Letters to the Editor
notre druide
Published Letters: 116 Editor's Choice: 5
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Roger Waters Summed It Up
[Read the article: The Weekly Standard's "9/11 Generation"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Whenever I see all these right-wing bantams strutting around with imaginary medals on their chests, I think of the great Roger Waters title from his Amused to Death album: "The Bravery of Being Out of Range." How these miserable hypocrites can fool anyone other than themselves -- if they do -- is beyond me. Every bully is a coward with a forward defense, and every armchair bully is even worse -- a coward whose toughness resides entirely in his imagination, and is only made possible by being "out of range."
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Support the Team
[Read the article: Ending the war vs. supporting the troops]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Fully deconstructed, the "support the troops" meme is actually loonier than anyone here has pointed out. If I really care about a guy in a foxhole, my preferred course of events is for him to be lifted out of harm's way. Even if I support the goals of the combat he's engaged in, I can't logically say I'm supporting him by keeping him in the war. What's missing from the phrase is an appreciation that war is intrinsically inimical to the wellbeing of its participants, i.e., "the troops."
The seeming obviousness of this logical error suggests that some false model has been substituted for the reality of war. The obvious candidate is sports. I suspect Americans have been so conditioned to the ritualized conflict of baseball, basketball, football, ad nauseum, that they can easily fall into viewing war as just another game. When they hear "support the troops," they are unconsciously picturing soldiers as members of a team -- our team -- so that pulling them out of the conflict is forcing them to lose. We are also conditioned to disdain "losers," so we're forcing our brave kids to disgrace themselves.
This is a deeply unsound conception, and it would readily be dispelled if the supposed leaders of public discourse would just point out its flaws. Perhaps awareness of those flaws is at last breaking through to the public despite the fog of magical thinking propagated by the power elite and its media lapdogs. Reality does have a way of punching through, eventually.
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Doomed to Irrationality?
[Read the article: Ending the war vs. supporting the troops]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]> Read it twice and we can restore sanity to the world.
As a fairly early fan of Lakoff's, I would never go this far. At the core of his thinking is the depressing premise that the public cannot be relied upon to decide policy issues according to reason and evidence, and must therefore be manipulated into doing the right thing. If one accepts that premise, then it does indeed become necessary to master the art of propaganda so as to out-manipulate the opposition. If this is true, it is a necessary evil -- a concession to our intrinsic insanity, if you will. And I do not deny that it is true. But I still harbor the hope that an educated public can fulfill the enlightenment hopes for democracy by bringing its collective intelligence, more than its various prejudices, to bear. That's why I think the very worst thing the Republicans have achieved -- and the one most central to their recent successes -- is the gutting of our educational system.
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Big Babies
[Read the article: National Review's new tough guy, Mark Hemingway]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]As I have suggested before, the motto for the Bush era could be "Revenge of the Neonates." For something more succinct, how about "Big Babies?" That would certainly apply to Rove, Limbaugh, and the ironically surnamed Mark Hemingway, all of whom have a distinctly prepubescent look about them.
I'm not sure the sensed shortcoming they're overcompensating for is situated as much on a masculine-feminine axis as a masculine-puerile one. There's something quite juvenile about all these guys -- not only the ones who only need to shave once a year, but even (and perhaps especially) Bush himself. I get a vibe of arrested development, a perhaps Peter-Pannish hunkering down in perpetual boyhood while basking in fantasies of masculine power and heroism. I suppose this is easier in some ways than actually evolving into a morally responsible adult being.
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Another Disconnect
[Read the article: A one-day guide to war supporters and their enablers]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I am almost entirely in agreement with the sense of the assembly here. The "almost" concerns a point on which Glenn seems to feel strongly enough to not-so-obliquely insult the last person to voice it: that the Democrats' fears may not be quite so ill-founded as current poll numbers suggest.
I have no doubt that you could pull 12 Americans off the street -- I'll even take 12 Bush voters -- and, in a fair trial, win a unanimous verdict against the continuing occupation of Iraq. But a poll is not a jury verdict. As any criminal defense lawyer will tell you, at least in California, a very sizable proportion of Californians will not vote to convict a defendant of a "third strike" offense if they know that's what it is. Yet time and again Californians have refused by overwhelming numbers to soften the Three Strikes Law in the voting booth.
Most people's responses to polls reflect not a considered view but an intuitive and potentially quite transitory gut feeling. Worse, an awful lot of voters have been conditioned to hold contradictory views at the same time, and to resolve the conflicts, if necessary, with irrelevancies like a candidate's accent or demeanor. Indeed, nothing keeps a voter from saying we ought to pull out of Iraq, and then turning around after we do so and looking for someone else to blame for the consequences. Representative democracy is fertile ground for the "bad faith" of the existential ethicists.
I'm not apologizing for the Democrats' lack of leadership, but I don't think the dialogue is well served by demonizing them for what is a very genuine concern. After all, they have watched their once preeminent majority in Washington erode for at least 27 years as the Repugs persuade a sizable wedge of the population to vote directly against its own interests *and* against many of its deeply held values. There are, in fact, a lot of dumb voters, and in dealing with them I fear the shameless liars will always have an advantage over those with principles.