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• Monday, November 3, 2008 09:37 AM

  Fundmentalists are low hanging fruit

  We all know that white trash Christians are morons. And we all agree that there's nothing quite so exquisitely painful as the stupidity of others, especially when presented in ways that we find hard to avoid in going about our day to day lives.

  But what really bothers me about the usual display of American credulity and assertive blindness that always accompanies our electoral carnivals is not so much what Bubba Lumpen has to say about God and Flag, but the idiotic way so many of our more prosperous and "sophisticated" folks can blithely conflate their own self-interest with some higher so called "principle." In other words, the problem with this country, I'd say, is not really so much how stupid the stupid people are, but how stupid the smart people are.

  After a year of watching the "smartest boys in the room" make infantile, self-destructive capital allocation decisions that have brought our "free market" economy to the brink of total destruction, you'd think people would've learned a lesson about the idiocy of unbridled greed, as well as the tax-favored risk taking enterprises built on greedy assumptions. But no, even here, in liberal New York, you still have the most naive attachment to the notion that the classy people know better, that "redistribution" is a threat to the moral purity of rigorous capitalism, that Obama is playing a dangerous game with his indulgence of "socialist" rhetoric. Just a moment ago, in fact, here in my work place, discussing the election with a very smart, very well educated cosmoplitan younger lawyer, I had to listen to the same ominous nonsense about Obama the Socialist that Sarah Palin is purverying out on the stump to her adoring fans, the authentically Amrikan plumbers and their aspirational cohort.

  Never mind the simple fact that we're talking about a shift of mere points in the tax code, merely undoing a dimwitted maneuver by the most dimwitted Administration in our modern history (a tax cut informed by Dick Cheney's moronic insistence that "deficits don't matter"). When people, even or especially nominally smart people, feel their own personal values or interests are threatened, no matter how unjustified or blindly self-destructive those values (ie, greed) might be, they fall back on ideological power words and magical thinking. Calling Obama a "socialist" is no more intellectually valid than calling him a Muslim terrorist.

  While Salon's readers might be savvy enough to recognize the idiocy of the latter, one can only wonder how much the first year of his presidency will be shaped our culture's inability to recognize the sheer economic illiteracy of the former attitude. The idea that "redistribution" is a threat to our way of life (well, except when the beneficiaries of any "expropriation" are bankers and lawyers) will surely be washed into our brains by endless repitition by some of the politically savviest people around.

  —MarkEHaag Read MarkEHaag's other letters
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