Saw this article today in the New York Times about the debate over putting labels on genetically modified food. Of course, this is one of those topics that immediate rips open fierce debate, like the vaccine-autism debate or the Laffer curve or Tom Cruise’s sexuality. In all those cases, the ferocity mainly seems to accrue to the minority that can’t seem to make it’s point without the conviction of the fire it breathes.
I personally am not frightened of genetically modified food, and look askance at the alarmists who shun GMO on principle. One day we might find out it’s harmful. Just like we might find out there are lots of all natural things, like tobacco, that are harmful. But dismissing genetically engineered foods out of hand smacks of back-to-nature idealism. Nature sometimes knows best–say, when an injured brain heals itself. Sometimes it doesn’t, say when lots of women without access to advanced medical care die in childbirth or when uncircumcised males pass more venereal disease than their snipped freres. Food activists have made great strides in uncovering some of our dirtiest food secrets–including the way tastes and smells are manufactured in labs and the way our increasing drift toward protein in our diets could augur environmental and economic upheaval. What they haven’t done is convince everybody that the concept of “Frankenfood” is in itself somehow evil if it had no adverse effects and and actually nourished an overpopulated planet, a world in which water and arable land are going to become scarcer and which could probably use a helpful nudge from human ingenuity in the form of technology. People who automatically fear an assault on the integrity of nature are in essence hawking religion. They mix up caloric intake with karma.
Having said that, one questions the reasoning of multinationals lining up against GMO labels on food. This is an argument of a different abstraction, and you don’t have to hate genetically modified food to think labeling is a good idea. Transparency being the watchword of our age, why would such companies fear honesty? If it was important to put warning labels on rap music, once upon a time, because of the unproven harm it could do to children, wouldn’t it be a no-brainer to label something that’s actually going into our bodies? Isn’t that a choice consumers ought to be allowed to make? If organic food and genetically modified food stood side by side, that’s a marketplace of ideas, not just food.
It also is distasteful that a decision against labeling could be unduly influenced by 8,000 pound biotech companies like Monsanto, who even profit motivated investors sometimes shun for its anti-competitive practices and bad corporate citizenship.
I think genetically modified food is OK, but if I didn’t, I’d demand the right to know when I’m buying it. Even our investments, our children’s toys and our drugs these days come with all sorts of disclaimers. Whether you think it’s necessary to be inside everything or not, GMO labeling sits well inside the pale of a public’s need to know. This wouldn’t be an issue at all if there weren’t powerful companies arrayed against public interest and (my old saw) a weak political establishment steered by anti-government hysterics woefully bereft of its power capital to do anything good for anybody.
Here’s a titter: Bill Kristol, the one-man juggernaut pushing a lot of neo-conservative policy over the last 20 years, says conservatives ought to be pushing to break up the banks “some.” “If they are too big to fail, make them less big.” That’s not big government, he says “That’s classic anti-trust.”
It must be a difficult time for neoconservatives (also, in Kristol’s case, known as minicons, as second-generation neocon progeny). Their disastrous war in Iraq has left a lot of them on the sidelines after it swamped the Republican Party. Kristol, who helped invent a lot of the nastier forms of politicking to push an aggressive foreign policy agenda, has now found himself in a weird position of trying to offer counsel to a backlash of anti-government hysterics when neoconservatives, at their core, believe in government and think it can be the tool of idealism conservative style.
To watch him try to play elder statesman after a life of being a partisan hack (albeit a brilliant one) is kind of sad. He knows he has to speak politely to Tea Party crazies but also offer reasoned analysis of Barack Obama’s successes to sound like a venerable analyst. So it hurts to watch him manicure his sentences to fit in the ears of so many tiny heads. He extols small government in this video but also says that legislation to limit huge Wall Street excess is OK and reasonable. Guess what? You can’t have it both ways. Government gets big only because life is complicated, and we need decent government watchdogs on Wall Street, not the current array of lap dogs. That means resources. Which means taxes. To say that financial legislation is just words on paper curbing excess and nothing more is disingenuous to say the least.
I give him this. He is much more subtle at trying to say two contradictory things in one sentence, unlike Ron Paul, who tries to do the same thing and often leaves you reaching for aspirin.
Kristol should just stand up, be a man, and admit what some former conservative colleagues are: that Reaganite deregulation and tax cuts for the wealthy have failed to make life better for the majority of people, which is what Kristol, the liberator of the Iraqis, has always said he stands for.
You expect amazing stupidity from conspiracy theorists, who use bullying tactics to get you to believe that they are smarter than you and tell you that you’re programmed if you don’t let them program you. But rarely do they push news organizations into such amazing blunders.
At least a couple of different online news sites, the Mirrorand the Daily Mail Online, are reporting today that Osama Bin Laden was not, after all, dumped in the Indian Ocean after his ignominious end at the hands of Navy SEALs last May. Instead, according to internal e-mails stolen from Austin, Texas security firm Stratfor by hackers, bin Laden’s body was taken to the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Bethesda, Maryland for examination and cremation. Stratfor, which does security work for the United States government, is called by detractors the shadow CIA. The firm supposedly has extensive knowledge about U.S. internal security and handles accounts for some of the largest U.S. corporations doing business overseas and thus stands at the nexus of commerce and power, say its foes.
According to the e-mails, which appeared on Wikileaks.org, a Stratfor executive named Fred Burton posted in an e-mail subject line, “Body bound for Dover, DE on CIA Plane” when referring to bin Laden’s corpse, which would then be sent onward to Bethesda. That e-mail came at 5:51:12 on May 5, 2011. This elicits the response from George Friedman, the company’s president, that the sea burial was an unlikely account. It sounded to him like the disposition of Adolf Eichmann’s body:
“Eichmann was seen alive for many months on trial before being sentenced to death and executed. No one wanted a monument to him so they cremated him. But i dont know anyone who claimed he wasnt eicjhman [sic]. No comparison with suddenly burying him at sea without any chance to view him, which i doubt happened.” The FBI wouldn’t let that happen, he opines.
Problem is, a later Stratfor cable the news organizations didn’t bother to read says, “Never mind.”
I first read this story after seeing a thread on The New York Times Web site about a bunch of hackers being arrested who were vaguely linked to the same large Anonymous movement that has targeted firms like Stratfor. One commenter said that the Bin Laden cremation story had appeared all around the world “except in America, due to the heavily censored government/corporate media.” There’s no telling why the Times would gain from burying this story, since the paper has regularly published Wikileaks material. Supposedly the Times, Dow Chemical, Stratfor and Barack Obama are now all in cahoots.
Smart readers probably already knew the story was a hoax when they read Friedman only “doubted” that the bin Laden burial at sea was true. That means the alternative Bethesda cremation story was simply conjecture by the Stratfor guys, a bunch of armchair analysts obviously outside the loop or still gathering information. But if that wasn’t enough to convince conspiracy theorists or gullible newspaper reporters hot for copy, then certainly this memo should have been:
“Down & dirty done, He already sleeps with the fish….” ** Fred’s Note: Although I don’t really give a rats ass, it seems to me
that by dropping the corpse in the ocean, the body will come back to haunt us….gotta be violating some sort of obscure heathen religious rule that will inflame islam? I was sleeping thru that class at Langley.”
The time code on this: 15:11:03, May 5, 2011. Well after the first two e-mails.
So, Stratfor concedes in the later memo, Osama bin Laden, was indeed thrown into the sea. How did they know? They probably heard it on the god damn news.
You can debate all day whether it was important for hackers to target Stratfor, which seems to have as many conspiracy theories about Julian Assange as he does about them. Reading the links is sometimes less like reading John Le Carre and more like listening to “Dueling Banjos.” When you read through Stratfor e-mails, you hear a mix of braggadocio and paranoia that is likely the proper cocktail of people who work in the spook business, but what you don’t hear are the voices of powerful people who control our daily lives. Sometimes they seem just as out of the loop as anybody (“Look here! Everything we need to know about our hacker enemies I found in this issue of Wired!”) The hackers who broke into the company regard it schizophrenically as an evil perpetrator of black ops standing at the nexus of power but then disdainfully as a company too drag ass to even protect its own computers from attack.
I wrote extensively about Assange last year, noting that even though information is always a good thing, his motivations are nutty. Of course, why should I care about that if the leaks are substantial? Well, in this case, much of the information was stolen by people who also stole credit card information from companies, assuming all companies are part of the complex. It so happens I write about finance, and perhaps part of my paycheck comes from advertising money doled out by a hated industry. Does that make me part of the complex? Does that make my credit card worth stealing?
I only worry about that because conspiracy theorists lump everybody into plots, damning innocent and guilty alike, and what’s more, especially in this case, THEY DON’T KNOW HOW TO READ OR TELL TIME. And yet their conviction is such that they will not be moved, they bully dumb reporters into stories like these, and finally, their extremism promotes criminality. If what they find in their hacking promotes the greater good, like the Pentagon Papers, I’m ready to defend them. And Stratfor seems to be full of nutty right wing conspiracy theorists itself. But there’s the rub. Conspiracy theorists are usually notable only by their infantile feelings of helplessness and their need to be in the know. And often, on both sides of the debate, they can impress us only in being smug, self-satisfied and wrong. In this case, the firm’s detractors seem as unlikable as the firm they invaded.
Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum’s last name, as well all know, has also become sexual slang denoting a mix of lube and fecal matter (after columnist and activist Dan Savage started a contest several years back to give Santorum’s name a new meaning). The slang word has taken on a life of its own on the Internet, and even topped the actual Santorum in Google searches for a long time.
Santorum as sex substance has led to a field day of accidental double entendres. One of the most interesting is “Santorum Comes From Behind In Alabama Three-Way” and “Santorum Surges” and “Santorum Trails Romney.” What kind of headlines could we expect for the next four years if Santorum were actually to become president?
Controversial media mogul Andrew Breitbart, the creator of such conservative Web sites as Big Government, Breitbart.TV and Big Hollywood, has died at age 43. Despite his confrontation with government, left-leaning legislators and the mainstream media, his passing has evoked measured response. What were some of the headlines about his death?
–*Andrew Breitbart, A Ghandi for Liars, Dies at 43
–*Death Cuts Short a Life Of Dishonest Video Editing
–*Breitbart–Biased, Blogging Beacon to Boobs–Buys Farm
–*The Passing of Web Media Hero Ends A Life of Stopping Progress
–*Race Baiters Lose Their John Lennon
–*Andrew Breitbart, Who Was Glad When Ted Kennedy Died, Probably Wishes He Could Take It Back This Morning
–*Exposer of Weiner’s Weiner Exposure Expires
–*Breitbart Dead; Who Will Frame Black Public Servants Now? Ask Racists
–*Man Who Destroyed Affordable Housing Program With Cooked Video Footage Ascends to Heaven To Sit at the Right Hand of Ultra Conservative and Spiteful Jehovah
–*Pioneer News Aggregator Crosses A Less Happy Frontier
–*Breitbart’s Passing Reminds People that All Death Diminishes Us, Even a Slime Bag’s
So let me get this straight. A U.S. federal judge in Montana sent a bunch of friends an anti-Obama e-mail that likened African-Americans to dogs. He sent it from his court e-mail address.
He admits that the content of the e-mail is racist, but explains he is not a racist. He sent it because he was anti-Obama.
So, we are to understand that although the judge is not a racist, he thinks a racist joke is OK if it conveys his anti-Obama anger. He said he wanted his friends to feel the same way he did when he read it. Was that a feeling of release? Of ressentiment?
There’s a reason that right wingers don’t like being called racists, and that’s simply that a lot of them are. Of course, as the song goes, we’re all a little bit racist, and libertarians are right: It is obnoxious to swing the word around like a brick bat to get your way politically. It’s worse that racism is a hard thing to pin down. It could be a belief system, such as the belief that one group has lower IQs. It could be an immediately unpredictable emotional reaction to another person who is unlike you. It could be an institutionalization of ethnic norms, such as making one language the official one. And what’s even more confusing is that all of these things can be mutually exclusive. Lou Dobbs seems to hate Mexican immigrants coming to this country, but he’s got a Mexican-American wife. The guy who played Kramer seemed to have absolutely no particular negative beliefs about black people, but somehow felt emotionally charged enough to yell “n*****, n*****, n*****” at a bunch of them who he felt threatened him. Also, a person could also absolutely love racial minorities but secretly harbor the belief they hold lower IQs.
It’s trebly confusing now that we have a black president, hated by many simply because he is black, and hated by many simply because he seemingly represents increased government intervention. Libertarians in particular have seized on the hypocrisy of those who quickly play the race card to fend off honest debate, and say we live in a world of political correctness run amok in which honest people are not allowed to ask honest questions of possibly nefarious people who happen to be black.
I had a friend write an intellectually thin blog on the subject the other day, saying conservative pundit Pat Buchanan was the victim of a McCarthyite witch hunt, being fired from MSNBC for writing a chapter in his book called “The End of White America.” In essence, he said that dissenting voices were being stifled with the taint of nebulous hate crimes. Meanwhile, we today confront the death of Andrew Breitbart, a former liberal whose disgust with race politics forced him to do a political 180. He eventually helped get housing activist organization Acorn (which has not coincidentally, helped a lot of black people) when one of his proteges sandbagged organization employees with a distorted video that supposedly showed them helping a young pimp swindle federal funds. The video portrayed the protege and young race-baiter dressed up as a pimp. The pimp outfit was an ironic comment on … well, smart people still haven’t figured that out unless we assume that’s just what the kid thought about black people.
To be fair, I often think that even minorities get it wrong. I have heard people say that if you use the “n” word your racism has been proved definitively, as if the entire discussion of racial discrimination, racial neglect and inter-ethnic strife can be dismissed with a single banned word. The awful truth is that quiet neglect of the adverse social conditions affecting black people and Hispanics is the real game. Under the auspices of “freedom” we can make sure government does not get involved in the social and economic deprivations facing minorities, even if it might right wrongs. Of course some people see affirmative action as a public good that addresses past injustices while others see it as a patronizing form of racism all its own. Obsession with the “n” word, meanwhile, assures that the real problems will never be addressed.
The reason my friend is wrong about Pat Buchanan is that this loathsome man’s need to frame race issues constantly, to be obsessed with the decline of the white majority at the expense of “non-Europeans” is pretty easy to call racism by any definition, even if Pat Buchanan doesn’t personally dislike black people. Buchanan’s insistence that America is not big enough to accommodate non-white culture ignores the fact that 100 or so years ago, his sorry, stupid potato eating non-American Irish ass was largely unwelcome here. He is arguing for ethnic purity in a country that has never, ever had it (and, in fact, no great society ever had it; the Roman Empire had a couple of languages, if you remember). The fact that Buchanan is trying to rankle an overly sensitive majority (overly sensitive majorities being among the most dangerous things in the world) is demagoguery of the worst sort, an appeal to people with racial bias to pursue racially biased behavior. So, calling him a racist is a no brainer, to me.
And that goes especially for those who think race and IQ have something to do with each other, people who don’t care to look closely and see that the rules for IQ keep changing. (Southern Italians somehow magically became smart in the 1940s. Once they were acculturated, that is.)
Some studies suggest that by 2030, non-whites will be in the majority of voters. To that I utter one word: good. America will likely become a bilingual nation with a huge voting bloc of Latino origin or even a Hispanic majority. All you have to do is look at immigration patterns to see that the southwest is becoming Mexico North. Again, I say: good. As the Roman Empire was Hellenized, so will the American Empire be Latinized. It doesn’t mean the end of our Constitution. Sorry to use such a vulgar term, but when cultures fuck, the best things about both are often preserved. America will be an interesting melange 100 years from now, as strange to our eyes as punk rock and Seinfeld were to the founding fathers. To be offended by the idea that your grandkids will speak Spanish is to reveal only your great intellectual insecurity.
What does this say about Obama and the current obsession with race? Well, as coy as libertarians like to play it with the race issue, I would suggest they look at one of the current front runners in the presidential race. Rick Santorum is an avowed enemy of libertarianism, since he thinks U.S. government definitely has a place in the bedroom and in Iran. For this, he is not getting called a socialist or having his birth certificate questioned. He is, instead, now somehow considered the only real “conservative” alternative to glib moderate rich guy Mitt Romney, even if all his positions run counter to the beliefs that were supposed to animate the tea party movement.
Yes, the pure libertarian will argue that the abstractions of her dogma are race-neutral. Perhaps.
But you can also say that the Earth and the sun have nothing to do with each other, even though one is spinning around the other. When right wingers keep spinning around racially charged items like welfare mothers and a black president’s Americanism and demographic shifts, normal people are going to look at it askew. And when you send a racist e-mail and say that it illuminates a deeper issue, we’ll call BS and say that race is probably your end game. If you refuse to examine it, that’s your problem.
In a recent speech, Mitt Romney referred to himself as “severely conservative,” an idiom strange to many ears. What other words most often follow “severely” (according to a Google search)?
This is a bit of an update to yesterday’s post. The cowards at “The Rumpus” didn’t post my comment. So you can officially file that site under the heading “Glib, small-dicked wussies masquerading as dissenters but secretly afraid of dissent.” Yes, a cumbersome file name, but I’m not much of a bureaucrat.
Again, I’m not one for sad anniversaries, but I have noticed that I do commemorate 9/11 in a very special way. Every year, I seem to become a Republican for a day. This isn’t by design; it simply seems to be the nature of the arguments I have. When far leftists tend to discuss Sept. 11, they usually have one of two problems: 1) Even if they kindly acknowledge it as a mass murder (thanks, pinkos!), they still have to carefully couch their language so that it meets the prescriptive of their doctrinaire worldview (America’s behavior on the world stage means this action was understandable). Or 2) They deny we were attacked altogether and insist 9/11 was an inside job.
I tried to pulverize that first argument yesterday, though I left out a couple of side notes: If the writer for the Rump Ass considered his “compassionate celestial” view more carefully, he would have realized that a celestial view isn’t a compassionate one at all. It’s simply indifferent. I would challenge the writer to interview a family member of one of the 9/11 victims, to ask specifics of how their loved one died, and then dare ask the question: “Did you know, when your husband ran back into the building to save those last three people on the stairwell, who America was giving money to in El Salvador in 1983?” As it happens, I did interview family members after 9/11. It caused me great anguish because I felt their pain in many ways was none of my business. I should have known, however, that I was helping keep their memories alive. This clod at The Rump Ass, however, brags about his unfamiliarity with those who died, and therefore his Wittgenstein-like refusal to speak of things he knows not. It’s for a very simple reason. If he ever had to interview a family member or write a profile of somebody at Cantor Fitzgerald who died instantly and had never even heard the name Osama Bin Laden, he would go back and look at the horrible article he wrote for the Rump Ass and he would destroy it. He would print it out and dip it in kerosene and burn every word and bury the ashes in quicklime. And he would have wished to god he had not spoken with such glibness and vanity about compassion being selective. He would have realized he traded empathy for doctrine. This guy says, 150,000 people died around the planet on 9/11, so why are 2700 Americans special? Should I similarly disregard anybody who died in Rwanda in 1994 because each of those days saw thousands of deaths elsewhere? Does it not bear remarking that most people don’t die horrifically everyday for political reasons when they are struck down by machetes or trapped in buildings that have turned into ovens? The Rwandans just wanted to kill each other, so why should I care or hope my government should do anything about it? If the author chooses not to show compassion for political reasons on 9/11, then he would have to spread that dispassionate view equally to Rwandans. Can he? Would he?
But let’s look at No. 2, the 9/11 Truthers. I was once working with a filmmaker from Germany on a Long Island movie, and we hit it off. Then on the subway ride home he tried to convince me that no men in caves could have brought down the Twin Towers, and that it was obviously a controlled demolition. I was thoroughly disgusted. It was a bit like finding out you’ve hit it off with a racist or an anti-Semite or a cannibal. One of the first things any engineer, philosopher, writer, linguist, philologist or doctor would know in his respective field is the rule of simplicity. It’s called Occam’s Razor and it means you don’t overcomplicate simple insight to fit a theory. Engineers don’t try to improve on the Pythagoras theorem by changing the numbers in gravity. Writers don’t come up with a hundred jargon words to say “The dog walked down the street.” Doctors don’t triple check a broken arm by opening a person’s heart. And a real thinker doesn’t remove the plane from a plane crash. This is logic so simple that my infant son would know it. And yet every time I’m on this here CB radio called the Internet I must confront people who say that the Twin Towers were brought down in an inside job, theoretically because g-men had days and days and days to plan and ably overcame bureaucracies and witnesses not noticing the tons of explosives being placed around the complex. The smoking gun: George Bush wanted war in Iraq. Therefore he destroyed the towers. There. It’s proved.
The fact that so many Americans believe this is truly chilling. These people are also, we presume, driving cars and raising children and handling knives. If you point out the fallacy, post hoc ergo propter hoc, they have the easiest retort in the world–they simply add you to the plot. Dehumanize you and your argument. George Bush has programmed you. It doesn’t occur to them that if you simply agreed with them to avoid confrontation, you would be much more of an automaton, much more a tool of somebody else’s will.
Why do people complicate simple insights? Helplessness. When the world seems bigger than you are, when you personalize complex events and the world makes you feel small, vulnerable, feckless and inferior, a conspiracy theory is one of those things that gives you false sense of power. You are suddenly part of a group of people who know a secret. Having joined a group, having become a joiner in the worst sense of the word, you ironically enjoy a feeling of false emancipation. You think you are a free thinker, even though you haven’t done the work free thinking requires: due diligence, proving steps, finding chains of causality, finding the simplest explanations. Having your ideas put up to scrutiny.
It is doubly repulsive because the Truthers, I think, are the people who made the world safe for another detestable “-er,” the Birther movement. I see these two buds inextricably intertwined like roses on a trellis. It was the Truthers who created a toxic polemical environment where even proof of Barack Obama’s citizenship with a birth certificate was no longer proof. Witnesses were no longer witnesses. Hospitals are no longer hospitals. Hawaii is no longer a state. The real insight is that Barack Obama is black, and so how could he be president, ask the Birthers, of “our” country. The same logic is at play with Truthers. “George Bush wanted a war, so how could 9/11 have really been plotted by the people like Islamist extremists who made categorical confessions of their own guilt?”
The rest is window dressing. Truthers pull out lots of meaningless specific heat capacity calculations to prove their theory that paper fires don’t melt steel. You try to tell them that steel doesn’t have to melt in order to stop doing its job, and for that you’ll get called a Manchurian candidate. Or they point out that falling debris can’t fall down on top of more debris with the speed of gravity because the building itself is “the path of least resistance.” In other words, the Twin Towers should have fallen over on their sides if they were destroyed by planes. Never mind that a house of cards wouldn’t fall over “on its side” if you knocked it down. Never mind that if you watch videos, the impact points of destruction start from the top and move down, where the falling floors cumulatively add new destructive weight, whereas controlled demolitions start from the bottom (using gravity as a weapon, perhaps the best weapon). Raise your hand if you saw the Twin Towers crumble from the bottom.
But again, by getting into these arguments, you remove the planes (some people actually try to do that too, by making 9/11 the world’s greatest advertisement for PhotoShop ever). To remove the planes makes you a non-thinker. A partisan who places himself at the center of a paranoid web of strange facts and non-facts. I’d feel better frankly, if many of these people just admitted they were lying. Then they would merely be scumbags. Instead, they poison the sort of thinking required of enlightened individuals to synthesize, dialectically, a better world. They’re making us all stupider.
I thought to further my contribution to a better world, I might offer some of the better Web sites debunking the Truthers. Here is one from a site called “Implosion World.” They say they are independent. So to Truthers, that means they’re probably part of the plot.
And then there’s this wonderful YouTube video that gives common sense descriptions of what happened when the planes hit the towers. If you are a non-Truther, I bid you a nice time enjoying your brain.
It’s human nature to politicize things that ought not be politicized–even the weather. I have personally come to believe that politics is not evil incarnate or the instrument of the devil, as Bob Dylan once put it, but as natural a process as cell division in biology. Some day, a scientist will show the direct parallels between a cell’s meiosis and a polity dividing. It starts with memes, symbols, words, and codes. Soon, people are debating, disagreeing, self-identifying and self-segregating around those semions, just as surely as haploid cells divide in meiosis. Because I’m not a scientist, I had to content myself with writing a novel about this process. It’s called “The Ghost and the Hemispheres,” and I’m shopping it to agents now.
But we are political and we do seek out political differences, perhaps because of a genetic imperative to innovate. That’s why I should have expected a horrible, recrudescent strain of 9/11 backlash articles like this shitty one. Like a good leftist speaking in the codes of his faith, just like Michele Bachman does to her flock, the guy runs at the mouth with a lot of the same predictable schtick about the evils of American exceptionalism. Not stopping to figure out that it was outsiders who decided to single us out in 2001.
Maybe I should confess that I agree with 20% of the piece, specifically the idea of Sept. 11 as a dubious cultural rallying point. I have not been much enamored of the 10th year anniversary memorials for 9/11. The author calls it the “pornography of grief,” which is a nice touch. But mostly he slips into the kind of pedantic, “told-you-so” moralism that characterized the far-left writings after 9/11. Lest we forget, this kind of attitude smeared the entire left wing in 2002 and 2003 and allowed warmongers to launch their immoral war because they could easily con the political center into thinking everybody on the left was crazy. As a left-winger, I get pretty torn up when liberals are wrong, as many of them were when they said the United States deserved the attacks in New York and Washington for all of its sins. I’m sure there’s a folksy phrase for this fallacy: Maybe killing Peter to pay back Paul. So I wrote this long tirade in the comments section of the Web site:
“This is an execrable piece. A piece that trades one fell morality for another like chips in a poker game, when in fact, as none of you can evidently see, the writer is willing to abdicate his morality altogether to settle petty political scores. He is unwilling to apply a simple categorical imperative that the murder of thousands of innocent people for religious reasons is wrong. If you think the Iraq war was wrong, as I do, for the simple reason that the United States wasn’t attacked by Iraq, then you must be willing to assert that the murder of thousands of Americans in for one man’s specious political calculation and religious chauvinism was wrong. The idea that “they hate us for our freedom” is stupid. The idea that Osama Bin Laden’s motive was the freedom of the Palestinians, whom most of the Arab world regularly spits on, is just as stupid. Bin Laden built himself up on American power and then turned on it. He decided to make thousands of Americans victim of an internecine squabble with his own government. To make him the moral voice of the oppressed Vietnamese or the Chileans is an act of stunning stupidity. But let’s talk about your celestial view. Isn’t Putting 9/11 into “perspective” a bit like putting the Manson murders into “perspective”? Yes, it was sad that a pretty pregnant lady got stabbed, but Charles Manson was right, the black people are oppressed, while rich white people are drinking champagne. This article offers the supreme intellectual dishonesty that anybody who lives in the United States and is willing to walk into a tall building, even to work, is worthy of being burned to death by jet fuel or defenestrated from the 87th floor for what has happened in Nicaragua, East Timor, Panama, Angola, El Salvador and Vietnam. There is no philosophy or ethics or morality that wouldn’t collapse under the weight of this viewpoint, and for the author to invoke unnamed children dying in huts is particularly pitiful; he’s not making the point that people should be equal but that misery should be. It’s anti-humanism at its worst. And if the author stops to think about it, it’s also an imperialist outlook. He’s not speaking FOR anybody. He’s just speaking against the United States as a sometime participant. And knee-jerk anti-patriotism is just as bad as knee-jerk patriotism. You all let that sink in. If you can. We all grieve in different ways; some of us get over it more quickly than others. I live in New York and did not choose to watch all the coverage tonight because I don’t want my grief to be preserved in amber. But if somebody else decides they want to be part of the grief–to give to charities, to comfort friends or to simply imagine that it could have been them (because if you’re an American, it could have been), then that’s his choice. If you decided that you did not belong to a country that day, that’s fine too. But be warned: you’re sounding a lot like a Tea Partier, who gets to pick and choose when he belongs to a commonwealth or the human race. The Tea Partier may decide to opt out when its time to help fund health care for everybody, but you, my friend, have decided to opt out when it comes time to show pain for 2700 people dying all at once. So today, you have made the Tea Party look good, the left look bad, and put your hatred on display for all to see. I only hope they can.”
I don’t normally read this site, and I don’t usually pick fights on bulletin boards, but usually keep my polemics to myself at this, your 24-hour Rasmussen station. But when my Facebook friends on the left started coughing up some of the old shit from their scarred lungs, I decided to go ahead and speak up. To lie down and do nothing while somebody is selling you a bill of goods is … un-American. And on certain occasions, I’m proud to be one.
–*Governor Rick Perry has executed 234 death row inmates, some of them presumably guilty.
–*If pilots, stewardesses and passengers had been armed on the airlines, 9/11 would never have happened says Ron Paul. Also, if babies were armed, there would be no child molestation.
–*As people born free in nature, we should not submit to the government giving us health care and unemployment insurance, providing for the general welfare, giving us R&D money, establishing a Congress, building roads, delivering mail, setting borders, putting out fires, setting standards, striking coinage or stopping raw sewage from running through the streets.
–*No, government’s job is mostly to sit back and watch as we make cheese by the river and occasionally shoot each other in the face, usually over a woman.
–*Cherchez la femme!
–*Obamacare has sent Christians to re-education camps where Mandarin children with machine guns decide who lives and who dies.
–*Social Security is a Ponzi scheme. By that definition, so are pensions, mutual funds, charities, banks, savings & loans, and anything else that doesn’t require you to haul a giant piece of gold around like a big turd.
–*Texas has such a booming economy, says Rick Perry, that he had to import a lot of people with real educations from socialist countries like California to come operate it.
–*Abortion is a states rights issue to be decided by the Congress.
–*The founding fathers were against abortion, says Rick Perry (even though abortion wasn’t illegal in most states until the mid 19th century).
–*The financial crisis was a systemic crisis caused by inept leadership, says Sarah Palin (even though that’s a complete contradiction in terms).
–*Government spending crowds out investment. And here we thought a world of shitty investments crowded out investments.
–*Ron Paul shows clearly how being NO. 2 in the polls can look a lot like No. 10 if you’re watching Fox News.
–*Ron Paul wants to return to an era of government deregulation, retrenchment and all the other things that made our Great Recession so great.
–*Socialized medicine and the bailouts and Acorn and states’ rights and 9/11 mosque and Islamization of America …
–*We need government out of our lives … but one of these candidates would probably invade Iran.
Eric R. Rasmussen is a novelist, composer, journalist and filmmaker. He is the author of ten novels, including the three-volume work The Ghost and the Hemispheres. He is the sole force behind the musical act Salon De La Guerre. And he is the writer/director of the online Web comedy series “The Retributioners” starring Stephanie Faith Scott.
Beauty is Imperfection 