A friend of mine — not a Facebook friend, a real one — was recently bemoaning the craziness of Teabaggers and other such freaks. Of course I also get a lot of similar handwringing from earnest ‘progressives’ and even from self-identified Commies on mailing lists and on Facebook, when I’m incautious enough to visit the latter. Everybody seems very worried about people who are, basically, Flat-Earthers.
Now it has always seemed to me very silly to pay any attention whatsoever to these clowns; but this was more a matter of intuition than careful thought.
Talking with my friend, I came to the conclusion — surprise, surprise — that my intuition was correct, but now I have some thinking to back it up.
I think my friend — and many other people — see political culture as a kind of arithmetic average. If you could just somehow eliminate the Teabaggers and kindred species, either by conversion or some other means, the center would automatically shift Leftwards — simple arithmetic, right?
This inorganic view of the matter seems not only wrong-headed but topsy-turvy to me. I don’t think the center is where it is because the Teabaggers are pulling it in a crazy direction. I think the Teabaggers are crazy because the center is crazy. That is, the fundamental, almost-universally accepted axioms of American political discourse are incoherent and delusional. My ‘progressive’ friends, who are capable of very sensible and cogent thinking on any other topic, start spewing word salad as soon as the conversation turns to Our Great Republic. Systematically unexamined concepts like ‘democracy’ and ‘the rule of law’ and ‘mixed economy’ and ‘extremism’ and ‘order’ and ‘chaos’ start to be flung around like badly-designed, un-aerodynamic Frisbees. They all fall to the ground; nobody ever catches them; and yet the pretense is kept up that some fun game is being played, out in the open air, to the general increment of cardiovascular health for one and all.
Seen in this light, the Teabaggers haven’t departed from the center; they’ve just raised it to a higher power. And maybe zeroed out some terms, as is the case with people who go the market-cult route. Put another way, craziness like the Teabaggers’ is simply a lemma of craziness like the center’s — an emanation, an epiphenomenon, a statistically predictable tail of the distribution, maybe one or 1.5 standard deviations out.
Of course this has some implications for the Left too. Maybe the abstract moralizing schematism of a lot of Left thinking is also an emanation of the Viral Center’s craziness.
So what do you do if you live in a crazy culture? You can’t simply bootstrap yourself out of it. You’re going to participate of the craziness around you, more or less.
Perhaps the best we can do is try to become, at least, a bit more aware of it — self-aware in the sense that any high-functioning crazy person has to be: There I go, being crazy again. Time to take a nap.
A certain progressive from a borough close to yours, Michael Smith, took offense when, after she railed against Ron Paul (based on a column by Katha Pollitt, whose word on such matters must, of course, be taken with the utmost seriousness!), I suggested that she’d be better off worrying about lots of other more serious problems. Paul had no chance to become president and he was, after all, opposed to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, something no other candidate could claim. She actually called me “dude,” reminding me that she had been an outspoken critic of all that was evil and a supporter of everything good. This was on facebook, and it was interesting to find that the comments from those who were from other countries agreed wholeheartedly with me. I made a snappy but polite response to being called a dude, not wanting to incur her further wrath, as she says “motherfucker” a lot, presumably channeling the tough guys in the ghetto a couple of neighborhoods away. Don’t mess with those progressives. They’re tougher than you might think. Though they do miss the forest for the trees.
I have a guess as to who the outerborough Pwog might have been…
Excellent
You know, I really despise long essays, but this one is different. I think it goes light years toward explaining what has happened to us. In fact, I think it’s more than worth every single one of its 5,000 words. Nothing great or awful seems to happen without the sacrament of Money.
So this must be what happened to us:
Mr. Anonymous and the Not-So-Spontaneous Birth of the Libertarian “Movement”
http://www.thebellforum.com/content.php?r=14-Not-So-Spontaneous-Birth-of-the-Libertarian-Movement&s=31ee1be48698441cce76842aa98344b2
Thanks for this. I read the entire essay! Long but interesting. The Teabagger phenomenon is not a spontaneous development either, but a well-funded adjunct of rich investors. At Teabag events, the same slogans, the same speakers, the same posters and signs, the same catch phrases appear over and over again, no matter where they are held. The essay gives some reasons why such minor league thinkers as Friedman, Hayek, and von Mises made it into the intellectual big time.
“That is, the fundamental, almost-universally accepted axioms of American political discourse are incoherent and delusional. My ‘progressive’ friends, who are capable of very sensible and cogent thinking on any other topic, start spewing word salad as soon as the conversation turns to Our Great Republic. Systematically unexamined concepts like ‘democracy’ and ‘the rule of law’ and ‘mixed economy’ and ‘extremism’ and ‘order’ and ‘chaos’ start to be flung around like badly-designed, un-aerodynamic Frisbees.”
I couldn’t have said it better myself. No really… I couldn’t. Thanks!
A % of those suicides reflect an “imperialism issue” — the returned-home liberators of Iraq and Afghanistan, who appear to be offing themselves at an alarming rate. I can only imagine the temptation.
Another case of broken promises, don’t you think? Enlist, and you’ll get all this psychic income from being a ‘warrior’, and we’ll take care of you afterwards. Of course, in the event, neither of those things actually happened. The joys of warriorhood, for anybody but a psychopath, don’t come to much; and *of course* they weren’t taken care of. Nobody is.
I like this a lot MJS:
“The joys of warriorhood, for anybody but a psychopath, don’t come to much.” Too true! Unfortunately, even the non-psychopaths have a hard time seeing this.
“Be all of you can be” -> “You’re on your own, loser.”
”…all of you can be”
for a high school
friend was enlist, basic,
off to Vietnam,
small unit fighting in the highlands, discovered he liked to kill
so
re-up
re-up
re-up
re-up
until CID guy tried to gain night time entry with wrong password
friend zapped him with ‘trusty’ M-16
\and given dishonorable discharge for doing right thing…..sent home, no VA,
nothing but hard core PTSD.
Y’know, I had the Tea Party crowd sussed out pretty early on, when my posse and I started covering them for DC Indymedia in the summer of ’09. We could tell right away that it was a phony “movement” propped up by rightist PAC money and think tanks, and that the Teabaggers themselves were no real threat to the Left™. In fact, they’re more like the political equivalent of rodeo clowns.
Fadduh Smiff pretty much nailed down what I figured out long ago, only in far “deeper” and more articulate terms than I could possibly come up with. Mainstream Pwogwessives and Liberals spend a hugely inordinate amount of time and energy getting worked up over the Tea Party and bitching about how “crazy” they are while totally overlooking their own brand of insanity, a kind of crazy far more dangerous than a bunch of cranks with hideously misspelled signs declaring that Obama is a Socialist. While the Teabaggers are busy being right out front and proudly displaying their lunacy in front of God and everybody, the Pwogs and Liberals are busy making a big deal out of how “sane” they are, while avoiding the Donkeycrats’ own massive failures and complicity in this nation’s misery by sharing their favorite Sarah Palin and Paul Ryan jokes, and displaying a stupidity not unlike that one really stupid cow who can’t stop walking into the electric fence. At least the Teabaggers’ insanity is entertaining. Liberal insanity, on the other hand, is simply banal and annoying.
“The Teabaggers are crazy because the Center is crazy…”
Bless you, Fadduh Smiff, for blurting out that straight, raw truth. For those of you impatient with massive analytical essays, here’s an infographic that should make it a little simpler for you. When you hear windbags like Joe Scarborough insisting that this is a “center-right nation”, you know the Center™ has sailed off the edge of the Earth. I’d picked up on this a few years ago, in a post which was picked up by this very blog, and had Fadduh Smiff declaring that I’d “gone all Mencken on us”.
Lately, I’ve found myself wondering if the problem isn’t that the Teabaggers are too crazy, but that Our Side isn’t crazy enough. By this, I don’t mean that Our Side should be in the streets publicly espousing cockamamie horseshit like “9/11 Was An Inside Job” or that Obama is a Socialist or that mobile phones cause brain cancer or that vaccines cause autism; I mean that in terms of public events and debate, Our Side should stop making a big deal out of how we’re not “insane” like the Teabaggers — inasmuch as I decided long ago that sanity is overrated — but to stop being afraid to stop being so “civil”, let it all hang out and bring the crazy ourselves. I mean, the rightists and the media are going to tag Our Side as crazy no matter what, so why doesn’t Our Side just get over itself and fucking own it, man?
Hell, if nothing else, it’d make covering Our Side’s demonstrations more entertaining.
9/11 Was An Inside Job.
What could be more obvious? Our side?
I am with the silent majority; just get artful “strategic” simple score voting. Then we will have a bit of responsibility to take,
There are plenty of “warriors” who did find a kind of joy in it; it’s rather tinfoil hattish to allow the testimony of some veterans to speak for all.
Which isn’t to say that national policy doesn’t treat soldiers/veterans like garbage, and make a mockery of all the commercials–but for the people who actually believe in it, there’s a deep honor and satisfaction to be obtained out of what they feel they’ve done.
Imagine, for example, that instead of just ranting on the internet, you were brave and put your life on the line trying to overthrow a tyrant regime. If the regime fell, you might feel satisfied with yourself afterward, and in your old age, be pleased that tomorrow’s children didn’t have to live under the control of insane dictators who, hypothetically, tortured and killed their own citizens.
For the people who actually believe in stuff like the “Saddam” stories, trapped inside that world, they do find some satisfaction in the service aspect. That’s a large part of what is missed by people you might call “leftist”–that there is actually an element of genuine personal sacrifice and altruism in some of the people who sign up. God knows it’s utterly abused, but it’s still there, and if “the left” found that kind of balls for their own beliefs, there would be fewer blogs and a better world.
A side note, my dear Mr. Fluggenock: I thought it was tacitly and quietly established a long time ago that those particular plane crashes to which you refer were just another boringly predictable false flag attack forming a part of America’s century-long habit of false flag attacks. Parsing the term “inside job” leads to many possible interpretations, so it probably wasn’t actually Cheney cackling on his headset as he gave the relevant orders. We could always watch a mob movie, though, and see someone give a suggestion that an underling “do what needs to be done,” turn on a spigot of money, and make sure the local cops look the other way–that works, right? Where do you lay responsibility in a situation like that?
I don’t diasagree, High Arka. And, yes, that sacrifice and altruism are abused. I suspect many patriotic folk have figured out that the fix is in, that they are being used and abused. But of course, the poverty draft persists, and likely will well into the future.
/¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯
High Arka —
[…]
Which isn’t to say that national policy doesn’t treat soldiers/veterans like garbage, and make a mockery of all the commercials–but for the people who actually believe in it, there’s a deep honor and satisfaction to be obtained out of what they feel they’ve done.
Imagine, for example, that instead of just ranting on the internet, you were brave and put your life on the line trying to overthrow a tyrant regime. If the regime fell, you might feel satisfied with yourself afterward, and in your old age, be pleased that tomorrow’s children didn’t have to live under the control of insane dictators who, hypothetically, tortured and killed their own citizens.
For the people who actually believe in stuff like the “Saddam” stories, trapped inside that world, they do find some satisfaction in the service aspect. That’s a large part of what is missed by people you might call “leftist”–that there is actually an element of genuine personal sacrifice and altruism in some of the people who sign up. God knows it’s utterly abused, but it’s still there, and if “the left” found that kind of balls for their own beliefs, there would be fewer blogs and a better world.
[,,,]
\____________________
Well let me say this about that. Everybody thinks they are a “good person.” Charley Manson, for example, thinks he’s a great person. A great hero. Hitler thought very well of himself too. And who am I to argue with such famous people?
I, on the other hand, I know I’m just a dumbass jerk. I am unique in this way. In fact, just my knowledge of this raises me to a level a bit above the rest of you.
”..Imagine, for example, that instead of just ranting on the internet, you were brave and put your life on the line trying to overthrow a tyrant regime…”
I have..study Guat. history and its post-’54 govts……..
MJS, you must be thrilled with the news about Bratton! I hope you have some posts in store for us on his previous and upcoming tenure.
Popular sentiment and even mobilization is beginning to reverse stop and frisk in NYC. Thanks to people (somewhat) taking to the streets, the issue has become toxic. Bratton and de Blasio are savvy to which ways the wind blows, methinks. Or perhaps this is a big dose of wishful thinking.
This is to say: I care less about who the police commish is — or who the mayor is, for that matter — and more about the pressures brought to bear on them. Bratton is image conscious — he had about 40 PR people working for him under Mayor Mussolini — and known to put his finger to the wind. I think we need to keep the pressure on, and blacks and Hispanics have been taking the lead.
Almost goes without saying that people need to keep pressure on them, but that’s never not the case. I sure hope you’re right.