Month: January 2011

A Message To Politicos

When the formerly powerful are made to serve time for their misdeeds, current Members of Congress can't help but take notice. That's why Tom DeLay's jail sentence is good news. The ruling class in America is so seldom made to follow the same rules that apply to their fellow citizens. Assuming that appeal attempts fail, DeLay's case will be a welcome exception to that trend, and perhaps a small boon to the rule of law, which he did so much to undermine.

“On Extreme Right And Left” Ctd

Jessewalker

This goes back to my debate with Pejman. David Corn insists that the difference between right and left rhetorical extremism is that the right has "institutionalized their side's craziness." Juan Cole is blunt. George Packer concedes that George W. Bush was the subject of vile liberal rhetoric, but notes the unmissable scale of the difference:

Only one side has made the rhetoric of armed revolt against an oppressive tyranny the guiding spirit of its grassroots movement and its midterm campaign. Only one side routinely invokes the Second Amendment as a form of swagger and intimidation, not-so-coyly conflating rights with threats. Only one side’s activists bring guns to democratic political gatherings. Only one side has a popular national TV host who uses his platform to indoctrinate viewers in the conviction that the President is an alien, totalitarian menace to the country. Only one side fills the AM waves with rage and incendiary falsehoods. Only one side has an iconic leader, with a devoted grassroots following, who can’t stop using violent imagery and dividing her countrymen into us and them, real and fake. Any sentient American knows which side that is; to argue otherwise is disingenuous.

The right and the left both have intemperate voices. But here's the key: only the conservative movement counts the most vile blowhards as leading lights, embraced by the leadership. Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Mark Levin, Sarah Palin: these are among the most popular conservatives in America. Who are the folks on the left with equivalent popularity and influence?

Rush To Judgment

Limbaugh comes out swinging:

Go out and try to tell these same people that one of their top grossing movies has influenced abject perversion or radical behavior and they will attack you left and right, saying, "That's entertainment. It stands alone. People know the difference."  You go out and accuse them of engaging in work, their art, such as crucifixions in jars of urine or whatever other acts of perversion they engage in that they call "art" — their movies, their music — and you go try to tell them that their music is responsible for criminal behavior. Look at the reaction you get from that.  You are considered to be a numskull, old-fashioned, out, and not with the times. They permanently, constantly insulate themselves from any influential behavior they might be responsible for and yet run off without any evidence whatsoever and admit they've got no evidence.

A good point. Culture does matter, and the impact of violent video games or gutter-level reality shows coarsens us. It's extremely hard to know where to go with this substantively, because of the First Amendment, but I sure believe that people should be held responsible for their contributions to the general culture, and he consequences of that on all their complexity. But that must surely also mean that racist, rhetorical polluters such as Limbaugh poison the culture as well. In fact, almost no one comes close to Limbaugh in terms of the violence, vehemence and demonization of his rhetoric.

National Review Against Itself

In its editorial on the Arizona shooting, National Review argues that "all of us have an obligation to speak with truth and charity in making our political arguments" – take that, Rush Limbaugh! – "not because hateful talk will drive the mentally ill to criminal acts, but because civility is a good in its own right."

It's a perfectly defensible argument – although it seems odd not to countenance the possibility that extremist rhetoric can indeed drive the mentally ill to extreme acts. But it contrasts in interesting ways with the editorial National Review wrote in the aftermath of the Fort Hood shooting:

We also suffer from a larger American unwillingness to acknowledge political violence. We rightly applaud ourselves for having avoided Europe’s upheavals. Yet the historic free flow of ideas in this country means that pernicious ones will lodge in the minds of very bad actors. Few of our famous assassins were mere loony loners without political motives. JFK’s assassin was a Marxist, RFK’s was another Palestinian, McKinley’s was an anarchist. Lincoln was murdered by a rogue Confederate intelligence operation. The solution is not to restrict freedom, but to take ideas seriously — to flag them and combat them; to monitor those who take them to extremes and to come down on them when they first cross the line to incitement or action; certainly to keep them out of positions of power or responsibility, even to the rank of major.

That's all we're asking!

The “Politicized Mind” Of Gabrielle Giffords

David Brooks is astonished, sickened, appalled that an attempted assassination of a sitting congresswoman should be immediately regarded as something possibly … wait for it … political. In fact, Loughner must be seen in a context in which politics does not exist:

The evidence before us suggests that Loughner was locked in a world far removed from politics as we normally understand it.

So why, one has to ask, does this person with mental illness, carefully select for assassination an already targeted and demonized congresswoman, rather than, say, a supermarket, or a workplace, or a school? We don’t know precisely yet – but it sure is relevant to ask that question. Why not shoot up the animal shelter he was fired from? Or the classroom he was banished from? In fact, it is a kind of bizarre suppression to avoid the obviously political fact of the target Loughner selected. Among those affected by an allegedly “politicized mind” was Giffords’s father who made the plainest connection himself:

Her father Spencer Giffords, 75, was rushing to the hospital when asked if his 40-year-old daughter had any enemies. “Yeah,” he told The New York Post. “The whole tea party.”

The other person with such a polluted brain and soul was Giffords herself who at the time of Palin’s provocation complained about an atmosphere of barely suppressed violence, and pointed to “consequences” when put within figurative cross-hairs by a former vice-presidential candidate:

“They really need to realize that the rhetoric and firing people up, and, you know, even things for example, we’re on Sarah Palin’s targeted list, but the thing is, that the way that she has it depicted has the crosshairs of a gunsight over our district. When people do that, you gotta realize there’s consequences to that action.”

This Brooks simply doesn’t mention. It would muddy the case for what Peggy Noonan would call “walking quickly past” unfortunate events that reveal a sickness on the right. Note this by David, as if it were somehow damning:

Mainstream news organizations linked the attack to an offensive target map issued by Sarah Palin’s political action committee.

But how could they not when Giffords herself had noted the map at the time and worried about what it might portend? The MSM would have been blatantly irresponsible not to make the connection – if only to note the irony and tragedy, if not to assert an empirical, causal link. David is right to call out those who flatly and crudely drew a direct link without any substantive information. But to raise the question and explore it? How could we not? To inquire into such a hideously violent culture, where you are put in cross-hairs, endure countless threats, have an opponent posing with an M-16, and a brick thrown through your campaign office window … and then end up shot at close range? Well, it’s a no-brainer. Brooks’ own paper today has an enlightening story about the particularly fetid and violent atmosphere in Giffords’ district. It’s good journalism. But according to Brooks, it is an offensive irrelevance. It should not have run. You can go back and look at the Dish’s live coverage, which seems to me to be trying to assimilate information as fairly as possible. Among the first things I wrote was that David’s dichotomy was impossible:

This is so awful that political grandstanding seems both inappropriate right now, and yet also very appropriate. An attempted political assassination is a political act and deserves a political response.

And as the information came in, the Dish concluded that this was both obviously a function of mental illness and a netherworld of condoned violence and extreme rhetoric. In fact, my assessment of the dude’s outlook began with:

Peter Pan, Mein Kampf and the Communist Manifesto. Not exactly a Tea Party purist.

and continued with:

It seems to me so far that he appears a disturbed and dangerous individual able to absorb shards of political conspiracy theories and turn them into evil.

And so on. By 5.47 pm, we have aired a possible diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia. I know David isn’t accusing me of jumping to some flat Tea Party conclusion; but I find this notion that in real time we should not even be discussing or airing or debating the political and rhetorical climate that preceded this to be a dangerous piety. Airing the question of how public culture affects the disturbed mind is not just legitimate in this case, but vital, in ways that Brooks of all people should understand. David is a very shrewd analyst of culture, of why it matters, of how we are all connected – and yet, suddenly, this one young man exists in a total vacuum, where politics and culture do not exist.

Such a place does not exist – however much some would now like it to.

So Close, So Far, Ctd

A reader writes:

I have been wanting to respond to the immensely enjoyable book for a while, as I'm the "Cannabismore harsh. I also donate on an automatic monthly basis to L.E.A.P. (Law Enforcement Against Prohibition) and I donated to the Prop 19 campaign and NORML. Deep in my scientific, moral, ethical, and nature-loving heart I believe prohibition of marijuana is wrong. Sustaining prohibition for political gain is wrong as well and that's why I write as many letters as I do and support the organizations I support.

I truly believe that my actions – from organically growing a plant, to not lying about that to my children, to smoking said plant – are not crimes. I am a moral citizen; I am a law-abiding citizen; and I put my money where my mouth is. I believe supplying my friends with marijuana is doing more to reduce the violence in Mexico than doing nothing. I would also never seek to harm my children, and being open about who I am, as well as being present as a father and husband, are things I take very seriously.

My actions are no different than the guy who home brews beer or wine in his basement. It's just that what I produce doesn't give you a hangover, can't kill you, and has proven medicinal purposes.

More reader reviews here and here. You can still buy the book at Blurb.com for only $5.95 (and be sure to use the promo-code DISH for $3 off shipping).

Citizen Science

Arran Frood imagines the future of crowd-sourced nutrition and health studies:

A man steps out of a health clinic after his monthly nutritional profile. He slides a ring onto his finger and the injection-free technology transmits a read-out of his blood constituents to a central server. Skimming the data sent to his smart phone, he looks at the recommendation for his evening snack — something with a little more selenium: brazil nuts, perhaps. He considers his diet for the coming week — logged with his refrigerator — and confirms an updated home-delivery shopping list. Finally, he tots up his credits for sharing this personal health data with a population-wide genome study—redeemable against the cost of his health insurance and nutritional supplements.

(Hat tip: Peter Smith)