Hollywood Hate Speech?

In one of the many stimulating citizen political engagements that now happen courtesy of Facebook, a very dear liberal friend had this to say in the context of a debate about the role of political rhetoric in the Tucson tragedy:

I have a slightly different perspective to add to the mix. I have worked with many paranoid delusional criminals who have threatened assassinations and/or violence. One scary thing they have in common is a hatred/fear of “the government.” They couldn’t tell you the current platform of the tea party, but they can talk for hours about gov’t mind control. From my experiences, the real dangerous rhetoric is that which demonizes or delegitimizes the government. It feeds right into their delusions and convinces them even more that “something must be done.” It just so happens that at this point in history, the right is vocally demonizing the “big, bad government.” Yes, liberals did it in the Sixties. As Americans, we should all feel free to criticize government, yet we could all benefit from refraining from its demonization or delegitimization. It might make our world just a bit more peaceful.

On the face of it, the point is well-taken. Categorical demonization of government virtually never hits a fair target. It is simply overwrought venting, an exaggeration that distracts from the more particular and essential details of this government abuse or that government salutary service. Less categorical demonization of government would indeed be a good thing.

But how would we get there? Certainly not government hate speech laws. It is perhaps the most basic axiom of our First Amendment tradition that our government cannot ever tell us we’re no longer free to say the government is bad, even angrily so. My friend intended no such recommendation. She called for civility among us citizens, a voluntary retreat from broadly demonizing government, and would that it were so.

But it’s not likely to happen anytime soon. The tradition of suspicion of government in this country is far too robust and entrenched ever to countenance a voluntary retreat into “government is innocent until proven guilty.” And even if we begun a dialogue about a kind of “civility code” about discussing government, I suspect it would break down with conservatives insisting that liberals stop demonizing conservative government, and liberals insisting that conservatives stop demonizing liberal government. The race then would be to control the definition of political correctness, what kind of discussion of government is acceptable and what kind is not, with, regrettably, a winner and a loser — and therefore a perpetuation of angriness.

So demonization of government, and its multiple less angry forms, will persist. But not primarily from the right.

I know. Sounds strange. These days, as my friend says, “the right is vocally demonizing the ‘big bad government.'” But the left is the most reliable demonizer of government.

More specifically, Hollywood is the most reliable demonizer of government. Granted, and not surprisingly, Hollywood demonization of government is almost invariably (possibly always, I haven’t run the numbers) a demonization of some conservative cabal in government. But it is nevertheless true that Hollywood movies, those vastly influential drivers of our popular culture, routinely demonize government.

A blogger has broken down 1980s-2000s Hollywood action films — never mind all the other genres — to determine who is most often the villain. Her result:

As you can see the overall winner of the villain tally is American military/government/law enforcement. Our own protectors even beat out the Russians in the 80s! We are a country that distrusts government innately and that has translated to film.

Keep in mind, this tally is limited to action films, so it wouldn’t include films like Avatar, which demonized government and military as against indigenous people, or sci-fi thrillers like V for Vendetta, which lauded terrorist tactics against a demonized totalitarian government, or any of the many documentaries slamming governments, virtually always from a leftist perspective.

Hollywood is “liberal” because its very rich actors and directors shamelessly preach at the American middle class about their stupidity, but its driving business class is relentlessly capitalistic in pursuing whatever it is that American consumers demand. And demonizing government appears to be a theme consistently in demand.

“Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice,” declared Barry Goldwater in an insufficiently vetted statement that sealed his fate in the 1964 landslide victory of Lyndon Baines Johnson. Americans themselves, we ordinary folks, don’t countenance extremism, even if we sometimes like a good story about it. But suspicion of government, that we’ll always savor. And Hollywood knows it.

Krauthammer Schools Limbaugh

So I’m conservative and not a big fan of Rush Limbaugh.  The man is about red meat for conservatives, and sometimes he’s right, but sometimes he’s not.  He has been not, lately.

I was among the conservatives applauding President Obama’s speech in Tucson.  Rush had this to say:

“They were slobbering over it for predictable reasons.  It was smart. It was articulate. It was oratorical. It was all the things the educated ruling class wants their members to be and sound like.”

Charles Krauthammer, whom I more consistently admire, had this to say in response:

“As one of the three slobbers on the set, let me say I find it interesting that only the ruling class wants a president who is smart, articulate or oratorical in delivering funeral oration.  It’s an odd and condescending view of what rest of America is looking for in their president.”

“Odd and condescending” is generous.  To whom is Rush pandering?  It should be possible for a conservative to admire a liberal President’s speech after a tragedy, just as it should be possible for a liberal to admire a conservative President’s speech after a tragedy.  Many liberals did so when George Bush spoke after 9-11.

Limbaugh’s determination to dislike whatever President Obama says is dishonorable.  It has plenty of locked-in liberal counterpoints.  A plague on both their houses.

Right versus Left Extremists

I like Michael Kinsley.  He’s liberal, but he writes well, and you see a perpetual thoughtfulness, a person sincerely trying to get it right.  So I end up disagreeing with much of what he concludes, but respecting the route he takes to his conclusions.

His recent column in Politico offers a close-up view of the Tucson tragedy, and veers off to a regrettable comparison of right-wing and left-wing extremists.

It seems — in fact, it seems obvious — that the situation is not balanced. Extremists on the right are more responsible for the poisonous ideological atmosphere than extremists on the left, whoever they may be. And extremists on the left have a lot less influence on nonextremists on the left than extremists on the right have on right-wing moderates. Sure, NPR, despite denials, tilts to the left. But not the way Fox News tilts toward the right. Rachel Maddow is no Glenn Beck.

I get how Kinsley got there — in this environment of Democrats controlling nearly all the organs of federal power in Washington DC.  But I profoundly disagree with his conclusion.

Ideologies out of power always sound harsher than ideologies in power.  Ideologies in power have the luxury of urging civility and restraint, while ideologies out of power wish most intensely to become the ideologies in power so that they have the luxury of urging civility and restraint.  In that narrow sense, Kinsley may be right, today, but he forgets the environment yesterday.  And I have seen this wishful forgetfulness among many on the left.

I believe the right was remarkably civilized in the face of Democratic party control, from 2008 through 2010, of every organ of federal power.  And the Democrats exercised that power most enthusiastically and successfully.  Indeed, few Americans really know how robustly the Democrats have changed the legislative and regulatory landscape of our nation.

I think that change is a net negative, but that’s not my point here.  I’m focused on Kinsley’s conclusion that extremists on the right are somehow more poisonous and have more mainstream influence.

The least attractive, least influential, most reviled sensibility in America is the extreme right.  And that is a credit to the evolution of our collective political sensibility because it has not always been so.  At its peak, Ku Klux Klan membership exceeded four million and comprised 20% of the adult white male population, commonly in Southern states, but historically more concentrated in Midwestern states.  Americans of good will fought back, and eventually the Klan was broken.  Conservatives today are very different than conservatives 50, 60 or 70 years ago.

As a people, thankfully, we do not hesitate to condemn racism or decry injustice when we see it.  But yes, we still have fringes, left and right, and we still have relatively mainstream people influenced by fringes.  The recent Tucson tragedy has reinvigorated a debate about the relative nastiness of our fringes.  At one level, arguing about the relative nastiness of our fringes is an enormous opportunity cost — how much more productive to discuss what we have in common among mainstream left and right Americans?

But the debate is nevertheless useful political discourse, hence my commendation to Kinsley, because it helps us to understand ourselves, our politics, and our history a little better — and these are all sorely needed understandings.

Kinsley concludes, simply because it “seems obvious,” that “extremists on the right are more responsible for the poisonous ideological atmosphere than extremists on the left.”  Similarly, many liberal commentators and citizen debaters responding to the Tucson tragedy have weighed in with excoriations of even the mainstream right — forever tarred in their imagination with excesses of right-wing extremism.  And most interestingly, many of these liberal commentators and citizen debaters insist that the left has never been so incendiary, at least not since the 1960s.

And that assumption warrants some recent history — very recent history — history that might hopefully cause all of us to hang our heads just a little and acknowledge, from the right and the left, that rightwing and leftwing rhetoric both get reckless, and it is our collective responsibility not only to keep the dialogue civil, but to stay vigilant about reckless rhetoric whenever we see it.

The left really hated George W. Bush.  Really hated.  Jonathan Chait, in The New Republic, opened an editorial with, “I hate President George W. Bush. There, I said it.”  (Chait, by the way, is one of the liberals who wrote honorably and with good will in the aftermath of the Tucson tragedy.)  The mainstream left tried to make a rational case for hatred of George W. Bush.  A little further to the left, our point in this discussion of relative extremism, it was a different story.

Please watch this video, featuring leftists demonizing George Bush, and one leftist saying “we’ll have to come out and kill somebody I guess.”

No current leftist will avow the wackos in the video — but we’re talking about relative extremism, hoping merely to get leftists to acknowledge that they have wackos who speak with virulence, violence, and vileness.  Only if leftists acknowledge this do we get to a point of forging common mainstream ground and finding the political courage to speak with mutual respect.

And there’s this smorgasbord of Bush=Hitler comparisons.  So far, to my knowledge, no Republican member of Congress has compared Obama to Hitler.  A Democratic member of Congress did compare Bush to Hitler.

And here are comparative images from left and right rallies in March 2010 — after Democrats had taken over everything.

Now, here’s an image to shame us all, with a red bullet hole in the President’s head.

And some more images…  Noteworthy poster: “Kill terrorists. Bomb there house. Kill Bush. Bomb his f—in house.”

And by the way, liberal friends, I get the distaste for Sarah Palin.  Am not a big fan myself — but my god she commands my respect for surviving the horrible vileness directed at her.

 

That stuff about Sarah doing cross-hairs on Democratic districts?  Please.  Democrats did exactly the same thing.  Martial metaphors have been par for the course in political campaigns since the invention of politics.  And it may be that no living politician has received more death threats than Sarah Palin — and that’s today people.  Not “the Sixties.”

Liberals understandably wince at comparisons of them to Hitler and violent politics.  I wince too.  Say it my friends.  See some of the vile speech of the left and call it vile so that we can get on the same page.  Michael Kinsley says the right is more incendiary.  I say we’re going nowhere until right and left both acknowledge the nastiness they both produce.

Rush Limbaugh Joins Paul Krugman Beyond the Pale

I said in my last post that Paul Krugman’s despicable nastiness about the Tucson tragedy (about which he exhibits not the slightest shame, and indeed, in his latest column, goes even further in blaming Republicans) would likely have the opposite effect he intended — it would disgust most Americans and make them less inclined to view the tragedy as political.  That has happened to an extent.

I also said, with a kind of plague on both your houses shrillness, that conservatives might do the same thing if the dynamic were reversed.  That, too, has happened to an extent.  Such has been the intensity of the pushback against the Krugman contemptibility that some conservatives  have felt a misdirected liberty to tar Democrats.  I said I’d condemn it if I saw it, and I’m obliged to be true to my word.

From Ben Smith at Politico, quoting Rush Limbaugh:

“What Mr. Loughner knows is that he has the full support of a major political party in this country. He’s sitting there in jail. He knows what’s going on, he knows that…the Democrat party is attempting to find anybody but him to blame. He knows if he plays his cards right, he’s just a victim. He’s the latest in a never-ending parade of victims brought about by the unfairness of America…That smiling mug shot — this guy clearly understands he’s getting all the attention and he understands he’s got a political party doing everything it can, plus a local sheriff doing everything that they can to make sure he’s not convicted of murder – but something lesser.”

That, like Krugman’s nonsense, is disgusting.

No Democrats and no liberals I know are rushing to defend the shooter.  Democrats and liberals may be less inclined than me to call this a capital crime, warranting execution — but they’re not even close to defending what he did or trying to find technicalities or excuses to exculpate his horrible crime.  Mr. Limbaugh went beyond the pale as well.

The mistake of some liberals, in my opinion, was looking for additional people and ideas to blame — but they never sought to minimize the horror of what Loughner did.

I try never to wish ill of anyone — but it might be interesting political sociology to lock Paul Krugman and Rush Limbaugh in a vault, and, you know, watch for a few months…

UPDATE: And Bernie Sanders goes into the vault…

Tragedy in Tucson

A lone shooter in Tucson, Arizona killed Judge John Roll, 63; Dorthy Murray, 76; Dorwin Stoddard, 76; Christina Greene, 9; Phyllis Scheck, 79; and Gabriel Zimmerman, 30.  Several more were seriously injured.

Judge Roll began as a bailiff in the courts and worked his way to the bench.  He was appointed by President Bush Senior.  Gabriel Zimmerman, engaged to be married, was the director of community outreach for Democratic Representative Gabrielle Giffords — herself shot in the head and in critical condition.  Dorwin Stoddard was a pastor at Mountain Avenue Church of Christ.  Christina Greene was a student at Mesa Verde Elementary and had just been elected to the student council.

There are no words that make sense of such massive loss.

But there are words that distort and exploit that loss.  Paul Krugman in the New York Times as quickly as it is possible to post one’s notions: “We don’t have proof yet that this was political, but the odds are that it was.”  Krugman, ignoring the six dead, then noted that Representative Giffords was opposed by the Tea Party, and that opposition to health care reform was like “the climate that preceded the Oklahoma City bombing.”

That is so disgusting and beyond the pale that it will likely have the opposite effect that Krugman would wish, which couldn’t happen to a nastier guy.  Krugman’s unseemly eagerness to pin horrible tragedy on political opponents is precisely the cynicism that gave rise to the Tea Party.  The liberal surge of finger-pointing and condemnation is the most morbid and repugnant evidence of cultural decay in the 21st century.

And had it happened the other way around — had high-profile conservatives been shot — I can fairly surmise that conservatives would have pointed to incendiary leftist rhetoric and demonized liberals, and I would then say, as well, it’s the most morbid and repugnant evidence of cultural decay in the 21st century.

There is a diabolical determination among liberals and conservatives (I am neither, consistently) to stay exactly what they are, demonize the other, and hear only what reinforces the foregoing.  I am sick of it.  I am sick of the cheap political scoring.  I am sick of the common impulse to say horrible things about other human beings simply because they are the politically abstract other.  I am sick of fighting against pathological hatred of hate.  I am sick of liberals and conservatives only reading the cheerleading liberal and conservative confirmations of their biases.  And I am really sick of the self-satisfaction of anger-mongers and righteous haters.

Anyone who has spent ten minutes in the public policy arena knows that no political development matters a fraction compared to our human connections and the things that bind us.  When we look back at our lives from the final perch, it never matters that Obama or Nixon or Roosevelt got elected.  It matters that our connections to human beings were real, that we loved well, that we were loved for good reasons, and that there was some laughter and good will.

So what do we do with the slaughter in Arizona?

Let’s start with the obvious.  We make a moral judgment.  He is disgusting.  Not because of his politics, whatever they may be, but because of his actions.  What he did is disgusting, and we can call it that because we all agree there are lines that cannot be crossed.  At a fundamental level, it does not matter what motivated him, what happened to him in his childhood, what growing-up nastiness his defense lawyer will dredge up — he murdered people.  So I don’t care a whit about what conjured horrors brought him to this place.  He murdered people.  Nothing in his background hasn’t happened to hundreds of thousands of people who didn’t murder people.  So no sympathy.

Now the trickier question.  Who else is responsible?  Should we look to a “climate of hate” so that we can pin this murderer’s actions on someone else?  Are conservatives “in denial,” as a Facebook post asserted, if they don’t take responsibility for this slaughter?

“Denial” is the province of the demonizers.  And the rush to blame political opponents for tragedy is revealing.  A lone lunatic — with no known connection to any political party or movement — opened fire in Arizona.  Among his favorite books were Hitler’s Mein Kampf and The Communist Manifesto — interestingly, from the right and the left, tomes focused on power and single-minded formulas, the natural obsessions of a deranged mind.  What has emerged from his internet presence indicates a deeply deranged mind.

And speaking of obsessions, has the bizarre hatred of Sarah Palin finally scored?  Did her use of some martial metaphors like “lock and load” and “targeting” push the repugnant lad over the edge and cause murder?  Was she arguably responsible for a climate of hate that caused violence when she said, “if they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun”?

Oh wait, that wasn’t Sarah, that was Barack Obama in Philadelphia during the 2008 campaign.  But he was just funning, being literate, using a ha-ha metaphor.  Democrats don’t mean it, but Republicans, being invariably literal rather than literate, always mean, no really, “lock and load” and shoot to kill.

And Sarah certainly welcomed actual death with her chart — all the rage on the internet — “targeting” certain congressional districts with “bull’s-eyes” (i.e., the things that guns, or more specifically, rifles, shoot at).  Again, Democrats did exactly the same thing, using “bull’s-eyes” for “targeted” districts — but they were just funning, using a metaphor.

I’m no apologist for Sarah Palin, or Republicans, or conservatives, or the Tea Party — I just get sick of the double standard.  Liberals scold anyone who suggests murders by Muslims might be inspired by murderous Islamist ideology — let’s get the facts first (and that’s good) — but evidently take less interest in getting the facts first if conservatives can get right properly tarred with murder.

That is a sickness in our politics.

There is a myth nurtured by the left that its disgusting fringe is less disgusting than the right’s disgusting fringe.  No.  Both fringes are equally disgusting — except that left-wingnuts enjoy a lot more play and forgiveness than right-wingnuts.  Nearly all Americans have no sympathy for either — which is exactly why the effort to pin mainstream conservatives or liberals with wingnut abomination is doomed.

One sick f*ck shot people in Tucson.  Bring him to justice, without hysteria, and try not to burn hordes of “witches” in the process.

 

UPDATE 1-15-2011: Former Carter pollster Pat Caddell calls Krugman an “asshole.” Not a fan of the name-calling, but Krugman did crawl into a lower intestinal space.