The Persistence of Mediocrity

Down in the comment section of this post, Bustedknuckles asks this perfectly legit question: "Why waste your time and talent grinding on Bobo?"

(actually he used some saltier language pivoting around a "P"-word that wasn't "puissant".)

So allow me to explain as best I can.

First, as was once explained to me by no less than Mr. James Fallows, within the People's Republic of China, the New York Times is the window onto American society.

Chew on that for a second; our banker and chief global competitor reads David Fucking Brooks to find out what's going on in the Land of the Free.

If he were just another local oaf, I wouldn't much care what he was up to, but by no virtue other than where he sits, Mr. Brooks falls into a very small category of multimedia bullshit force-multipliers, and so instead of just fouling his own nest, his words directly influence what a billion Chinese think of our country.

DFB casts a long and terrible shadow which deserves rebuttal.

The second point is much more local and directly relevant to our day-to-day struggle with the Right. But to explain it, I have to spend a minute discussing exactly how the Right weaponizes hate and harnesses it for cultural and political ends.

If you're like me (and why wouldn't you be) during any given week you receive somewhere between a seiche- and a tsunami-worth of breathless and genuinely, spectacularly stupid email from Conservatives about the Latest!Liberal!Outrage!

It might be the horrors of some nonexistent Liberal prison/spa...or the hoaxed-up horrors of New York being overrun by hordes of praying Muslim every Friday...or the horrors of something something ACORN something something (with yummy Bill Ayers sauce)...but in virtually every case all such email blasts have the following five things in common:

1. The VERY BIG SPARKLY FONT (72-point, Wingnut Credulous Gothic I do believe.)

2. One million screaming eagles rampant on one million American flags.

3. A tone of strident urgency warning you that the Kenyan Usurper may well be at your door to gay up your kids and grab your guns....Right...Now!

4. Some callback to the lost greatness of a semi-fictional America that has been destroyed by "those Liberals" who are "at it again!"

5. And more important than anything else, they are lies. Whopping big, wild, dumb lies so easily debunked that it has really made me rethink my position on Net Neutrality for trailer-trash (Maybe if it took hours instead of seconds to upload this horseshit they'd get bored, give up and go back to cousin-fucking.)

Being a good netizen (betcha haven't heard that word in an internet-year or two), for awhile I took it upon myself to deflate this flaky, hysterical trash, often softening my Poundy Hammer of Truth with a smiley emoticon. Each debunkification usually took me about two minutes of mouse-clicking -- something which evidence suggests is far, far beyond the capacity of the average Pig Person -- and it would only be a slight exaggeration to say that, if I had collected a couple of bucks for each case of debunkery, I would never have to worry about a steady income again.

The existence of these lies -- their sheer volume and persistence despite their ludicrousness -- is no small thing, for they represent nothing less than the down-market version of the same lying-without-consequence culture that FoxNews and Hate Radio drives home 24/7/365, and it is on this mag-lev cushion of pure crap that the entire Conservative Base floats.

With this cushion, they zoom along, year after year, election after election, lie after lie, precariously suspended inches above an unforgiving Reality.

Without it, they crash -- hard -- face-first into that Reality.

So they need a fail-safe. A kind of mental Wingnut Panic Room. Someplace impervious to consequence and retribution into which they can safely retreat when they get caught cold lying their black little hearts out.

Understand that the Conservative Lie Machine simply cannot function without both of these components -- the fire-hose of lies the Right uses to stampede its millions of fear-drunk chumps into one catastrophically bad decision after another....and the "Both sides do it" surge-protector which permits the Pig People to repeatedly absorb the shock of finding out over and over and over again that their leaders are pathological liars without the slightest diminution in their trust in those leaders -- operating in perfect working order.

And after you have watched enough teevee and listened to enough radio you will begin to notice just how deeply their robotic, self-absolving "Both sides do it" excuse is knit into the basic building blocks of the media itself.

Everywhere.

And I mean everywhere. And it is really fucking creepy.

Body-snatchers creepy.

It is now so unnervingly ubiquitous that this little joke of mine --

Q: If Dick Cheney were caught red-handed tossing burning kittens at homeless veterans from the White House lawn, what would be the first three words out of Cokie Roberts' mouth?

A: "But the Democrats...."

-- has long since lost its funny.

It is now so ingrained -- so completely on Manchurian Candidate, Raymond-Shaw-is-the-kindest-bravest-warmest-most-wonderful-human-being-I've-ever-known-in-my-life brainwashed autopilot -- that I doubt that its poison can ever be completely cleaned out of the body politic.

I might well be wrong, but after watching the actions and reactions of the Pig People for many years I believe it is useless to try to counteract the effects of their lies without first razing their Panic Room and cutting off their lines of retreat. And the only way to do that is to go right after the chief architects of this Big Conservative Lie, whose sheltering breastworks is what allows all their other little lies to breed and snipe in comfort.

And so long as Bobo uses his immensely influential New York Times column, year after year, to stack the deck so cold in favor of this Greatest Conservative Lie that you could perfectly preserve mastodons under it for 20,000 years, however ridiculously overmatched I might be, as long as I have the capacity to do so, I will continue to use my tiny corner of the blogosphere to push back against it.

Every. Single. Time.