12 February 2010
the high road
on my facebook page today, i posted a picture of sarah palin all dolled up in the joker makeup with a big fat FASCIST sign underneath. personally, i found the image hilarious. i laughed out loud for at least three minutes before giving way to the inevitable. oh i knew then that it would spawn some controversy, because quite frankly, it's an offensive image.
and the reason i think it's offensive is because i was offended when it was president obama's face in that paint above a SOCIALIST tag.
but you know what? i don't give a shit anymore. i've sat back, i've tried to be nice, i've tried to reach people through channels of reason and intellect. i think. i dig policy. i like to know what i'm talking about before a go off spewing some nonsense about isms i don't have a blues clue what the fuck i'm talking about (see morons accusing the potus of being a socialist who have no fucking idea what 'socialism' even means*).
but you know where the high road leads? to a really high cliff, the precipice of which we liberals fall really hard, right on our faces.
and you know why?
because the wing nuts on the right play dirty. mostly because they're too dumb to try to play straight with the smarter, more educated, more wordly liberals. and we're never going to win a war of reason with people who don't have any fucking capacity to comprehend anything beyond immediate emotional impact. and so, i'm gonna pounce upon the sage advice of the proverb that claims, 'if you can't beat them, join them'.
and whilst i will not be joining the dummies' ideology, i will be taking on their weaponry, because bringing knives to gun fights hasn't won us many battles. and i'm in this to win the war. so from here on out, i'm in the trenches, pulling, slinging, and flinging mud. because the sad state of the truth is that the intellect of the american people is so sadly downtrodden that i've no choice but to stoop to a discourse so low as to be able to connect with something americans can respond to: filthy, truth-bending rhetoric of the highly emotional and offensive sort.
it makes no sense. but i'm done with trying to make sense with people who have none.
~k
* socialism: a theory or system of social organization that advocates the vesting of the ownership and control of the means of production and distribution, of capital, land, etc., in the community as a whole.
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Respectfully, I must disagree. Not with the assessment of the sad state of discourse, for the evidence is overwhelming. Nor do I disagree with the concern that all too often we seem to be bringing knives to a gunfight. And I do not disagree that we therefore, must get tougher, stronger, louder.
ReplyDeleteBut I cannot endorse simply giving in and reducing the debate to name calling.
During the summer I attended a town hall meeting sponsored by my congressman. There were several thousand people there, most of the tea-bagging sort. Their preferred tactic was to yell during the prepared presentations - "Answer our questions!" And then during the Q&A they shouted down any answer with which they disagreed, which was mostly all of them. Ugly. I tried to speak to some of them - it was futile.
And yet, there was an older woman standing next to me. She was embarrassed by the crowd's behavior, some of whom were her friends. She had come, she told me, to listen and learn. And all that was happening was that people were shouting each other down -- how could anyone learn from that, she wanted to know? We had a good and sensible conversation and I left feeling that she was *now* likely to be a vote on our side.
I think times like these call for political triage - the tea party crowd is lost, nothing you do will reset their thinking; the left needs attention (lest they confuse the dream for the possible) but can be treated in due course. My neighbor at the town hall is the third group. They need our intervention NOW. But silly signs and offensive comments turn them off. (Satire, perhaps - a la Stewart, not Limbaugh - has the potential to reach them for example.) By reaching out to that third group is where the progressives rebuild the coalition that got President Obama elected. That is where I believe we are called to act.
You already know my feelings on this from the Facebook thread, so I'll just say this: In the short view, maybe you'll win an election with this tactic. In the long view, it has brought our politics to failure. Our govt can't get anything done because each side as so vilified the other that it's political suicide to be bipartisan. Another 100 years of this and people will laugh at the idea that the USA was ever a superpower.
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