More Liberals In the Mist

by John Holbo on May 28, 2010

Rick Perlstein showed up in comments to my “Liberals In the Mist” thread – after I sort of roped him into it all – providing thoughts on his anthropological interest in conservatism and a confession of longstanding interest in primatology.

And over at the Corner K-Lo links to an interview with Andrew McCarthy on the Bill Bennett show, about McCarthy’s new book – Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America. Round about minute 10 Bennett asks a ‘quick question’: “Does Barack Obama want the imposition of Sharia Law?” (Tough, but fair.) And McCarthy answers: “No, I don’t know that he wants that.” (A fair question deserves a fair response.) But then, perhaps realizing the suspense is killing us – is Barack Obama going to turn out to be the Smoke Monster? – he tries to put the few pieces we’ve got together, come up with a theory. There’s obviously some sort of partnership, because …. But setting that aside, the basis for the ‘partnership’ [“a good, working partnership, an effective working partership between Islamism and the modern left” (minute 5)] is probably that Islamism and Barack Obama-style liberalism are both ‘transformative movements’: “in order to establish their respective utopias they need to push out of the way American constitutional republican democracy. That’s the biggest obstacle to both of them.” So they are teaming up. (But is Barack Obama like Benjamin Linus, to Islamism’s Smoky? Obama is just hoping he’ll be allowed to rule the island? But what will he do when he learns Smoky is planning to destroy it?)

But seriously. This agnostic moment, in which McCarthy seems to admit that he doesn’t really know what the heck Obama wants, strikes me as a perfect occasion for someone on the conservative side to actually go and check out whether it’s likely that Obama wants to impose sharia law … or whether he is even opposed to the cherished values and principles of America. McCarthy has written a book on the subject, but even he doesn’t seem sure. Liberals in the mist. There’s room for conservatives to move here, to investigate what the mysterious Others really want. There’s probably polar bears.

{ 64 comments }

1

y81 05.28.10 at 3:21 pm

Isn’t the orthodox conservative answer that liberals are simply feckless children, who don’t know what they want? Most of them never left school, have never held a real job, etc. All they really have, which they share with Islamic extremists, is hatred of Americans who work for a living. They are making common cause with other enemies of ordinary Americans. (If Stalin and Hitler could do it . . . .) However, the liberals will be as unpleasantly surprised as anyone when Shariah is actually imposed. (As was Stalin, come to think of it.)

Now, all of that might be wrong, but it isn’t incoherent or metaphysically impossible.

And, come to think of it, that answers my earlier question, about why conservative mockery substitutes for “liberals in the mist” primatology. Most people aren’t interested in what children are actually thinking, but they do find them amusing. Liberals, to P.J. O’Rourke et al., are like the children “who say the darnedest things” on Art Linkletter.

2

marcel 05.28.10 at 3:34 pm

In that comment, Perlstein wrote, “Our misunderstanding above arises from an oversight (Goldberg’s fault) in recognizing the difference between primatology, whose subject is apes, and anthropology, whose subject is human beings. ”

At Dartmouth, the primatologist (soon to become 2) is in the anthro department.

3

ice9 05.28.10 at 3:38 pm

my own ‘misty’ moment–one I’m still trying to handle–came in about 1992, as I transited the first class section of a Northwest plane, you know, that little brief moment of seeing the Overclass, shuffling past them the same way you walk through the Reptile House. I knew immediately that the two men sitting side-by-side were Important, but this was Washington and everybody is Important, especially in first class. I first identified the man-child as Ralph Reed. But who was the other odious-by-association fat-cat pol gloating about their imminent departure from Ronald Reagan “Don’t call it National anymore you liberal simp”? Only after I’d passed them did I click: Tom Daschle, soon-to-be or maybe already majority leader. It was weird. They were laughing and chatting like old friends taking off on a fishing vacation. They were both in the mist, behaving in a way that utterly confounded me, and I was thinking of myself as at least a bit Fosseylike but with no hypotheses to offer.

ice9

4

roac 05.28.10 at 3:44 pm

Regarding Lost: I never saw any of this show (not counting promo clips), but from what I have read, my suspicion is that, as with Twin Peaks and The X-Files, its fans are victims of apophenia.

(Actually I am posting this because I just came across the word today and wanted to show it off. But the hypothesis does go back a while.)

5

Eli 05.28.10 at 3:50 pm

I think a lot of conservatives are simply in a mode of permanent reaction. Conservatism is correct, so by definition any attack on it is false. So when they hear liberal arguments, instead of bothering to understand what they’re basing their arguments on, all they see is an unwarranted attack.

Liberals, indeed like children, just want to destroy their way of life and impose big government. So instead of each individual regulation or spending project being considered on the merits, its all part of the larger “agenda”. So liberals don’t really care about worker safety, gay rights, environmental protection, discrimination, etc. They just want to take over.

I think a fair case can be made that this is actually projection. Because on many of these issues, conservatives don’t actually want to look at the merits themselves. Instead they hew to their own agenda – which is free markets and small government at any cost. To those who think this way, it would make sense to see others as thinking the same way too.

6

John Holbo 05.28.10 at 3:54 pm

You mispelled it. It’s apofania.

7

chris 05.28.10 at 4:02 pm

@roac 3: I don’t think that’s a fair description, considering that all three shows are, you know, *shows*, intelligently designed to entertain people, and most fans of them (AFAIK) are well aware that the world portrayed is a fictional one that does not function like our own, more banal, world.

OTOH, political apophenia might describe Glenn Beck quite well (assuming that he isn’t just hamming it up for the cameras), or real-world conspiracy-theorizing in general.

an effective working partership between Islamism and the modern left

To be much fairer than Bennett or McCarthy have any intention of being, there *have* been some leftist theorists who postulate that there can be a symbiotic relationship between the hardliners on both sides of a conflict, like neocons and Islamists. But even they would rarely go so far as to say it was something *deliberate*, which I think the word “partnership” clearly implies; rather, the success of hardliners in the internal struggles of one country promotes the political fortunes of hardliners in the internal struggles of the adversary country and vice versa, making it easy to demonize the peacemakers as traitors (as, in fact, Bennett and McCarthy are actually doing in this case). The Cold War arguably had a lot of this sort of thing going on. But it doesn’t mean that McCarthy (the Cold War one) was literally best friends with Khrushchev, even if both of them may have benefited from the other’s existence.

P.S. Gotta love that wordsmithing. “I don’t know that he wants that” not only contains the substring “he wants that”, which may have some subliminal value, it informally implies it too: it conveys something like “I think he does want that, but I don’t have proof of it” without making an unsupported accusation in so many words.

8

ed 05.28.10 at 4:04 pm

They were both in the mist, behaving in a way that utterly confounded me, and I was thinking of myself as at least a bit Fosseylike but with no hypotheses to offer.

They’re both despicable power-feasting assholes. You’re welcome.

9

nnyhav 05.28.10 at 4:07 pm

There’s probably polar bears.
At the petting zoo.

10

ed 05.28.10 at 4:09 pm

P.S. Gotta love that wordsmithing. “I don’t know that he wants that” not only contains the substring “he wants that”, which may have some subliminal value, it informally implies it too: it conveys something like “I think he does want that, but I don’t have proof of it” without making an unsupported accusation in so many words.

It’s really the print version of the Cavuto Mark:

http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/wed-september-13-2006/the-question-mark

Is your mother a whore?

11

John Holbo 05.28.10 at 4:10 pm

Continuing my thoughts. Obama is Ben Linus and Jacob is the Constitution (the Golden Light is the Constitution). Obama has been thinking he’s been working for Jacob all these years … So that makes ‘the candidates’ …

12

roac 05.28.10 at 4:10 pm

Ice9: If it was really 1992, the airport was till being called by its correct name at the time, as the hijacking didn’t take place until 1998 — I looked it up.

(I find that I can still get around without having utter the word “R**gan” or even “R**gan National.” It makes me feel like a Jacobite toasting the King over the Water.)

My own first-class revelation came at least a decade earlier at Dulles, when I heard a fellow-passenger say, “That’s either Jesse Jackson, or Reggie Jackson.” I looked up, and it was Jesse. He and his numerous entourage were all flying first class.

13

bianca steele 05.28.10 at 4:49 pm

It’s easy to make fun of Bill Bennett, and even asking that question is reprehensible, but maybe it’s worth it for getting McCarthy to admit to the answer he did. Did Bennett then go on to ask McCarthy to explain the term Sharia Law for the benefit of viewers? If McCarthy gave that answer, we can know whether he knows what he is talking about, and if his answer shows that he doesn’t, Bennett will have succeeded in showing that McCarthy’s answer to the first question was stupid too, and what’s more likely is that he doesn’t care how plausible his statements are as long as he can smear his enemies.

Also, David Duchovny is kind of sexy.

14

CJColucci 05.28.10 at 4:55 pm

I don’t know that Andrew McCarthy wants to send jack-booted storm troopers through Dearborn or Newark rounding up and shooting Muslims either.

15

bianca steele 05.28.10 at 4:57 pm

And I find it really difficult to believe anyone who watched the X-Files believed, for example, that the reason kids today have bad manners is because of a secret government experiment. The show’s sympathies are all with Dana Scully and her struggles to remain skeptical and scientific about Mulder’s obsessions in the face of her affection for him, at least until the end where we’re actually shown that his obsessions are true, and she gets cancer.

16

Malaclypse 05.28.10 at 5:16 pm

Where is Norbizness when we need to know what The Left really wants?

17

Mrs Tilton 05.28.10 at 5:30 pm

CJ @13,

I believe the canonical statement would be, “I don’t know that Andrew McCarthy blows goats”.

18

chris 05.28.10 at 6:08 pm

@16: Isn’t it also traditional to conclude with “, but it would be irresponsible not to speculate”?

19

subdoxastic 05.28.10 at 7:07 pm

Did any of the other apopheniacs? notice that chris’ response to roac contained bolded text reading, “Shows have deliberate”. The lack of object for the transitive “have” is cheeky, and it does leave the creative sort with a lot of fill in the blank opportunities.

I haven’t bothered to fill in the blanks on Lost as I haven’t seen an episode. It has a reputation for being puzzling, and snippets of description that I did take in were of fantastic-sounding situations and a potentially malevolent force operating somewhere in the environment. Someone here must know something about the representation of struggle through fantasy, and I’ll leave it to her or him to be appropriately critical. That being said, those who enjoy puzzles of this sort enjoy the open-ended. The secret message in chris’ text (that so flagrantly flies in the face of Steganography) would seem to underscore that point.

I did see a few episodes of X-Files and I imagine that fans of that show enjoy the open-ended as well. Bianca your points regarding Scully are well taken. Scully was that show’s Pre-Raphelite anchor.

I want to thank roac for providing me with apophenia and Holbo for the description of the interview. The fellows so described have me wondering how many types of psychosis there are that I still don’t know about.

20

roac 05.28.10 at 7:48 pm

My no. 3 was a leg-pull. But to be serious about it, I can’t agree about those who enjoy puzzles enjoying the open-ended. It seems to me that any form of entertainment that has a puzzle element involves a contract between the creator and the consumer, the main clause of which is that the puzzle is soluble.

Of course, there is entertainment value to be had in getting all meta with this assumption, the locus classicus being “Why is a raven like a writing-desk?” And even in genres that are formally constructed around a puzzle element, like the mystery novel, the quality of the puzzle itself is far less important to success than the quality of the writing and characterization. (E.g. the Nero Wolfe novels, where Archie’s voice and the tactical intricacies of his endless warfare with Wolfe totally overshadow the obviousness of a lot of the solutions.)

But where shows like Lost are concerned, it seems a priori obvious that nobody can construct a decent puzzle without having any idea whether the solution will come in one year or ten. You may have a satisfactory resolution in mind to deploy after episode 20, but by the time you have improvised enough elaboration to fill episodes 21 through 99, the original idea is very unlikely to work in episode 100. And it further seems that this should be obvious enough to deter a customer from getting invested in the thing, if the mystery part is what you are after. From the outside, Lost fans look like Charlie Brown and the creators of the show look like Lucy and every polar bear looks like a football.

21

pv 05.28.10 at 8:04 pm

bianca, re: X-Files

“The show’s sympathies are all with Dana Scully and her struggles to remain skeptical and scientific about Mulder’s obsessions in the face of her affection for him, at least until the end where we’re actually shown that his obsessions are true, and she gets cancer.”

Except this is the pattern not just for the overall story arch, but for most individual episodes.

Mulder: “Crazy Thing is happening!”
Scully: “That can’t be. Science. I’m a medical doctor.”
Mulder: “Scully, when are you going to realize that Crazy Thing!”

(show confirms Crazy Thing, both look off into the distance, darkly)

I think the show’s sympathies are with Mulder’s worldview, with Scully as the necessary philosophical counterweight that, dialectically, allows them to succeed.

(The internet means never having to stop discussing The X-Files)

22

chris 05.28.10 at 9:10 pm

But where shows like Lost are concerned, it seems a priori obvious that nobody can construct a decent puzzle without having any idea whether the solution will come in one year or ten.

That’s why if you’re going to write a puzzle show, you should be like J. Michael Straczynski and plan your whole plot arc from the start. (And then get forced to change it anyway because actors want to leave the cast, etc. But he managed to pull it off pretty well in spite of the practical difficulties, although I admit it’s not the same kind of puzzle show that Lost might or might not have tried to be but definitely didn’t succeed at being.)

@pv 21: Only later seasons work like that. In earlier seasons the show doesn’t confirm Crazy Thing; at most the viewer sees something ambiguous that might or might not be consistent with Crazy Thing, and sometimes Mulder is downright wrong and a mundane explanation is clearly proved.

The switch to Mulder being right all the time and Scully becoming completely in denial (I see it, but I still don’t believe it — not uttered as a joke, but the joke being how dumb Scully is) is often described as when the show started to go downhill.

23

Salient 05.28.10 at 10:28 pm

It seems to me that any form of entertainment that has a puzzle element involves a contract between the creator and the consumer, the main clause of which is that the puzzle is soluble.

Normally… yes. If this is important to you, though, don’t read House of Leaves.

24

Joshua Holmes 05.29.10 at 12:09 am

From the outside, Lost fans look like Charlie Brown and the creators of the show look like Lucy and every polar bear looks like a football.

This is exactly why I bailed on the show somewhere around Season 4. I realized that they didn’t have the answers from the beginning. I am more than dense enough to miss foreshadowing, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that they didn’t even know what they were foreshadowing. Didn’t watch the final episode, but it looks to have been more or less true.

25

Billikin 05.29.10 at 1:06 am

“Bennett asks a ‘quick question’: “Does Barack Obama want the imposition of Sharia Law?” (Tough, but fair.)”

Quick, fair reply: “Did you check your brain at the door?”

—–

Sorry, folks, I don’t usually get like that, but it would be funny if it were not despicable. The question, is not tough, it’s easy. It’s not fair, it’s propaganda. The answer does not matter, to ask the question is to legitimize the association between Obama and Sharia Law.

26

John Holbo 05.29.10 at 1:18 am

A lot of people didn’t like the final volume of Poe’s popular epic fantasy cycle, “The Raven and the Writing Desk” either. But, seriously, I liked “Lost”. I even liked the ending.

27

bianca steele 05.29.10 at 1:38 am

I think at the very least Scully’s point of view is the viewer’s, especially when she’s trying to drag Mulder back. As I think you suggest, pv, if she weren’t skeptical, the audience would never hear half of what Mulder thinks or 80+% of the objective evidence. To the extent the audience is a science fiction audience, this has to be there for them to care.

(I just on-demanded the finale of Lost, and made it to the second commercial break for now. My mother, btw, loves it, or did in the first seasons. My mother also loves The Great Race and hate, hates, hates SF and fantasy, always has, since she was small.)

28

roac 05.29.10 at 1:46 am

If this is important to you, though, don’t read House of Leaves.

Experimental fiction mostly happens out of my field of view these days, but I had to click through some links about that. I see that House of Leaves is an example of ergodic literature, meaning you have to make extranoematic effort to read it. Obviously I will have to read it now, just to prove that I can be as extranoematic as any twentysomething grad student. And anyway, it sounds like these are just the same kinds of tricks that Nabokov got up to in Pale Fire, and I’ll have you know I got an A on the senior thesis I wrote about that, so bring it on!

(Okay, it was an A minus.)

(And don’t think I didn’t notice that “Espen J. Aarseth” is an anagram for SPARE THE JEANS.)

29

Salient 05.29.10 at 3:15 am

And anyway, it sounds like these are just the same kinds of tricks that Nabokov got up to in Pale Fire,

Yep, but with more geeking out. (Or maybe with more modern geeking out.)

If you’re really going all-in for the twentysomething graduate student thisissoamazing ergodic experience with House of Leaves, also be sure to pick up the album.

(And be prepared to wince at the lyrics, from time to time.)

30

bad Jim 05.29.10 at 5:09 am

Poe? I though “The Raven and the Writing-Desk” was the sequel to “A Hawk and a Hand-Saw”.

Moreover, it’s well known that Republicans reject LOST. From the Maine party platform:

h. Oppose any and all treaties with the UN or any other organization or country which surrenders US sovereignty. Specifically:
i. Reject the UN Treaty on Rights of the Child.
ii. Reject “LOST” the Law Of The Sea Treaty.
iii. Reject any agreement which seeks to confiscate our firearms.

31

John Holbo 05.29.10 at 5:35 am

The Hawk and the Hand-Saw would be a great superhero/sidekick duo. Raven and Writing-Desk? Not so sure. What would Writing-Desk’s superpower be?

32

Salient 05.29.10 at 7:31 am

What would Writing-Desk’s superpower be?

The uncanny ability to provide support to even the most pitiful of written arguments.

In fact, if it wasn’t for a Writing-Desk to lay them on, it’s safe to say many of Megan McArdle’s columns would go entirely unsupported.

33

Martin Bento 05.29.10 at 7:49 am

I never watched X-files regularly as I wasn’t a TV watcher, so this could be off-base, but it looked to me like one thing it did was treat notions like “there was a broader conspiracy to kill MLK”, which, at a minimum, is not scientifically implausible, as comparably crazy as notions like “a backyard genetic engineer is breeding credible if eccentric humanoid creatures from farm animals”. Equivalences like that reinforce the notion that anything not generally accepted as true is fantastic by virtue of that fact alone.

34

bad Jim 05.29.10 at 7:51 am

Ink! Schneier and Myers would concur. Though a pen is typically less sharp than a sword, ink is more indelible than blood. At least at present, mindshare is valued over hecatombs.

35

Bruce Baugh 05.29.10 at 1:02 pm

Martin: Not really. X-Files didn’t have anything to say about the secular (so to speak) world of posited conspiracies. Mulder would be inclined to believe them all, and Scully to believe none of them, but they never dealt with any of those things in the stories, and the political apparatus they did deal with was concerned with the manipulation of suppressed truths about the rest of the ecosystem and with deals with extraterrestrials, with fallout about who gets to do what with those goodies.

Implicitly, and possibly explicitly from time to time, the political conspirators certainly could be up to more mundane political conspiracy stuff, but it got no weight on the show. I genuinely don’t recall any equivalencies of that sort at work. I have the impression that show creator Chris Carter isn’t really interested by what I called the secular side.

Bad Jim: The way my friend Rob Heinsoo once put it was, “Strategy: The pen is mightier than the sword. Tactics: The sword is faster than the pen.”

36

EMG 05.29.10 at 3:44 pm

Well, except for the scene that shows the Smoking Man shooting Kennedy from the sewer opening. And others I’m probably not thinking of at the moment. You guys sound like a bunch of cocktail party posers nattering on about books they haven’t actually read.

37

Bruce Baugh 05.29.10 at 4:21 pm

JFK is a special case in conspiracy theory, though. Like the Knights Templar, the Illuminati, and a few other touchstones, your theory just isn’t complete until his assassination is in there. And certainly the conspirators in X-Files are out for power in human society, and since they have a bunch, it comes up. It’s just not the point of the show, and (I felt) was generally rendered as not being nearly as interesting as liver fluke people.

38

alex 05.29.10 at 6:02 pm

The X-Files was basically about the Occult, taking a wide definition of that which includes ‘real aliens’, ‘real global conspiracies’, ‘real monsters of various kinds’. It showed as materially present, on screen and large as life, things which you’d have to be deranged to take seriously. It and Lost both have about as much to do with real life as Twilight does. Scared the shit out of me consistently over the first couple of seasons, mind, before its edge wore off.

39

bianca steele 05.29.10 at 6:18 pm

alex,
you have redefined “occult” to mean “fear” and that can’t be right.

40

Lee A. Arnold 05.29.10 at 7:41 pm

Now I’m glad I never watched Lost! But then I never watched Twin Peaks after the first season either. As soon as I realized that we were not going to get a rational answer to who killed Laura Palmer, the narrative lost any scientific interest for me. I understand some of the problems of seasonal television writing and the similarity to gameplaying and the possibility for an endless mystery to become a metaphor for life, but to me it’s cheap storytelling because you don’t intend to tie all the clues together in the real world.

Along the same veinm I think that some people here appear to misunderstand why Bill Bennet, Glen Beck, Newt Gingrich and their ilk say and write the things they do. They don’t believe that Obama will impose sharia. They are hoping to invent campaign rhetoric. And to stay employed. They are trying to find their way to a few resonant phrases that will help to gull the rubes. They know that repetition plus a feined attitude of certainty with disinterested musing is the key to successful false rhetoric. Their real object is power, not truth. Asking them why they don’t actually explore their own arguments logically, misses the point. They don’t intend to.

41

Martin Bento 05.29.10 at 8:50 pm

EMG, what makes cocktail party posers posers is that they pretend to have read the books. I admitted to not being a regular viewer of the show, so my comment was basically a question. I do recall an episode that seemed to be implying some government conspiracy against King (some government agent turning against King when he made his move to the Left), though possibly as an element of a larger conspiracy involving UFOs or something.

One thing I was paying attention to at the time was the discourse around alleged government conspiracies, both public and interpersonal, online and off. Regardless of the actual content of the show, X-files had an effect on public thinking at the time. When Gary Webb published his Dark Alliance series, alleging, based on the sworn testimony of a government agent, that the CIA had purposefully overlooked Contra drug running, the mainstream media, which routinely relies on anonymous sources, ridiculed it as poorly-supported. The first cliche that those not wanting to believe the story threw up was “that’s X-files stuff”, usually followed by some blather about Elvis or UFOs. Of course, CIA involvement in illegal drugs, often more direct than what Webb reported, had been documented fact for decades (see The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade by McCoy, or Acid Dreams by Lee and Shalin, for example), but the “skeptics” were too ignorant to know that and too certain that anyone who suggested such a thing could be simply ignored – I guess that’s why they call it ignorance.

This is all getting pretty off-topic, though, so I guess I should drop it.

42

Bruce Baugh 05.29.10 at 10:03 pm

Martin: I think that this is a case of “any rationale will do”, though we’re really on John Emerson’s turf here. You can look at ways Hofstadter’s essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” has been used to dismiss well grounded, well documented, clearly presented arguments about collusion of various sorts in and around governance, for instance. The X-Files was a handy thing to sling around, but I don’t think that it helped to build a new story in the way that, say, 24 did.

But I could also be missing things myself. I’m not passionate about my point here.

43

Tony Sidaway 05.29.10 at 10:15 pm

I didn’t watch much of X-Files, and what little I did see was infuriatingly credulous tosh, especially when compared to earlier series such as the BBC’s Doomwatch which tried to deal with the edges of scientific knowledge in an obviously fictional setting but in a way that could engage grown-ups.

In the 1990s the X-Files series became very popular with conspiracy-minded types, one of whom expressly told me he was convinced it was a project run by the US government to prepare the population for revelations about what really happened at Roswell.

44

politicalfootball 05.30.10 at 4:03 am

42: I never found Emerson persuasive on that, though I would have liked to explore his thinking more. Hofstadter, best as I can reckon, wasn’t denying the existence of conspiracies, and people can’t be held responsible for how their work is misinterpreted.

45

alex 05.30.10 at 7:34 am

@39 – no I haven’t. ‘Occult’ = ‘hidden’. The X-Files notion is that there is a whole lot of ‘hidden’, where UFOs, ETs, liver-eating monsters, satanic possession and the assassination of JFK all occupy a related space out of sight of poor normal schmucks. This is of course just silly. That it was an effectively creep/scary TV show doesn’t alter that.

Nor does it alter the fact that real conspiracy towards political ends has always and will always occur. Just not in collusion with The Greys…

46

ejh 05.30.10 at 5:42 pm

But then I never watched Twin Peaks after the first season either. As soon as I realized that we were not going to get a rational answer to who killed Laura Palmer, the narrative lost any scientific interest for me.

Twin Peaks wasn’t about narrative though. It never really mattered a damn who killed Laura Palmer.

47

Jay Livingston 05.30.10 at 6:08 pm

Bianca Steele asks, “Did Bennett then go on to ask McCarthy to explain the term Sharia Law?” No. But as McCarthy was saying,“No, I don’t know that he wants that,” Bennet interrupts to say, “But he’s not doin’ enough to stop it.” The former Secretary of Education does not think that Obama is doing enough to stop the imposition of sharia law in the US.

48

valuethinker 05.30.10 at 6:20 pm

dropping back to the original topic.

Isn’t the whole point that intelligent conservatives know that Barack Obama does not support sharia law, and has no intention of imposing it (there are these feminists, you see, who dominate his party and got him elected….).

But there is an essentially ill-informed audience for conservatives out there who can be tapped, and stirred into righteous rage, with such talk.

It’s the equivalent of some of the fringes of the Afro-American community and the stories which are widely believed in it: that the US government introduced AIDS to get black people, etc. (of course, given the history of US government research on black people, you can get to that theory with only a short hop and jump). Stories about Jews, etc. There are unscrupulous politicians on the left who have used those too.

So what we have is conservative leaders treating their followers as ‘useful idiots’.

Nothing new in that in American politics (see some of Richard Nixon’s tricks, white politics against the Civil Rights movement, politics against Catholic candidates like Al Smith, some of Karl Rove’s more interesting tactics eg in Alabama).

The sad thing is, it works. And the mainstream media, cowed by right wing pressure and economic pressure, doesn’t call them on it.

49

parse 05.30.10 at 6:52 pm

You guys sound like a bunch of cocktail party posers nattering on about books they haven’t actually read.

I love the idea of pretending at a cocktail party to have watched The X-Files in order to maintain my reputation as an intellectual.

50

bianca steele 05.30.10 at 7:36 pm

alex,
I wouldn’t have pinned you for someone who think etymology tells us what a word means, and if you really believe this, I won’t bother asking what you think a “conspiracy” is. Occult pretty much always refers to the supernatural, specifically to the realm of the supernatural that is anathema to organized religion. Maybe the Jersey Devil and the chupacabra border on “occult” (but something was killing the goats), but species extinction caused by corporate pollution and biological weapons are not things you’d have to be deranged (or petrified by fears of apocalypse) to believe in, and whether or not you believe there’s good reason to believe space aliens have landed on earth, the idea of a space alien is not occult either.

And the lure of the X-Files is not, I think, the very idea that there is a lot of stuff going on that most people don’t know about, and that the existence of such stuff is some kind of terrible injustice.

51

MQ 05.30.10 at 9:30 pm

Their real object is power, not truth.

this is and must be true of all politicians. I’m not always sure academics on the internet fully take in the nature of politics.

52

sg 05.30.10 at 11:38 pm

at some point late in the series the X-Files itself made Bruce Baugh’s point explicit, in the scene where the Smoking Man tells Mulder that all these conspiracy theories about aliens are being encouraged by the govt in order to distract people from the real nasties of the cold war and afterwards (this was just before the movie was released). He reveals Mulder’s obsession has made him a patsy for the govts plan.

Then of course, to squeeze another season out of something that really should have been set aside before then, the Smoking Man subsequently reveals that he lied to Mulder to throw him off track, because he was close to discovering the Aliens. By the late seasons the directors were so desperately throwing everything they had at the series that any coherent directorial aims (or decent story arc, for that matter) were impossible to pin down.

However, until then, by casting all conspiracy theories about real problems like secret weapons testing and the like into the same vein as backyard geneticists and Big Foot, the show does effectively reduce them to a joke, hence the phrase “that’s X-Files stuff.” I agree with Bruce Baugh, the X-Files did a lot to drag a lot of really fun, sinister conspiracy theories into the light and then completely discredit them.

Of course, that kind of effect only obtains if you believe there is anyone out there whose worldview is actually informed by TV. But that’s impossible, right?

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Martin Bento 05.30.10 at 11:49 pm

sg, I think you’re agreeing with me, there. I’m the one who said X-files led people to dismiss realistic conspiracy theories as “X-files stuff”, along the lines of backyard geneticists.

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Landru 05.31.10 at 2:01 am

@48: “The sad thing is, it works. And the mainstream media, cowed by right wing pressure and economic pressure, doesn’t call them on it.”

I agree with the final phrase, but not with the lead-up. You write as though this should be self-evidently true; but why? Why can the media be “cowed by right wing pressure” but not by left-wing pressure? As for economic pressure, shouldn’t there be a great demand for media reporting that _does_ call politicians out on their tactics? And, if there is no such demand, then shouldn’t you be blaming the uninterested public first rather than the media who follow their lead? You’ve diagnosed the symptoms, but not necessarily the causes.

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parse 05.31.10 at 4:43 am

It’s the equivalent of some of the fringes of the Afro-American community and the stories which are widely believed in it: that the US government introduced AIDS to get black people, etc.

If the stories are widely believed by a fringe of a minority community I’m not sure I can picture accurately the Venn Diagram that represents those who accept such assertions,. Can you tell me what it is about the African-Americans who believe the stories makes them a “fringe” of their community?

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alex 05.31.10 at 8:09 am

Dear Bianca, I was attempting an imaginative recasting of the word ‘Occult’ in an age when people are possibly more [or at least as much] inclined to believe in aliens as they are in witches. It seems to me that it is a useful recasting, for the very reasons I have outlined previously, and especially in the context of the X-Files, which is only a TV show, and concerning which it would not seem worth the effort to try to untangle the bits-that-were-about-devils from the bits-that-were-about-killing-JFK. There are, after all, lots of films and shows about political conspiracies that don’t include mutant bees, alien babies in jars or demonic messengers disguised as schoolteachers.

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noen 05.31.10 at 3:49 pm

I have a question and possible topic for a post.

What IS Liberalism?

I read CT but only comment sporadically and I have enjoyed the discussions about Libertarianism. They were very informative. Perhaps it’s time to take a look. The “liberals in the mist” posts have only approached the subject tangentially (I think). Maybe I’m wrong, maybe it’s a dumb idea but it’s just a suggestion.

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kid bitzer 05.31.10 at 3:51 pm

also, it is surely time for a eurovision thread.

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alex 05.31.10 at 4:00 pm

What is liberalism? Apparently something that can be a hairsbreadth from conservatism, viewed from one side, and a hairsbreadth from communism, viewed from the other. Whipped like a red-headed stepchild from both sides, and yet it is the thing – with its commitment to pluralistic freedom – that allows the conversation to continue.

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bianca steele 05.31.10 at 5:06 pm

Hi Alex,
Why would you do this, though? What is it convenient for? It sounds like a dog whistle to me, but I can only guess what kind of dog whistle. Does it say, “Evangelicals stay away. This show is the work of the devil. (Worries about these things are okay only when the book’s cover is graced by the name of a Bible Institute?)”? Does it say, “Stories about aliens are really stories about ‘angels'”? Does it say, “People who read Dune are the same kind of people as people who read Von Daniken”? Does it say “People who worry about environmental issues, like conspiracy theory nuts, and who watch television shows and read popular or mainstream books about those subjects, are wasting time worrying about things they can’t do anything about, and would not do this if they were more emotionally stable”?

These questions are raised by your choice to use the world “occult.” I could just as easily focus on the tendency in the show to blame everything on government. Then, however, the fact that the bad things are depicted as the work of only a small number of people in the government, trying to subvert it, would raise new questions.

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alex 06.01.10 at 7:32 am

Dog whistle? Sorry, I’ve nothing to say if you’re going to go there.

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Earnest O'Nest 06.01.10 at 8:47 am

Libertarianism is a bit like smoking. You know you are going to wind up regretting you started a discussion that could not but wind up annoying yourself but it itched, you scratched and before you know it you couldn’t stop scratching. Sorry, should have said – starting discussions threads on libertarianism is a bit like scratching when you know the itch is not going to go away.

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Dr. Hilarius 06.01.10 at 10:23 pm

The proper response to Bill “Snake-Eyes” Bennett is “what kind of odds are you giving on that.”
Ignoring his blatant hypocrisy, Bennett is little more than a common scold.

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Igor 06.04.10 at 2:38 am

Bill Bennett was supposed to preside over the eliminate of the Department of Education. So, I’m afraid his competence is open to question. With that stipulated, the correct answer to his question is “No, not particularly, but neither would he have any very strong objection.”

And Value Thinker, can you give me an example of a feminist (other than Sarah Palin) who has ever expressed any objection to sharia law?

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