In “New York Press” – NYC’S ONLY DAILY BLOG FOR POLITICS, CULTURE, MUSIC, ENTERTAINMENT, MEDIA, as they claim – Mark Ames, on June 8, 2004, had this to say –
For the first time in almost 30 years, the left has a chance to occupy the reality vacuum that opened up after the big barbecue in Fallujah. The left can sense that their time may have finally arrived, and they’re prematurely settling into their new role as saviors of the national soul, with their former hysteria already reverting to a smug, nurturing tone. The once-vicious humor, born of desperation and hatred, is again becoming nauseatingly didactic and responsible. This is a disaster. The left seems to be buying into the high school civics teacher’s idiotic lie that “you can’t just be de-structive, you have to be con-structive as well.” Yeah, and did you know that girls prefer shy, sensitive boys?
Well, there was a presidential election coming, and Ames saw trouble coming –
One look at Bush and you’ll know why: Bush is the privileged frat-boy/jock asshole that every spiteful male recognizes from his school days. Spiteful males may have supported him in the past, but only because Bush’s cartoonish stupidity gave a daily dose of stomach cramps to the responsible, concerned Americans who voted for Gore. And really, what white male in his spiteful mind could possibly have voted for Al Gore, with that pained “Am I pleasing you?” smile he beamed at you? Spiteful white males don’t want to be pleased - they want other people to be displeased.
Kerry, on the other hand, has that long graveyard face, and a dull, 1940s delivery, making it hard for the spiteful voter to hate him instinctively. In fact, with Kerry, the spleen just goes to sleep.
Liberals just don’t understand this country –
If there were one perfect spite president, it was Richard Nixon. He looked mean, spoke mean and stomped on the hippies who were having too many orgasms, the last real orgasms this country ever witnessed. Kerry shares roughly the same repulsive physical qualities as Nixon, repulsive in the sense that he doesn’t look like a TV anchor - which is a good thing. And while Kerry may not stomp on hippies, it’s hard to imagine that he ever enjoyed a single minute of his life. There is nothing about Kerry to make a man envious, even if he is rich and famous. You get the sense that Kerry’s greatest joy in life is sitting alone in his office at the end of a long day, thumbing through his fresh collection of business cards and coveting the connections that each one brings. When it comes to the spite intangibles, Kerry is the closest thing to Nixon that the Democrats have ever fielded.
Kerry won’t draw the spite vote, but his creepy face, along with Bush’s jock glow, just might neutralize it - out of spite. All the left has to do is not stir up the wrong bile. That means keeping the focus on Bush’s corporate-jock clique, and keeping it mean. Just don’t let us know how responsible and concerned you are. Don’t let us know that you care about us, and the election is all yours.
That didn’t work out, of course, but it is an interesting theory – a good portion of America is basically made up of spiteful, angry people who vote and think purely on the basis of making others miserable –
This is America, not Denmark. In this country, tens of millions of people choose to watch Fox News not simply because Americans are credulous idiots or at the behest of some right-wing corporate cabal, but because average Americans respect viciousness. They are attracted to viciousness for a lot of reasons. In part, it reminds them of their bosses, whom they secretly adore. Americans hate themselves for the way they behave in public, always smiling and nodding their heads with accompanying really’s and uh-huhs to show that they’re listening to the other person, never having the guts to say what they really feel. So they vicariously scream and bully others into submission through right-wing surrogate-brutes. Spending time watching Sean Hannity is enough for your average American white male to feel less cowardly than he really is.
Of course, and this has been discussed here before – the whole “surrogate bully” thing. From August 2004 –
Almost all votes have made up their minds already. And half the country likes this child bully who can sucker-punch the skinny, brainy wimp and get away with it. Hey, it is entertaining - and plays to the secret fantasy of so many who feel life, and brainy wimps who get along with the French, have treated them unfairly and mocked their lack of education and their simple incurious values and tell them life is complicated when it really isn’t.
And a week later Spite and Its Uses summarized this same Ames article, but left out this detail –
Put your ear to the ground in this country, and you’ll hear the toxic spite churning. It’s partly the result of commercial propaganda and sexual desperation - a desperation far more common than is admitted. If you didn’t know anything about how America’s propaganda worked, you’d think that every citizen here experienced four-dimensional multiple orgasms with beautiful, creative, equally satisfied partners, morning, noon and night.
The wretched truth is that America is an erogenous no man’s land. Most white males here (at least the straight ones) have either dismal sex lives or no sex lives at all. As bad as this hurts, the pain is compounded every time you expose yourself to the cultural lies that await you at every turn - that is, every waking hour and during deep REM sleep, when the subliminal messages kick in. This wretchedness leads to a desire for vengeance, to externalize the inner famine - it leads directly to the Republican camp.
Yeah, yeah – but why bring up again? The widely-read “Digby” says the events of the first weeks of this October almost demand you consider it. The events she lists are rather spiteful, “bubbling up from the primordial ooze of the conservative movement.” Rush Limbaugh calls veterans who are critics of the war “phony soldiers” and implies that one of them, who suffered a head injury, was a suicide bomber who was too damaged to know what he was doing. Right-wing blogs and the Senate minority leader’s office conspire to disseminate slander to the media about a lower middle class family because they spoke out about their support for a government program that provides health insurance for children. Ann Coulter does her new number – on television, bluntly baiting her Jewish host saying that she believes Jews need to be “perfected.”
All this has been discussed in these pages, but seeing listed offers a different perspective – something is up, or something is deepening. Digby says her mail has increased a bit –
I got several handwritten and nicely typed letters to my post office box recently suggesting that I am a communist, a traitor and a very, very stupid person. (That’s translated from the original Martian.)
And she notes the offices of the publication for which she is writing received this –
You pathetic socialist pukes give me hope that one day the country will reach the frustration level necessary to take up arms and hunt you assholes down. I went to Viet Nam to kill communist and will kill them here if necessary. I can still part your idiotic hair with an M-16 at about 300 yards and I would find great satisfaction in having people like you in my sights… the time of tolerating you assholes is running out… so please keep it up… and a mountain is going to come down on your treasonous head and if there is a hell, it is reserved for stupid fucks like the writers and contributors to assholes like you…. I detest you… I am your enemy and WILL REMAIN your enemy… quit talking about the military… they consider you their enemy, and you don’t deserve a military… All you have is the Trashcanisthan of the northeast… the fucking rust belt, and the third world of California… you ain’t got shit! You will lose again, and again and again, because your message is socialist bile… and that is ALL you are… FUCK YOU!
So, she deduces, people on the right are very, very angry right now and they are lashing out at their most hated enemies. That would Americans who disagree with them. The question she asks is why the suddenly ratcheting up the rhetoric now?
She does cite Dave Neiwert, who has long said that this is the result of the right’s long standing tactic of injecting their most extreme rhetoric into the mainstream, and that may be true, as Limbaugh and Coulter have both been long-time toxic purveyors of eliminationist slime (she cites Neiwert here) – “It’s just working its way up through the muck into the light.” And she point to the Ames item, and the more stylistically restrained The Wimp Factor from Stephen Ducat and Susan Faludi’s new book The Terror Dream. Now it’s all adding up – “The right wing male panic of the last several decades of rapid social change has certainly led to some very disturbed people (of both genders, by the way.)”
But then, it may not be “male panic” that’s at the core of things here. That’s just social anxiety, and this may be deeper, or primal, if you will. There were those studies of liberal and conservative brains - they work differently, “in ways that logically lead to a more violent and angry sort of thinking” –
The differences between liberals and conservatives may run deeper than how they feel about welfare reform or the progress of the Iraq war: Researchers reported Sunday that their brains may actually work differently.
In a study likely to raise the hackles of some conservatives, scientists at New York University and the University of California, Los Angeles, found that a specific region of the brain’s cortex is more sensitive in people who consider themselves liberals than in self-declared conservatives.
The brain region in question helps people shift gears when their usual response would be inappropriate, supporting the notion that liberals are more flexible in their thinking.
“Say you drive home from work the same way every day, but one day there’s a detour and you need to override your autopilot,” said NYU psychologist David Amodio. ”Most people function just fine. But there’s a little variability in how sensitive people are to the cue that they need to change their current course.”
The work, to be reported today in the journal Nature Neuroscience, grew out of decades of previous research suggesting that political orientation is linked to certain personality traits or styles of thinking. A review of that research published in 2003 found that conservatives tend to be more rigid and closed-minded, less tolerant of ambiguity and less open to new experiences. Some of the traits associated with conservatives in that review were decidedly unflattering, including fear, aggression and tolerance of inequality.
That evoked outrage from conservative pundits.
Actually it seems to have evoked fear, aggression and tolerance of inequality. Some theories just demonstrate themselves.
Okay, this is old ground, plowed many a time before. What’s new is that Digby doesn’t buy all of it. She suggests new factors -
I don’t think that adequately explains why this seems to be happening more at this moment. It’s possible that it’s a result of frustration with the fact that conservatives have been shown to be dramatically incompetent at governance. But they have always believed themselves to be an aggrieved minority bravely fighting against the liberal elites who run everything, so that doesn’t really hold water either. And in any case, they will purge the Bushmen from their pantheon and instantly assume the glorious mantle of Ronald Reagan the first chance they get and carry on as if it never happened. (You can already see it with the astonishing hypocrisy with which they are once again extolling themselves as good fiscal stewards after six years of feeding on the government carcass like gluttonous hyenas.) These little set-backs do not penetrate the right wing mind very deeply.
But there is one thing that is new in the political landscape that might explain this recent outbreak of nasty invective: political leadership that is not only tolerant of its supporters’ reliance on violence, both real and rhetorical, but one that engages in it itself. We are led, after all, by a president who started an illegal war based upon lies and who blatantly uses fear and threats for political gain. He says “you’re either with us or against us” and he hasn’t hesitated to support and commend Republicans who use the same language against their political rivals.
So the issue is violence as a legitimate political tool. Consider these examples –
And last week, among all these instances of violent right wing rhetoric flying through the ether, our president smirked, for the umpteenth time, “we don’t torture” knowing very well that the whole point of his refusing to define torture is because they want people to believe they are actually torturing. Torture - a taboo for centuries– is now considered a useful tool by the government of the United States of America, both in practice and in rhetoric.
Our extremely powerful vice president blithely tells an interviewer that the medieval practice of water-boarding is a “no-brainer.” The president’s lawyer famously wrote that the Geneva Conventions were quaint. The administration could barely find its voice to repudiate the horrors of Abu Ghraib and even then blamed it on a few bad apples when there was ample evidence that it, and the many other instances of prisoner mistreatment and torture we’ve seen revealed are aspects of a widely used regime of experimental, ad-hoc “interrogation” methods based upon Soviet techniques. Rush Limbaugh comparing it to a fraternity prank was a thoroughly mainstream opinion among Republicans — one allegedly moderate congressman even said that it wasn’t torture at all, but rather a “sex ring.“
Yep, those were Soviet techniques, and Limbaugh’s fraternity prank assessment of what happened at Abu Ghraib did become mainstream opinion (or it was a “sex ring“). And she does point out that “many members of the leadership of this country, in all branches of government,” have signed off on the presidents right to order torture and indefinite detention with no due process for “enemies” – however he sees fit. We know that we now “render” people to foreign countries for torture – we admit doing it, although we do claim that it is done “responsibly.”
So here’s the conclusion. Why wouldn’t “the hard core right ratchet up its natural proclivity for violent rhetoric,” given all this? This kind of thinking “is now openly sanctioned by the conservative leadership of this country.”
So it’s a matter of violence, as a useful and effective – and righteous (or self-righteous) – tool. What we’re seeing is not the result of “male panic,” nor is it the result of a difference in brain structures. It is matter of philosophy.
Think about it. Since the heady days of the civil right movement, back in the very early sixties, the middle and the left have been enamored with the “philosophy of nonviolence” – King used Gandhi as his model, and that 1982 movie won Ben Kingsley an Oscar (Best Actor in a Leading Role), and it won Best Art Direction-Set Decoration, Best Cinematography, Best Costume Design, Best Director (Richard Attenborough), Best Film Editing, Best Screenplay and finally Best Picture. The right doesn’t think much of Hollywood values, obviously. Passive resistance, for many, and for those who now run things, is foolish, and irresponsible. Violence is what gets you what you want, although you say that that “truth” makes you sad an you wish it we’re so (unless you’re Ann Coulter).
And if it is a matter of philosophy, it is obvious that such a philosophy informs our “muscular” foreign policy – the Vice president has said, more than a few times, that we don’t “talk” with foreign regimes with which we disagree, “we remove them.” And we get the de facto admission that we to torture people, and we’re proud of it – and who can really define it, anyway? It’s just necessary, and the right thing to do. And with such a philosophy at the top, is it any wonder it filers down to all matters? It’s a fact of life, we’re told – violence works, and nothing else does.
And you need to be onboard with that as the nominee for Attorney General, Michael Mukasey, found out. Steve Benen offers a good summary, but it comes down to this – in his confirmation hearing on Wednesday, October 17, he rejected the now famous Bybee memo authorizing what was obviously torture, and compared our policy to Nazi Germany. And then later in the say, he went native on the White House, vowing to end Justice Department “stonewalling” and insisting he would resign if the president tried to do anything unconstitutional. And there would be no more “partisan considerations in employment” – there simply would be no more “unilateralism,” or so he promised.
Great! But it seems the White House talked to him overnight, and he changed his tune –
President Bush’s choice for attorney general, Michael B. Mukasey, embraced some of the administration’s most controversial legal positions yesterday, suggesting that Bush can ignore surveillance statutes in wartime and avoiding a declaration that simulated drowning constitutes torture under U.S. laws.
Mukasey struck a different tone on the second and final day of his confirmation hearing, after earlier pleasing lawmakers from both parties by promising new administrative policies at the Justice Department and by declaring that the president cannot override constitutional and legal bans on torture and the inhumane treatment of prisoners.
He’ll get the position – he’s not Alberto Gonzales and that is enough. That’ll do. But now there are reasons to reject him.
UCLA’s Mark Kleiman says this –
I understand Mukasey is supposed to be a reasonably good guy, by comparison with the run of Bush appointees. But if Mukasey won’t say that waterboarding is torture and claims that the President has some undefined power to violate statute law - even criminal laws, such as the ban on torture and other war crimes - under his “Article II powers,” then why should the Senate Judiciary Committee even bring his nomination to a vote?
Benen points out that in response to questions about authorizing surveillance, Mukasey suggested there may be circumstances in which the president can ignore federal law, and in response to questions about waterboarding, Mukasey would only say, “If waterboarding is torture, torture is not constitutional.” Be he didn’t know if it was torture. Maybe he ought to look into it.
Having read the testimony, I’m afraid I have to abandon my early hopes and agree. An attorney general who believes a president has a permanent right to ignore the rule of law because peacetime is now wartime for ever, is an attorney-general defending the rule of one man over the rule of law. If I were a Senator … I’d vote no. This is the fault line of our time. If we are redefining war as a permanent state of being, and redefining presidential authority to give him/her extra-legal and extra-constitutional power to what s/he wants anywhere in the world, including the United States and to its citizenry, then American liberty is in extreme peril. To approve an attorney general who does not dissent from this position is a terrible precedent.
Don’t people see that this is what Cheney is doing? He is setting precedent after precedent for totalist, secret executive power. And with each precedent for unchecked, uncontrollable executive power - including the power to detain and torture within the United States - the America we have known is being surrendered. This is the other war - a constitutional war at home against American liberty and the Constitution - as dangerous in a different way as Islamism. One attacks our freedom from the outside; the other hollows out our freedom from within. The fight against both is the calling of the time.
I think we’re in denial about this. Following Mukasey’s statements with confirmation would set a precedent we may well deeply regret. Think of another terrorist attack. Think of the Cheney precedents. Think of Giuliani in the White House. Now think of what would be left of democracy and the Constitution the day after.
Ah, think of the spite and violence that informs everything here. Kevin Drum – “This just shouldn’t be hard stuff. It’s a sign of the moral decay of the Bush era that we even find ourselves arguing about it.”
But people do argue over basic philosophies. Some people’s philosophies are stuck in 1963, on August 28, with King telling us he has a dream. Some people’s philosophies are stuck in stuck in the feudal wars of the fourteenth century – and they say they are the realists. Which is it? Gandhi and King got some things done, sure, but we’re now told to consider that there was always a far more effective alternative to nonviolence and all that hippie stuff.
But then the proof is in what actually works, isn’t it? Look where we are now.
