Victor Davis Hanson on Dan Rather and Liberal Hypocrisy:
If we wonder why CBS is in trouble, why no one trusts the universities or the U.N., or why the Democrats may soon lose the Senate, the House, the presidency, and the Supreme Court, the answer has a lot to do with arrogant hypocrisy – the idea that how one lives need have nothing to do with what one professes, that idealistic rhetoric can provide psychological cover for privilege and preference, and that rules need not apply for those self-proclaimed as smarter and nicer than the rest of us. But none of us – none – get a pass simply because we claim that we are more moral, educated, or sophisticated than most.
VDH writes with solid descriptive power. In the end though it would be most fitting to see someone possessed of a muse and genius for parody and satire (e.g., iowahawk) take on the task of elaborating our late modern versions of self-enamored Don Quixotes and useful-fool Sancho Panzas in a book length format. Tranzis such as Blix, Annan and Kerry; insinuating presumptives a la Rather and Jennings; sclerotics of the old, new and contemporary derivations of the Left ranging from Alinsky to Chomsky to Zinn, et al. All that can be captured with positive language only to a point, beyond which it begins to take on the tone of a tired moralizing itself and begins to tempt one to take it all too seriously.
Only mirth resulting from a well framed parody and satire of these egoists and self-promoting elites will be able to fully disclose these ardent buffoons and their wastreling moral content for what it is.
R.I.P., and let mirth and laughter preside over their funerary procession and burial service, no other presider will do.
Roger,
This morning at just before nine I posted this, on your “Profiles in Courage…” thread, concluding
Our [that is, our generation's, the 60s generation's] presumption of moral superiority makes us, in a dreadful and distressing way, the natural allies of the Islamofascist psychpaths.
Jamie Irons
Hanson has it right.
I wish this generation would mature rather than just grow old.
Terrye:
I’m trying! I’m trying!
I just finished that VDH piece before checking in here. He was really on a roll, and should be named one of the official cheerleaders of the pajama revolution.
Sam:
I agree. He says it so well and so clearly.
I too am trying, with Lady Clairol’s help. I always swore that I would not be one of those middle aged women that did not know when to give it up. I would be graceful.
It is harder to do than I thought.
The attitude of the media/academic elite that Hanson decries is encapsulated brilliantly in Robert Warshow’s critique of The Crucible. Here Warshow nails the smug audiences who applauded Miller’s smug play:
“The Salem witch trials are in fact more relevant than Arthur Miller can have suspected. For this community of “dissent,” inexorably stripped of all principle and all specific belief, has retreated at last into a kind of extreme Calvinism of its own where political truth ceases to have any real connection with politics but becomes a property of the soul. Apart from all belief and all action, these people are “right” in themselves, and no longer need to prove themselves in the world of experience; the Revolution — or “liberalism” or “dissent” — has entered into them as the grace of God was once conceived to have entered into the “elect,” and, like the grace of God, it is given irrevocably. . .
For the Puritans themselves, the doctrine of absolute election was finally intolerable, and it cannot be believed that this new community of the elect finds its position comfortable. But it has yet to discover that its discomfort, like its election, comes from within.”
http://whatstherumpus.blogspot.com/