"Solitude," wrote Karl Kraus, "would be ideal if you could pick the people to avoid." I come pretty close to it here in Florida, and it's by design -- right down to the welcome mat that says, "I See The Assassins Have Failed." But we do a respectable job of making our little retreat a no-drama zone. Then I invariably turn on the evening news and wonder at the devil's hubris in thinking he can make people even meaner than they already are.
Then, itching for more tribulation, I look online and discover that to compare the deadly fiasco at Abbey Gate with the clumsy handling of military operational information via the Signal app is to engage in "what about-ism." I've heard that term with increasing frequency over the last several years, to the point that it's become like a magical incantation whereby one can silence an ideological adversary, lest he shine a klieg light on an unsavory hypocrisy.
Perhaps you've heard of "what about-ism's" cousin, twice removed and three times sent packing, called Godwin's Law. That's the one which holds that the longer a debate goes on, the more likely it is that someone will eventually make a comparison to Adolf Hitler — a comparison that's viewed as an act of intellectual laziness. I've never met Mr. Godwin, but I'm sure he's a dandy guy. Nevertheless, while I don't throw around terms such as "Nazi," and "Fascist," and "Hitler" with the same merry abandon I use to throw plastic beads around on Mardi Gras, I will use the reference when it is needed.
The same principle applies to "what about-ism," an increasingly amorphous and ill-defined verbal talisman used to ward off unpleasant perspectives and realities. Like other expressions of convenience, the term what about-ism has a certain history to it. Originating during the Cold War, the term referenced instances in which the Soviet Union would deflect an American official's denunciation of its gulags and dreadful human rights abuses by saying something on the order of, "But what about blacks in the south?" The idea was to direct attention away its own misdeeds by bringing up the shortcomings of its critics.
But what started as a way of highlighting a rhetorical misdirection has metastasized into a prohibition against any sort of historical perspective or factual contrast that might expose one's hypocrisy. If universally applied in its current form, "what about-ism" would rob Black Lives Matter of any justification for their own robbery, plunder and tendency to burn things down, and put the whole DEI Industrial Complex out of business. Indeed, take away what about-ism's cartoonish version of history as justification for any number of fashionable lunacies and crimes, and the whole raison d'être of the left would collapse, taking the Democrat party with it.
It's reached the point that any reference to the past that debunks the latest talking points of the left is labeled a "what about-ism." It's the linguistic "get out of jail free card," of progressives, intended to shut down further inquiry. Except many of us are no longer inclined to play the game. Historical perspective, historical analysis and historical contrasts, are among the hallmarks of honest intellectual inquiry. They are the very foundation of civil society from its schools and universities to its courtrooms, legal reasoning, and the nation's foundational documents. To put inconvenient historical comparisons and perspective off limits is to usher in an era of idiocy, incivility and primitiveness, not unlike what we've seen spilling out of our campuses and into our streets in recent years, ad nauseam.
Not only that, but the prolific use of what "about-ism" as a semantic silencer can also lead to higher liquor consumption, which is the fallacy known as post hoc ergo pop the top. Fortunately there is a cure, and it resides in ignoring the label.
When Senator Ted Kennedy (who drove off a bridge and left a young woman to drown before contacting the authorities several hours later) or Bill Clinton (a serial philanderer who apparently confused a young subordinate with a humidor) presumed to lecture anyone on women's rights, they should have been booed off the stage, along with anyone with the temerity to call "what about-ism."
And it's entirely reasonable to say that some demonstrators got carried away and went too far on Jan. 6, 2021, while also saying that people who would not condemn the riots of 2020, which claimed nearly 20 lives and did more over $1 billion in damage to multiple cities, which resulted in a 10 percent rise in homicides, should not be taken seriously on questions of demonstration etiquette.
If you say that racism is wrong while simultaneously putting people in boxes based on their racial identity while labeling one group as the oppressor and another as the oppressed, it isn't "what about-ism" to say that you've become the very thing you claim to be fighting against, before laughing you off the public stage.
If you claim that President Trump is a fascist for actually rescinding a suffocating web of federal regulations while trimming federal power back to its constitutional confines, while simultaneously praising the Biden administration's prolific growth of the federal government and its control of your life, it isn't "what about-ism" to say that your definition of fascism is the product of stunted emotions that are unsupported by history or a dictionary.
And if you call for the firing of cabinet-level officials over communication missteps during what has turned out to be a very highly successful series of missions in which the only casualties were the terrorists, but you didn't call for any firings after American lives were lost to a colossal level of official ineptitude in Benghazi and Abbey Gate, or when a secretary of state and presidential candidate illegally used a personal server to conduct classified duties and then personally presided over the destruction of the evidence, it's not what about-ism to observe that your superhuman powers of projection are turning into what you denounce.
