MISSION ACCOMPLISHED – OR AS ROTARIAN AS THEY WANNA BE!
Shot:
By the numbers: since President Barack Obama was sworn in, the financial markets have dropped to ten-year lows, housing prices are off by ten percent or more, nearly a million jobs have been lost, federal discretionary spending has doubled, the share of federal spending as a percentage of gross domestic product is set to soar by 50% by the end of the year, and there’s to be a trillion dollars in new taxes, trillions more in new debts, and even more trillions due as interest payments. Oh — and Republicans are the bad guys.
I say: Yeah, OK, we can do that.
A few years back, television writer/producer/director/visionary Joss Whedon made a little libertarian-themed science fiction movie called Serenity. In it, our ragtag band of heroes make their way around the ‘verse by trading freely when they can and by stealing from the corrupt, oppressive central government when they must. Before launching a minor raid on a government stash of ill-gotten gold, Jayne, the hired muscle (played with an endearingly ignorant malice by Adam Baldwin), cocks his shotgun menacingly — is there any other way? — and suggests, “Let’s be bad guys.”
Yes. Exactly. Let’s.
—“My Fellow Conservatives, Let’s Be Bad Guys!”, Steve Green, PJ Media.com, March 6, 2009.
Chaser: Noam Chomsky: ‘The Republican Party Has Become the Most Dangerous Organization in World History.’
—EcoWatch, today.
And yes, Chomsky is excusing all sorts of history’s genuinely evil organizations by making such a preposterous quote, but then, that’s pretty much been his life’s work, outside of linguistics. Or as Tom Wolfe once said, “An intellectual is a person who is knowledgeable in one field but speaks out only in others.” And he was talking explicitly about Chomsky when he said it:
An intellectual feeds on indignation and really can’t get by without it. The perfect example is Noam Chomsky. When Chomsky was merely the most exciting and most looked-to and in many ways, the most profound linguist in this country if not the world, he was never spoken of as an American intellectual. Here was a man of intellectual achievement. He was not considered an intellectual until he denounced the war in Vietnam, which he knew nothing about. Then he became one of America’s leading intellectuals. He remains one until this day, which finally has led to my definition of an intellectual: An intellectual is a person who is knowledgeable in one field but speaks out only in others.
This whole business was started unintentionally by my great idol, Émile Zola, in the Dreyfus case. Zola was an extremely popular novelist. A popular writer writing fiction had never been considered a person of any intellectual importance before, but in the Dreyfus case he and Anatole France and others who were trying to defend Dreyfus were singled out by Clemenceau as “the intellectuals.” The term had never been used that way before-meaning people who live by intellectual labor. That was Clemenceau’s term.
When Zola wrote his great manifesto, J’accuse . . .!, it appeared on the front page of a daily newspaper. All 300,000 copies of the newspaper were sold out by afternoon. Suddenly the world of writers and teachers and all of these intellectual laborers realized that it was possible for a mere scrivener to be called an intellectual and be considered an important person.
Zola, incidentally, was very knowledgeable about the Dreyfus case. He knew it as well as anybody, as well as any law clerk did. That part was lost later on; it was considered not necessary to go that deeply into anything. All that was required was indignation.
Marshall McLuhan once said that moral indignation is a standard strategy for endowing the idiot with dignity. I think that’s quite true these days.
Which neatly sums up the past week, doesn’t it? But the above passage is from a decade before 2016, a year that’s been so insane, even Tom Wolfe couldn’t have foreseen how crazy it would be in his most satiric novel.