14 Feb 07 Our Culture of Nurtured, Beloved Hate

Occasionally, I will be using Newsgator Web Edition to view my feeds, catch up on them, and then idly click on the first link in their “most linked” sidebar to the left. Clicking on a link simply entitled “Announcement,” I was surprised to find myself on the website of Shakespeare’s Sister, a liberal weblog written by Melissa McEwan. I was surprised because, if memory serves, I had been familiar with Melissa back when her blog was first starting out, back when I was contributing to Running Scared.

Because I’ve for the most part ignored politics (aside from my invective-filled linklog posts, in which the tags “neocon,” “neocon,” and “dumbfuck” commingle with startling frequency) since I grew filled with what I termed “hatred fatigue” — which can be easily and accurately interpreted as “being so wearily sick of the Bush Administration pushing forth an agenda which is on every point the precise opposite of what you think and believe that you can’t bear to pay attention anymore” … ah, where was I?

Because I’ve ignored politics in recent months, her blog post resigning from the Edwards campaign was the manner in which I learned she had been hired by the Edwards campaign as a part-time technical adviser and brought down personally by the ideological fuckwit known as Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League. In a sober article that did nothing to illuminate Donohue’s past reputation as a media hack who has the ability to foam at the mouth on cue, the New York Times with a straight face quoted Donohue calling McEwan and another blogger as “anti-Catholic vulgar trash-talking bigots.”

I’m really of two minds on this. On one hand, Melissa has, in my opinion, always come across as a blogger on the extremely liberal end of the spectrum. Notice that I don’t agree with the unspoken corollary that so many attach to the adjective “extreme,” that to be extremely liberal (or, for that matter, extremely conservative) is intrinsically a bad thing … it just meant that her beliefs never struck me as moderate in nature. It thus doesn’t strike me as strange that an extreme conservative (Donohue) would have difficulties with the hiring of an extreme liberal (McEwan).

What strikes me as particularly troublesome on this matter is how this incident demonstrates the uncivil demeanor of this country and our relationships with our political opposites. And my definition of civility needs some clarification: I do not mean prudish stuffiness. I mean the treatment of another human being with simple, decent respect, even as you acknowledge with no rancor that your position differs significantly from theirs. One of the conservatives whom I intensely still respect, years after I met him, is a gentleman by the (misspelled, I believe) name of Dwayne Leitzel, who went to college with me. We barely agreed on a single issue. But the debates we had were fascinating, and the fact that he could argue for his position with great intelligence and support while never attacking me personally made me quite open to listening to what he had to say. Dwayne, if you ever have the chance to read these words, know that your simple civility made a lasting impact on my life, and still remains a stark contrast to my experience of your brethren to this day.

In the “West Wing” episode “The Leadership Breakfast,” chief of staff Leo McGarry recounts:

There was a freshman democrat who came to Congress 50 years ago. He turned to a senior Democrat and said, “Where are the Republicans? I want to meet the enemy. The senior Democrat said, “The Republicans aren’t the enemy. They’re the opposition … “

As Americans, we seemed to long ago stop demanding that sense of intrinsic civility from our politicians, perhaps because we realized we no longer practice it ourselves.

The Internet is a powerful tool, and it has wired us all up to each other in metamorphosing ways that I still believe our culture hasn’t fully assimilated yet, and perhaps won’t for generations to come.

The Internet allows that intrinsic incivility — that Hatred of the Other — to be both concatenated and ring-led with no lag time or delay. There’s no organizational time needed; all that’s needed is a charismatic figure and its followers. All that is needed is Bill O’Reilly and “The O’Reilly Factor”, all that is needed is Michelle Malkin and her readers, all that is needed is people who say, “Opponent A takes a tack that is 180° different than the position I do, and Charismatic Blogger/Media Figure A has attacked Opponent A with venomous invective. Off I must go to emulate this Charismatic Blogger/Media Figure whom I respect and agree with!” (Clarification: I don’t speak of charisma with a positive association here, but in the baser sense of having a quality about them that inspires followers.)

There seems to be no aforethought involved. Moreover, there seems to be no point at which this theoretical person stops and realizes that a monobloc culture in which everyone thinks with the same precise ideology they believe in would not only be undesirable, it would be horrific. And I’m not using the adjectives “undesirable” or “horrific” to describe a theoretical neocon monobloc culture, I’m speaking of it to describe the quality of any culture in which there’s no opposing side. To borrow again from that same episode, in perhaps one of the wisest moments of the series:

Leo: Alexander Hamilton didn’t think we should have political parties. Neither did John Adams. He thought political parties led to divisiveness.

Toby: They do. They should. We have honest disagreements. Arguments are good.

Leo: Only if they lead to statesmanship. Or it’s just theatre. And statesmanship is compromise.

I suppose were you to boil down this post to the very basic, it would be that line uttered by Rodney King: “Can’t we all just get along?” Or, to put it much more precisely (whoops, too late) …

The Internet has done such great harm to us as a political culture because, viewing it on the much larger scale of societal development (as opposed to human lives), we’ve suddenly become wired up to each other far more quickly than we ever were before.

Melissa McEwan has received the concentrated hatred (accompanied by the usual misspellings, miscapitalization, and disturbing misogyny) of seemingly hundreds of wingnuts all led by charismatic bloggers exhorting the hate. We’ve “blossomed” into a culture where our disagreements, even outside of the halls of government, have no degree of statesmanship and are entirely theater — but the quality of theater being displayed has become akin to that of a snuff film, in which the basest primal instincts are being routed and concentrated through the Internet more quickly and in greater mass than the U.S. Post or Ma Bell ever could have.

It’s not going to end. As a species, I don’t think we were sociologically equipped to be hooked up to each other’s beliefs and to handle the combined weight of Internet-scale movements and politically biased memes. I simply don’t believe that as a species we’re going to get an okay handle on this situation, wherein we’ll somehow, someday resort to a situation where we find an easy peace with each other. I think that unless somehow such vitriol and rage falls out of vogue, a possibility I find so small as to be nearly non-existent, we’re going to be culture-warring and meme-warring with each other until the sheer massive neglect of society’s normal business causes something catastrophic to grind us to a halt.

Here is where I delve into my own bit of what might be termed mudslinging: I think this is a specific result of the rise of neoconservatives to cultural and political power. Note that I don’t attribute this to conservatives or conservatism, but specifically to neoconservatives. I don’t believe that the neoconservative political or social culture is interested in conducting their affairs with civility or with any degree of compromise — and therein lies the problem, as it creates a culture of war. I may not have written about politics in quite a long time (and I note with surprise that this blog post has already grown to nearly three pages in Word), but during that interim, I’ve constantly linklogged to neoconservatives’ actions throughout the American political and social culture, and they are always extremist and seemingly operating under the slogan of “no quarter given.” And although I had hoped this extremism might die with the end of Bush’s Presidency, it seems as if moderates are willing to metamorphose into extremists if it gets them the power they seek (McCain) or that other extremists are ready to jump into the situation the moment a void forms (Romney).

It’s because of this that I lay little blame on extremism at the feet of the Democrats, if only because I think that if you are being attacked by an extremist who sees no value in compromise and will rest only with your defeat and humiliation, responding with moderation only gets you flattened. Yet liberals’ responses to extremism seem anemic at best, even after they were given power. This blogger critiqued Edwards’ response to the above situation quite well.

Well, I’ve blathered on enough over these past three pages, and I’m not sure I’m anywhere near a conclusion. I suppose, were I to try to sum up what I’ve written here …

I believe that the Internet has enabled us to, as a species, be exposed to far more of the existing population of the Earth than we ever have before in the past. I think that, as a result, we’re more susceptible to all the dangers inherent in that increased ability to communicate, including a greater country-wide susceptibility to charismatic figures espousing rhetoric appealing to the worst of us, and a higher exposure to exponentially massive campaigns of coordinated espoused belief that have the ability to assault us with an intensity that we as individuals couldn’t have been exposed to without the Internet. I believe that this sort of extremism, which seems especially inherent in the neoconservative politics which Bush empowered with his rise to the Presidency, is extremely damaging to us as a culture and as a country, and it gets in the way of the non-theatric statesmanship that is desperately needed by a country that is suffering in so very many ways.

To quote Sorkin again … “We’ve got serious problems, and we need serious people.” We don’t have a single serious person serving us in the government any longer, and we’re running out of them in the “civilian” landscape as well. Where the hell do we go from here?