I miss focus, precision and clarity in political argument. I dislike smug hot air and gloating over trivial narratives. I hate a pumped up atmosphere of tribalism, which values strength of belief by exclusivity and belligerence alone.
Have you ever read Murrow's report of Buchenwald? Not a single bit of explicit raging against the Germans. No pejoratives, no hyperbolic condemnations, no bluster. All it contains is what he saw and felt. Yet his words damn the Germans indelibly.
He refuses to apologize if anyone is offended, but why would anyone be offended? Not because he did anything so easy as using a vicious word, but because he revealed a hideous truth to the world. The bare facts he related represent a greater condemnation than any editorial harrumphing on his part ever could. Read it if you haven't:
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/murrow.htmlAnd that's his report on -Nazis-, on genocide. I'm led to think of how Olbermann can get into a pious froth on marginal tweets from Sarah Palin. I just can't see that as worth the air time, but more importantly it is all out of proportion. I'm led to think of DU as well. If your dial has to go all the way up every time a Juan Williams comes along, how can you give proportional weight to a vast human tragedy? If you condemn Jon Stewart in the harshest terms possible, how do you proportionally dial up your condemnations for -truly evil people-?
Some here think the answer to bullies is to make our own bullies. That's nonsense. The way to stop a bully isn't to become a bully yourself, but to erode the bully's support. You do that by drawing a contrast. You do that by making the viciousness clear to people. You make the bully hideous in his cruelty. No epithets are necessary for this. In fact, you undermine the entire effort if you're addicted to engaging in viciousness and cruelty yourself. The fact that we are and will -always- be less vicious and cruel than the GOP is immaterial. The reasons for dismissing the worst bully will resemble those for dismissing the lesser, and your attacks will always be dismissed by the bully's followers on that basis. It doesn't matter if you're demonstrably less of an asshole, so long as you are an asshole there will be an excuse to ignore what you say.
Too many people have this bizarrely-weighted continuum of advocacy, that goes from a caricature of Booker T to a caricature of Malcolm X, and doesn't recognize anything in the middle whatever. As that idea goes, you are either a mealy-mouthed chump of equivocating weakness or an epithet-spewing tough who actually stands for something. It's absolute nonsense.
You want some examples of how to treat bullies? The first is from a book anyone advocating for social change ought to read but doesn't:
During this period I had about despaired of the power of love in solving social problems. Perhaps my faith in love was temporarily shaken by the philosophy of Nietzsche...Nietzsche’s glorification of power—in his theory all life expressed the will to power—was an outgrowth of his contempt for ordinary morals. He attacked the whole of the Hebraic-Christian morality—with its virtues of piety and humility, its other-worldliness and its attitude toward suffering—as the glorification of weakness, as making virtues out of necessity and impotence. He looked to the development of a superman who would surpass man as man surpassed the ape.
...
Prior to reading Gandhi, I had about concluded that the ethics of Jesus were only effective in individual relationship. The “turn the other cheek” philosophy and the “love your enemies” philosophy were only valid, I felt, when individuals were in conflict with other individuals; when racial groups and nations were in conflict a more realistic approach seemed necessary. But after reading Gandhi, I saw how utterly mistaken I was.
Gandhi was probably the first person in history to lift the love ethic of Jesus above mere interaction between individuals to a powerful and effective social force on a large scale. Love for Gandhi was a potent instrument for social and collective transformation. It was in this Gandhian emphasis on love and non-violence that I discovered the method for social reform that I had been seeking…I came to feel that this was the only morally and practically sound method open to oppressed people in their struggle for freedom.
The next is probably well-known to you, but bears repeating, and comes from a conservative:
Senator, you won't need anything in the record when I finish telling you this. Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty, or your recklessness.
...
Little did I dream you could be so reckless and so cruel as to do an injury to that lad. It is, I regret to say, equally true that I fear he shall always bear a scar needlessly inflicted by you. If it were in my power to forgive you for your reckless cruelty, I would do so. I like to think I'm a gentle man, but your forgiveness will have to come from someone other than me.
These guys should have gotten creamed, with their bankrupt slave morality. They should have been driven down to their opponents' level if they wanted to fight. But they didn't, and weren't. They shouldn't have inspired anyone. They shouldn't have been able to hold strongly to their beliefs. But they did, and were.
They didn't buy into the arms race of nastiness, but they still exposed the vicious cruelty and brainless hate of the bullies, and, thereafter, heretofore supporters abandoned those bullies in droves.
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