Hysteria becoming the norm?

The Harris Poll came out with a survey revealing the hysteria bubbling out there among the masses, an hysteria no doubt resulting from a combination of an economic crisis, seemingly unending war, and the presence of a black man in the White House. The results are rather stunning. 4 of 10 Americans think President Obama's a socialist? Nearly a third still think he's a Muslim? Between 1 and 2 of every ten Americans think he's the Anti-Christ? It's not surprising that the lower one's education, the more likely one is to agree with these statements, but the data also show that ideology and party identification matter much more than level of education for most of the statements. Fear-driven belief can trump any amount of education.

Question	Total	High School or less	Conser-vatives	Repub-licans
He is a socialist	40	45	67	67
He wants to take away  Americans' right to own guns	38	45	63	61
He is a Muslim	32	43	51	57
He wants to turn over the  sovereignty of the United States  to a one world government	29	37	52	51
He has done many things that  are unconstitutional	29	35	53	55
He resents America's heritage	27	31	49	47
He does what Wall Street and  the bankers tell him to do	27	35	38	40
He was not born in the United  States and so is not eligible to  be president	25	32	41	45
He is a domestic enemy that the  U.S. Constitutions speaks of	25	32	45	45
He is a racist	23	28	42	42
He is anti-American	23	27	43	41
He wants to use an economic  collapse or terrorist attack as an  excuse to take dictatorial  powers	23	28	40	41
He is doing many of the things  that Hitler did	20	24	36	38
He may be the Anti-Christ	14	18	24	24
He wants the terrorists to win	13	16	23	22

Here's my two cents on each of the statements--

He is a socialist: Socialism is a political-economic system in which the state owns the means of production. We're nowhere close to that, but the US, like all countries, does have a government that intervenes in numerous areas of the economy. If President Obama is a socialist, then so is any homeowner writing off mortgage interest when they do their taxes, any college student getting Pell Grants or federally subsidized loans, any veteran getting GI benefits, any driver racing along an interstate highway, any one using a public library or school, and so on, and so on. If Obama is a socialist, we're all socialists.

He wants to take away Americans' right to own guns: Yes, he's okay with government restricting the use of handguns. Fine with me. But voiding the entire right? Give me a break.

He is a Muslim: For those who don't want to use the N word, you just call him this.

He wants to turn over the sovereignty of the United States to a one world government: Conspiracy theorists have been dreaming up some variation of this since anti-Catholics worried that all those Irish immigrants in the 1840s-50s meant an impending Vatican takeover of the US. We see this fear of losing sovereignty in Cold War sci-fi film (The Blob, Invasion of the Body Snatchers) and TV (the Borg in Star Trek). It's our individualism writ large, and run amok.

He has done many things that are unconstitutional: In his continuation of certain Bush-Cheney era War on Terror measures, I'd have to agree.

He resents America's heritage: He may very well resent particular aspects of that heritage, like slavery, Jim Crow, nativist bigotry, etc. Understandable.

He does what Wall Street and the bankers tell him to do: Like Bush, Sr. during the Savings and Loan bailout--the Bush and then the Obama administration worried more about socializing the liability banks amassed then rescuing individuals who lost their pensions or their homes. This is just a fact of political life: the financial class has a great deal of power to shape banking and monetary policies.

He was not born in the United States and so is not eligible to be president: Again, this is just another way not to use the N word.

He is a domestic enemy that the U.S. Constitutions speaks of: Ditto.

He is a racist: A favorite rhetorical ploy of a socially privileged group losing the entitlements it unconsciously enjoyed due to its race, sex, sexual preference, religion, etc. So threatened whites accuse blacks of racism, men declare feminists are engaged in a 'war on boys,' straight people argue that equal rights for gays are special or extra rights, Christians complain about not being able to dominate the public square

He is anti-American: this presumes some widely agreed upon definition of American, and it's typically the accusation of those who can't bear to live in a pluralist world.

He wants to use an economic collapse or terrorist attack as an excuse to take dictatorial powers: more conspiracy theory claptrap

He is doing many of the things that Hitler did: the lazy labeling tactic too many of us resort to dismiss an argument, but an effective tactic because way too many don't trouble themselves to read history.

He may be the Anti-Christ: Oh, the power of myth. An Anglo-Irish minister, John Nelson Darby, invents this eschatological framework, including the notion of rapture, in the 1830s, spreads it in the US, and it takes hold of the American imagination. We're all so desperate for meaning and direction, and Darby's fanciful revision of the Bible gave so many just that. And still does. To our detriment.

He wants the terrorists to win: this is just a variation of conspiracy theory, one encouraged by Cheney and his crowd who argue in effect that we need to transform our government into a non-democratic garrison state in order to win this so-called war on terror. And if you disagree with them, you must be on side of the enemy. A variation of the intolerant 'love it or leave it' argument.

Cockroach to Beck: You're no Thomas Paine

A friend gave me Glenn Beck’s Common Sense: The Case Against an Out-of-Control Government, Inspired by Thomas Paine. It’s interesting to read a political tract in which I am such an awful or scary guy. I’m a government employee, an academic, and worse, a political scientist, and I’ve been in the company of progressives. At various points, Beck refers to these kind of people as “cockroaches,” “enemies at the gates,” and “deadly masters.”

I won’t pretend to speak for all ‘deadly enemy cockroaches’ across the land, but here’s how one of them responds to Beck’s book.

As the subtitle informs us, Glenn says the book is inspired by Thomas Paine, and it includes Paine’s 1776 Common Sense. Beck does readers a service by including it—perhaps it will inspire more folks to read him (it is, however, widely available for free on various websites). I wonder, though, how many of his readers will actually read the Paine portion. Even if they do, they’ll find precious little to connect Beck’s text with Paine, beyond the phrase “common sense,” which Beck repeats, as if saying it lots of times will make it so. I think of common sense as referring to things like ‘Don’t pick up a hot cast iron pan with your bare hand,’ or ‘look both ways before crossing a street,’ or ‘don’t expect everything to end hunky dory if you sleep with your best friend’s girl- or boyfriend.' No, for Beck, his opinion is common sense.

And he’s not just delivering common sense. He’s the mouthpiece of God:

America has let thieves into her home and that nagging in your gut is a final warning that our country is about to be stolen. Our Founding Fathers understood that our rights and liberties are gifts from God. They also understood that WE are an intuitive people. If all that is true, then it only makes sense that He would alert us to our impending loss.

And now He is—shame on us for ignoring Him for so long.

The 'God-talk' is curious, for Paine was hostile to the Christian religion (see Paine's Age of Reason). But such selectivity is not surprising, and the passage above is pretty representative of what we get in the rest of the book. Drumbeats of fear. Pronouncements on US history of dubious veracity. Lots of caps because that’s what Talk TV and Radio hosts think wins arguments: YELLING. A jumble of different ideas thrown together in a single paragraph.

Amid the clichés, name-calling (“border-line sociopaths), the histrionics (“WE ARE NOT SHEEP”), the hyperbole (“The chains of economic slavery. . .are about to snap shut around the necks of our children. . .”), we get the standard conservative critique that I’ve been hearing since I started paying attention to politics in the mid-1970s: America is going to hell; we need to revive an idealized Leave it to Beaver American past; schools no longer teach “real history” and are instead brainwashing our kids; distrust “them,” you know, those “experts,” and get big government off our backs, out of our pockets, and away from our guns.

Along with this we have a walloping sense of marginalization: “The fastest way to be branded a danger, a militia member, or just plain crazy is to quote the words of our Founding Fathers.” That is so absurd that I can only guess that Beck misunderstands the criticism he’s faced. It’s not the material he uses. It’s how he uses it, and his delivery.

Take Thomas Paine. The Paine section includes an Introduction and four essays that give us arguments against monarchy and for a war for independence. Beck could have drawn analogies, drawing parallels between Paine’s indictment of monarchical rule and the increasing concentration of authority in the US executive branch. He could have mused over connections between his own call for a non-violent revolution and Paine’s efforts to mobilize support for the war for independence. And he could have adopted Paine’s tone. Here’s Paine’s opening passage from Common Sense:

In the following sheets, the author hath studiously avoided every thing which is personal among ourselves. Compliments as well as censure to individuals make no part thereof. The wise and the worthy need not the triumph of a pamphlet; and those whose sentiments are injudicious or unfriendly, will cease of themselves, unless too much pains are bestowed upon their conversion.

Beck, instead, gives us sophomoric wit:

Politicians, like cockroaches, are not stupid creatures. Both have an uncanny ability to survive, consume all things living or dead, and can apparently live up to one month without their heads—though I would argue that politicians can survive much longer than that.

Beck also gives us a big dose of conspiracy theory. Beginning with Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, progressives, the new bogeymen, have been working patiently, cleverly, evilly, to create a fascist, socialist, or communist regime (the terms are interchangeable in Beck’s intellectual world). Beck says it’s not a conspiracy theory, but to borrow from another famous conspiracy theorist—‘If it walks like a duck. . .

That said, I can understand Beck’s conspiricist bent and his fear, even if I dislike his style and disagree with starting assumptions and his conclusions. In Real Enemies, historian Katheryn Olmsed argues that Americans are prone to developing conspiracy theories in part because the US government indeed has engaged in conspiracies. As the scope and size of government began to grow during and after WW I,

It gained the power to conspire agains its citizens, and and it soon began exercising that power. By the height of the cold war, government agents had consorted with mobsters to kill a foreign leader [Castro], dropped hallucinogenic drugs into the drinks of unsuspecting Americans in random bars [MKULTRA], and considered launching fake terrorist attacks on Americans in the United States.

As well, the government handed Americans conspiracy theories that they were to believe in, from a Japanese Fifth Column during WW II or, soon after, a State Department completely infiltrated by communists, on to the Al Qaeda-Saddam Hussein connection that the Bush-Cheney administration sold to the public.

With revelations of real government conspiracies, and with the US government trying to promote particular conspiracy narratives, and then spying on and harassing dissenters, you get an environment rich with conspiratorial possibilities. For example, during the Iran-Contra affair, the CIA turned a blind eye to Contra drug-runners selling crack in LA. While Olmstead thinks it’s preposterous that this was part of a government campaign to destroy the African-American population, it certainly makes more understandable why people might believe in such a conspiracy.

Finally, I can also understand Beck’s anti-intellectualism. We academics, for example, can be tremendous snobs, and much of our writing is inaccessible to the lay public (much of it is even inaccessible to me!). Still, his knee-jerk rejection of “experts” is also an awfully convenient way to protect his view of the world, and his arguments, from any evidence or reasoning that might contradict his own.

Tempest in a Tebow

Focus on the Family has bought ad time during the Super Bowl in which Heisman Trophy winner Tim Tebow and his mother deliver an anti-abortion testimonial. It’s big news because the Super Bowl has been typically an arena for more or less clever advertising for things like sugar, alcohol, or athletic gear, but not advocacy. Unsurprisingly, pro-choice groups like NOW and others are upset, urging CBS to pull the ad, apparently on the dubious grounds that the Super Bowl is an inappropriate venue for such a message. As if pro-choicers are all avid fans of a sport that is a patriarchal rite of passage for many boys. As if there is some sort of pristine form of the Super Bowl viewing experience that should not be messed with.

Silly, and these groups only play into the narrative that Focus on the Family and other conservative evangelicals have worked hard to promote: that they are marginalized. Meanwhile, Focus folks are happy with all the buzz the opposition has generated and attribute it all to the Lord. God works in mysterious ways, apparently creating a recession so that CBS would be desperate for ad revenue (though not so desperate that it would run an ad for a gay dating service, Mancrunch).

I gather the premise of the Tebow ad is 'What if the mother had allowed illness to convince her to have an abortion' (mind you, the illegality of abortion in the Philippines, where she was at the time, had nothing to do with this decision)? What if? Imagine if she had gone through with the abortion, and then twenty years later Gators fans are, what, scratching their heads, thinking 'we're missing somebody; there should be Bible-toting Heisman trophy-winner here?' Absurd. There are plausible arguments against abortion rights, but 20-20 hindsight isn't one of them (Richard Dawkins makes a more thorough indictment of this logic here).

Some argue that it's refreshing to have a nationally-known athlete featured who can put his faith before self-gratification, e.g., 'saving himself for marriage' rather than killing dogs or shooting himself in the leg, who wears Bible verses rather than shill for some corporation. I don't know, to me it's hardly heroic to resist sexual desire and wear Bible verse references as if they were talismans--not too different from the Trijicon company inscribing Bible verses on rifle sights sold to the US military, though in the former case, it does no harm; in the latter, it's a big PR disaster for US efforts to convince the Muslim world that it's not on a Christian crusade (the firm has recently agreed to stop the practice).

While I think a debate over the Focus ad isn't merited, it is part of a larger, intriguing relationship between athletics, religion, and politics. Football has been a conduit to politics for some Christian conservative males, and I wonder if that's what is in store for the young Tebow.

Upset People Produce Brown Upset

Politico.com headlines it's announcement of the Brown win in Massachusetts special election"Forces of change." Seems to me that backers of Brown voted for the status quo--no change in healthcare. And given that Senate procedures now make supermajorities required to get anything done, Massachusetts voters have now made the representation of the majority will moot, along with adding another voice to Congress that will spout the patriotic cant that torture is not torture when Americans do it, the urban legend that global warming is a hoax, and the nativist rhetoric criminalizing low-paid immigrant workers. Imhofe will have a friend.

But, that's what Madison and Hamilton and other founding fathers bequeathed us. A political structure designed to thwart majority will and allow only incremental change--except, curiously, in the area of foreign policy, where our government has engaged in radical imperial ventures, for which our elected representatives have tolerated a drastic expansion of executive powers. And the majority has gone along with those ventures, at least until too many dead start coming home. I wish Madison could see us now; I wonder what he'd say?

Another thing. Check out the sign in the picture: "It's our turn for a change." "Our turn?" Just one year under a Democratic President and Congress and Republican and independent voters act as if they've been marginalized for decades? Since 1980, the first time I was able to cast a vote for president, I've lived under 20 years of GOP presidents (Reagan, Bush Sr., Bush Jr.) and 9 under a centrist Democrat (Clinton) and the current (pragmatic?) Democrat. The GOP either had parity with the Dems or the majority in the Senate from 1999-2008 and in the House the GOP had the majority from 1995-2006. I know, it's the reeling economy that's given voters the jitters about the party in power, and I agree that there are lot of valid concerns about health care, environmental, and immigration reform, but, please, opponents of Obama, stop acting as if you're long-suffering victims of liberal Democratic domination.

Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog.

Blog Song for the Moment

Neil Patrick Harris and Felicia Day, "My Eyes," Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along-Blog (2008).

I give Dr. Horrible five out of five stars. For those not in the know, the story is about Dr. Horrible's (Neal Patrick Harris) efforts to get a membership in the Evil League of Evil (ELE), but it's complicated by his love for the sweet Penny (Felicia Day), who has fallen for Horrible's nemesis, Captain Hammer (Nathan Fillion). I can't think of a another movie offhand that delivered a tragedy with such comic flair (If Tim Burton's Batman Returns had been a musical, and had a few more daylight scenes, it might have come close).

On the face of it, it's an exercise in cynicism. The hero, Hammer, is really the awful guy, and the villain is the good guy. The commentaries in the special features are long, knowing winks. It's all just a joke, especially for sophisticates in the film and www worlds. But it escapes pure cynicism because the creators and actors clearly loved their characters, the story, the music, the very act of putting on this act.

So if you do watch the DVD, don't forget the special features, which are as clever and hilarious as the show. Those applications sent in by Dr. Horrible fans to be in the ELE warmed my heart--it's good to know there's so many people out there who revel in intelligent silliness.

You can watch Dr. Horrible online here.