Psst... It's All An Act

To Sarah Palin's detractors, she's a moron. And I suspect they mean that in its long-lost "technical" sense of someone with an IQ significantly below the norm. Over on Slate, a lively "debate" (so THAT'S what they're calling them these days) is raging over whether or not Sarah Palin actually is Stupid, or if her critics just don't like her because they're afraid that she'll lead a movement to kick their butts. This was sparked by Jacob Weisberg logrolling for his new book Palinisms: The Accidental Wit & Wisdom of Sarah Palin in an article entitled: A Grand Unified Theory of Palinisms and subtitled: "Why Sarah Palin says all those stupid and ridiculous things." (I see they went for the low-key approach.)

As I said in the comments section for the piece (pretty much word-for-word, except for the end): I've never been a fan of Sarah Palin, mainly because I'm not a fan of Populism (any political movement that's predicated on Us vs. Them is Bad News from the outset, and I make sure to stay FAR away). But I've also never considered her as stupid as her public persona suggests to her critics. Like President George W. Bush before her, she's playing a role for the benefit of a particular audience, and (as Hollywood types would likely put it) I'm not in the target demographic.

There seems to be built into the fabric of America a certain level of distrust for royalty and aristocracy - all that's ever really changed are the definitions of royal and aristocratic. For the left, it's the privileged wealthy - those people who were born into (or hatefully expropriated from the desperate masses) scads of money and due to the deference that money (or at least a willingness to share it) tends to create, seem to live under a different (and easier) set of rules than the rest of us. For the right, it's the "elite," an amorphous collection of liberal thinkers who they perceive as being hell-bent on making the lives of average people difficult in the name of whatever greener, social justice-ier or spread the wealthier-than-thou cause they've come up with this week, and are willing to use jargon and technobabble to obscure blatant falsehoods.

Not being idiots, politicians pander to their potential constituencies along these lines - they can't afford not to. You'd think that John Edwards was born in a workshop floor somewhere, there way he continuously invoked his working-class parents. By the same token, President Bush played up his "folksiness" in a way that made one question the competence of his teachers.

The message is always the same: "Like/Respect/Vote For me... I'm the exact opposite of those people whom you (and by extension, I) think have screwed up the entire nation, and when push comes to shove, I will lead you in the glorious War Against the Aristocracy, where we'll fix everything (and if there's any pain to come of it, They will be the ones to suffer it)." Like I said, I'm not in the target demographic for this message, from either side. But I still appreciate the actor's craft that goes into it.

But when I say this, I realize that I'm also saying that even a politician who speaks like an imbecile can convince large sections of the public that they should be in rather powerful public office. But isn't that the power of saying what people want to hear and presenting oneself as the person that people want one to be? It's difficult to acknowledge that we're susceptible to trickery. The desire to want to go back and "fact-check" (or sense-check, for that matter) things that resonate with us requires an understanding that we can resonate with falsehood, and few of us revel or find comfort in self-doubt.

For me, the answers to America's problems are going to lie in a certain amount of shared sacrifice (and likely hardship). Given this, I know that I have to be careful of anyone who comes by preaching that, and be ready to critically evaluate what's being said, rather than taking it at face value, simply because I already believe it to be true. It could all be an act, and the only way to guard against it, is to realize that I can be fooled, too.

Oh... NOW I Get It...

One of the tricky things about being a layperson when it comes to a number of politically significant topics is that the people in the know often talk about them in ways that seem deliberately designed to prevent laypeople from understanding and evaluating them.

The detonation of the American financial system has heightened a number of people's interest in economics, myself included, and I've been spending some time doing a little reading here and there, attempting to get a handle on the inner workings of money and the exchange of goods and services. (Whee!) I'd been hoping to avoid some of the more ideological aspects of the discussion, but with Democrats and Republicans having staked out different people's theories to follow, that's harder than it should be, mainly because the people who talk about these theories often have an ideological bent of their own.

The most recent topic that I've been trying to understand is Supply Side Economics, which is often boiled down to the saying: "Supply creates its own demand." Short, simple, sweet and nowhere near accurate - unless you're willing to monkey somewhat with the definition of "demand." After beating my head against a wall for a while, I finally had something of a Eureka moment; and I think that with it came a semi-clear understanding of the concept, why it was so attractive to the Reagan Administration and why, ultimately, "Reaganomics" didn't work (and why George H. W. Bush was dead on when he termed it "Voodoo Economics"). Sorting out enough information to really make sense of it from all of the chaff is a somewhat more difficult task than it needs to be, because so many people who talk about such topics do so with a particular purpose in mind (to either support or debunk the theory) thus requiring that information and ideology be separated out. If you don't realize that, you wind up with a skewed understanding of the topic, which makes it difficult to make informed decisions.

Which I guess is sometimes the point.

My Content! Mine!

So I decided, once again, to click on the Next Blog>> link, to see what kind of company Nobody in Particular is keeping these days. It's quickly becoming something of a guilty pleasure of mine, randomly wandering through the pages that Google, in its rather unfathomable wisdom, decides that I, and perhaps you, should want to read, given what I've written here.

This time out, it was a short trip. The first blog that I came across was about advertising law: Rebecca Tushnet's 43(B)log False advertising and more. It's another one of those things that makes perfect sense (After all, there's at least one weblog for everything under the sun, right?), but wouldn't have occurred to me. From there, I found myself at Caravan Hound, a dog weblog. Once again, file under Learn Something New Every Day, since I'd never encountered the Caravan Hound breed before. But I figured that things had changed in the neighborhood - I wasn't wandering through random political weblogs, sprinkled throughout the English-speaking world. But I'm not really an animal person, so I clicked the "Next Blog" link again, to see where it would land me. And I found myself at Wiping the Crazy Off My Face which is, I gather, basically an online diary. My journey ended here, because Wiping the Crazy Off My Face doesn't display the "Next Blog" link.

But I was kind of surprised - three blogs, and little, if any connection to one another. Until I noticed the little graphic at the end of each WtCOMF post that read: "Those who STEAL my work shall suffer my PUBLIC WRATH." I stepped back, and found that repeated over and over on Caravan Hound was the warning: "All images here come under COPYRIGHT laws. Do not copy." And the most recent post on Rebecca Tushnet's 43(B)log? Yep. It dealt with Copyright.

Which has me wondering if Nobody in Particular has been suing people behind my back.

Executive Wisdom

President George W. Bush was often characterized anywhere from no smarter than the average bear to a complete idiot, depending on which side of the political spectrum someone happened to be on. For his supporters, he wasn't some sort of eggheaded brainiac, out of touch with the "average Joe six-pack." For his detractors, he was barely a step up from a drooling moron. As far as I'm concerned, both of these pictures are wrong. Average Joes don't manage to be President of the United States of America, and I'll believe an idiot, no matter how well guided and coached, can pull it off only when I see President-Elect Alvin Greene take the oath of office.

But because no-one seemed to respect the former President's intellect, it didn't attract much of the right kind of notice when he actually made a very good point. To wit:

"I don't think you can win [the War on Terror]. But I think you can create conditions so that those who use terror as a tool are less acceptable in parts of the world."
President George W. Bush. (NBC's "Today" show, 30 August, 2004.)

I bring up this particular piece of genuine Presidential wisdom because we tend to think that somehow we can alter the laws of the Universe when it suits us.

One of the big stories in the news recently is yet another workplace shooting. Now, as pretty much every time there's a workplace shooting, there is an outcry to ban the personal ownership of firearms. And that what brings me to the President Bush quote. To re-cycle his logic, the "War on Violence" is more or less unwinnable. But creating a society where the use of violence as a tool strikes me a being an achievable goal.

Which makes it kind of a shame that the President never really got any traction with that quote - Democrats immediately accused him of being "defeatist." Because even if you do manage to somehow ban people from having weapons, they will still find ways to hurt each other. (And often with weapons - no ban yet has ever been able to simply banish an item from existence. And if you think that a ban will completely halt the illegal trade in guns in the United States, I'll bet you 20 pounds of cocaine that you're wrong...) So it seems to me that making violence less socially acceptable is really the way to go. Easy? No. But I think that it will pay off, and to a much greater extent than the idea that you can simply outlaw the tools that people use to hurt one another, and see real results.

Black And White

One of the strangely enduring facets of the black community in the United States is an endless argument over who is more racist - white liberals or white conservatives.

It's a heated topic, mainly because black people tend to be very keen on casting those among themselves that they don't like as "confused." Now, this term has a few different meanings. The important thing is that none of them are compliments. For this particular dispute, the label "confused" is simply a shorthand way of saying "pawn of racist white folks." This topic occurs to me because of David Weigel's piece on Slate, which reminded me of many fruitless debates. Not only could no-one ever win them, but they proved impossible to diffuse. Contrary to what you might expect, they didn't cause much in the way of hard feelings, given the level of animosity between the sides to begin with, making them dislike each other any more would have been a rare feat.

What's odd is the inability to realize that no matter which side of the debate one might argue, it's pretty much the same argument - white people are the source of the black community's problems. Either it's conservative whites who are caricatured as longing for the days of Jim Crow, when they ruled the roost and had dibs on the front of the bus, or it's liberal whites, parodied as the latest group to pick up the White Man's Burden of looking out for poor, stupid Negroes (and, while they're at it, making sure that said Negroes are always, poor, stupid and reliably Democratic voters). In either case, the solution is for Black America to kick these guys to the curb, and vote with the other guys - who have only their best interests at heart, and don't see skin color. I think you can see now why this never goes away.

And it's unlikely to, unless and until there is a general sentiment of "we don't need these guys - at least not any more than they need us." Now, I don't know that this will ever come to pass. For the time being, too much of what it means to be Black in America is linked to the nature of the relationship with White America. Which simply fuels the debate over which part of white America can be trusted.