Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Sunday, November 07, 2010

Stupidity

It is fairly stunning to watch the luminaries of the GOP on the tee vee for the Sunday shows in the aftermath of their great resurgence to power.

It's not just that I disagree with their assessment of events and disapprove of their ideals, I just find it literally painful to witness their dim-wittedness. The used-car salesman pitches, the irrepressible gloating upturn of the lip, the unbelievably lame analogies. These Republicans are all just, frankly, slow moving vehicles, brutal beings. The dying light of the world is so much worse when one attends the actual lip smacking mastication of the imbeciles feasting on the light.

Since Nixon there have been few (but there have been a few) Republicans who weren't just scoundrels, but at least some of them were brighter than a bag of hair. Sometimes they had a real intellectual flair in their opportunistic mobilization of the worst impulses of their fellows, the hatefulness of racism, the lazy greed of the something for nothing crowd, the fearful belligerence of the warmongers and so on.

But it's been a while since the GOP has provided progressives with worthy opponents, and their victories are demoralizing not just because they are demonstrably wrongheaded and yield objectively ruinous outcomes but because they result from what seems an ever-widening ever-deepening suffusion of the republic with idiocy.

I mean, Michelle Bachmann is clearly completely out to lunch, and is now joined by a whole lamentable Tea Party desk set of braying loons. These are the ones so ridiculous they outpace every parody. One suspects civilization in its minimal construal is something like an organized effort to protect majorities from precisely this sort of deranged person, and the less one says the better about a civilization that directs its spotlight preferentially to such creatures, that offers them the reins to the sledge in an ice storm. I mean, what can one say? One is oneself imbecilized in exposing imbecility beyond a certain point.

But then the grisly eminences grises of the Party leadership, the endless extruded white guys mouldering like piles of mashed potatoes under the studio lights on the Sunday shows today, folks like Cantor, McConnell, Boehner, and so on are also so, so very painfully dim. The way they wear their guile on their sleeves, the way they stumble and slur their lines.

Even Cheney, who is regularly figured as some kind of robed satanic Mad Scientist or Pope-Emperor, and whose evil, sure, is beyond doubt, had and has awfully clumsy moves when it comes to it, from his high-profile secret meetings to his disposals of incriminating evidence in serial office fires. Like so many gloominaries of the GOP he certainly was a brazen bully, but it's not like he ever exhibited anything in the way of thoughtfulness or style (let alone even a remedial dress sense).

And, saints and ministers preserve us, these self-appointed "intellectuals" of the GOP, not one of whom have risen above the wit and wisdom of the truly flabbergastingly execrable Ayn Rand! Saucer-eyed shrivel-dicked simpletons like Paul Ryan and now Rand Paul (actually named for La Rand), earnest Eddie Haskels and dullards every one, mistaking unearned privileges for ruggedly individual accomplishments, mistaking the stubborn shoehorning of complexities into inapt inadequate categories for genius insights, mistaking unimaginative parochialism for priestly elect knowledge.

Hell, these days people refer to Karl Rove of all people as some GOP sooper-"brain" when his whole schtick has always simply been his willingness to lie and cheat without any care for his reputation for anything but ruthlessness. You know, while Machiavelli did indeed grant a place for ruthlessness in politics there actually was more to the Machiavellian program -- even if it is outsourced to Mayberry -- than just a pack of lies backed by a bulldozer.

John Stuart Mill famously quipped that "[a]lthough it is not true that all conservatives are stupid people, it is true that most stupid people are conservative." But I think we have arrived at a moment in the history of Republicanism in which Mill's chestnut no longer speaks to the spirit of organized American conservatism. At this point, self-identified conservatives really are all stupid people, every one. The Republican party is now a formation that selects for stupidity. Those who are insufficiently stupid are jettisoned, pilloried for the least exhibition of tendencies to reflection or sensitivity or concerns for consistency at the expense of any fleeting expedient opportunity, come what may.

I am happy to grant that plenty of unintelligent people are only too happy to identify as progressives -- especially progressivism in its least demanding most complacent new agey broad brushstrokes race to the middle wherever that happens to be guises -- and that there are plenty of temperamentally conservative people among the Democrats as well.

But there is nothing left of Republicanism but the stupid. Palin is the empty face of the stupid stomping over the earth, but so too are these mainstream muckety-mucks flapping their jaws for the Networks today. It is impossible to be a Republican now, in this moment, and not be stupid -- and also very likely a scoundrel, too.

We confront real shared problems the stupid is unequal to. We are in real trouble.

1 comment:

jimf said...

> Michelle Bachmann is clearly completely out to lunch,
> and is now joined by a whole lamentable Tea Party desk
> set of braying loons. These are the ones so ridiculous
> they outpace every parody. One suspects civilization
> in its minimal construal is something like an organized
> effort to protect majorities from precisely this sort
> of deranged person. . .
>
> We confront real shared problems the stupid is unequal
> to. We are in real trouble.

--------------------
Bill Moyers. . . (. . . a lifetime Southern Baptist himself). . .
is using his considerable media skills to alert his fellow
Americans that while we were sleeping, [Christian] fundamentalists
have taken power over the executive, legislative, and judicial
branches of our government. While accepting an award
from the Harvard Medical School [in 2005], Moyers warns
us of the tragic consequences of our apathy.

"One of the biggest changes in politics in my lifetime
is that the delusional is no longer marginal. It has
come in from the fringe, to sit in the seat of power in
the Oval Office and in Congress. For the first time in our
history, ideology and theology hold a monopoly of power
in Washington. Theology asserts propositions that
cannot be proven true; ideologues hold stoutly to a
worldview despite being contradicted by what is generally
accepted as reality. When ideology and theology couple,
their offspring are not always bad but they are always
blind. And there is the danger: voters and politicians
alike, oblivious to the facts."

-- Mel White, _Religion Gone Bad_

--------------------

Gimme that old-time religion. It's good enough for me.