Brain Destroyer - In Through the Looking Glass, Humpty Dumpty spoke with Alice:

"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean--neither more nor less."

"The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things."

"The questions is, "said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master--that's all."

This is exchange frames much of the left-right debate in this country.

In many circles, the left has long been "Master" when it comes to defining that most important of things - what a word means. He or she that controls what a word means, controls communication. When one controls communication, one controls society.

Columnist Mark Morford, in SFGate.com (think "online Village Voice, only with very untalented writers") attacks Charleton Heston and the NRA - and exposes how deeply the left is used to being "Master" of our communal language.

Oh - and in the bargain, he displays himself as a rather uninformed commentator:

[Heston] is 78 and fragile and suffering from symptoms of Alzheimer's and hasn't made a decent movie in decades, unless you count how he sadly made himself look quite the undereducated, largely unsympathetic, defensive fool in the Oscar-winning "Bowling for Columbine."

Morford's sympathies drive his conclusion, obviously - I thought the exchange between Moore and Heston made Moore look like a smug, uneducated cretin.

And now, Charlton Heston is stepping down as the High Lord Gunmaster Poobah (or whatever they called him)

"President?"

of the phallically righteous increasingly paranoid adorably manly National Rifle Association.

Now, attacking the rhetorical style of the likes of Mark Morford is rather like Daunte Culpepper connecting with Randy Moss against Ramsey Junior High's defensive secondary. But it's instructive, anyway: Phallic? Manly?

And the big daddy of them all, "Paranoid?"

We'll get back to this.

They are sighing in tribute. They are hugging each other and giving reassuring pats though not in an icky scary gay way.

Mr. Morford - if they were getting some tongue into it, would it have been more acceptable to you?

They are raising their rifles in salute.

And they are actually erecting, in front of the NRA's national headquarters in Washington, D.C., a 10-foot bronze statue of Heston, in character from a manly 1968 western flick no one has really ever seen called "Will Penny," in full bogus mythological cowboy gear, holding a handgun. Isn't that great?

Mr. Morford: I'm told that Prince Hamlet of Denmark may not have actually existed. Does that, in and of itself, render Shakespear's art moot?

Other nations erect statues of poets, artists, thinkers, revolutionaries. We erect statues of craggy actors holding a pistol. God bless America.

Other "Nations" may erect statues of whatever they want - but the NRA is not a nation. It is a private organization.

It's a thoroughly appropriate icon for the NRA, actually. A character that never really existed, a gun-totin' Wild West that never really happened, a studly kill-the-bad-guys posture that, well, the NRA pretty much invented and frantically clings to as its own raison d'etre.

The Hollywood version of the wild west indeed didn't exist in exactly the form shown in the movies. But the current leftist trope - that it was all fiction - is, anything, mnore ignorant. Cattle were driven, towns boomed, justice was sometimes rough, posses rode forth...

...and towns governed themselves, and order pretty much prevailed. Both extremes are wrong.

As is the frankly nutty assertion that the myth of the old west drives the NRA.

More:

Actors are, by definition, all about illusion, the propogation of manufactured myth, of collective delusion, as opposed to genuine human ideas and perspective. Voilè -- the perfect icon for America's gun culture.

"Perfect" indeed - if you suspend logic.

Heston's departure is a good time for reflection, truly. Arguably, the man has done more to promote the desperately macho causes of the NRA than any leader in the group's carefully racist, white-power history (as "Bowling..." so effortlessly describes).

"Bowling" describes it effortlessly because it makes it up, or strings together long-outdated out-of-context tropes into a conclusion that may as well be fiction.

Which is to say, because he is a reasonably articulate and well-known actor, he single-handedly did more to promote the NRA's trademark causes of fear and paranoia than any outspoken gun lover in 25 years. No wonder they are so proud.

"Paranoia" and "Fear" - there are those words again.

Ansme.com defines Paranoia: " 1. a psychological disorder characterized by delusions of persecution or grandeur".

So where's the paranoia? The NRA has fought - and, in a large measure, defeated - a legislative effort to functionally disarm Americans. That the effort existed is unquestionable - large (or at least well-funded) organizations like the National Coalition to Ban Handguns, The Fifty Thousand Mom March, the Violence Policy Center and the oft-renamed Brady Campaign dominated the media's attention span for decades (generally with fictitious information), and carried the day in legislatures nationwide from the sixties until the early nineties. Paranoia is delusion - was the gun control movement, or its intentions, unreal?

Because this is the great myth of the NRA. This is the true foundation. Despite the careful PR, the NRA is not much about the promotion of safe firearm use. It is not about enforcing the rules and sportsmanship of hunting, or about appreciating firearm artistry or improving your clay-pigeon target-practice technique. Maybe a little.

One peek into America's 1st Freedom: The Official Journal of the NRA reveals that the group is, more than anything else, all about paranoid defensiveness and the simple promotion of the right-wing brand of dread.

You know the one. That fear of the great ugly Other coming from somewhere "out there" -- someplace probably Muslim, or pagan, or inner city, or foreign or San Franciscan -- to steal your children and eat all your apple pie and take away your precious guns. Always, always to take away your guns. This is the Biggest Fear of All.

Morford makes the big leap; while showing no examples of racism or xenophobia, he charges the NRA and its official magazine of trafficking in it.

It doesn't exist.

Who is delusional? Who, indeed, is the paranoid?

Like pyromaniac children hording precious matches, the loss of unfettered gun-ownership rights ranks right up there with castration and the outlawing of beer in Worst Possible Evils for the NRA. The magazine is packed with lib-hating articles, attacking everyone from the progressive U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals to the entire country of Canada and its national gun registry.

And they do that because there are legitimate attacks to be made!

Or are columnists at "SFGate.com" the only ones allowed to do that?

Every single alarmist article delineates how "those damn anti-gun liberals" are skewing the statistics, lying and manipulating, trying to chip away at your God-given right to keep 157 sawed-off shotguns and a few submachine guns in your garage, for, you know, "hunting."

Again, all made up.

Morford must know that nobody in his audience is interested in digging beneath the surface.

Morford actually astounds with this next bit:

The NRA is, of course, wildly easy to hate. Easy to see the group as a cliched cadre of twitching socially inept boy-men with a seriously compensatory need to display their gun barrels. Problem is, such hyperzealous groups only feed on such sentiment -- it simply adds fuel to the cause.

And, moreover, the stereotype is largely wrong, and unfair. The NRA has some very smart, very passionate people who truly value their rights and their country. It's true. Let's admit it.

Whoah.

Never thought I'd see that.

However, he veers back to Wonderland with this next bit:

The tragedy, then, is how deeply this powerful group of rabidly passionate uber-Americans has bought into the lie, the myth, of what America really stands for, and has become a part of the tyranny of fear, a mouthpiece for that very divisiveness and paranoia and antagonism that keeps America volatile and childish and so bitterly derided the world over.

And here we get into the issue of the control of the language we all try to share in this country.

Morford is correct; the NRA (and CCRN, and even some members of the Minnesota DFL, for that matter) really defy the stereotypes when you dig beneath the surface.

And yet, there are those words, of whose definitions Morford is so cocksure: Is America volatile? Is America "childish"? If we're "derided the world over", by whom?

"Tyranny of fear"... of what?

In what way is the NRA's vigilance over the slippery slope of gun control "fear" and "paranoia", that NARAL's equally-zealous definition of any "erosion" in "abortion rights" is not?

It is a vision of America as this faux-virtuous, good-guy, white-hatted, monosyllabic brute, the well-armed hero enforcer of all that is righteous and pure and bullet ridden -- you know, just like the bogus and hollow Wild West of Heston's "Will Penny."

Again with the definitions.

Is our virtue "faux"? Is the cultural archetype of the white-hatted sheriff a bankrupt ideal?

Are the ideals and touchstones of the "fictional" western any less valid than the equally-fictional ideals of the samurai in Kabuki, or the tortured protagonists in Shakespeare, or the monochromatic archetypes of Greek theater?

Every society has its collective myth: Germany has "Volk". Greece has the Heroes of Olympus, France has the gallic heroes of the Carolingian era, and we have the "old west".

And tying whatever pros and cons attend our own nation's communal semi-myths to a legislative effort to protect a civil liberty that a well-heeled, well-connected part of the country doesn't value smacks...

...well...of delusions of persecution (that big baaad NRA!) and grandeur (of Morford's prowess as an amateur mind-reader).
posted by Mitch Berg 4/30/2003 02:05:16 PM