"Chilling Effects" - While driving

"Chilling Effects" - While driving to pick up my son yesterday, I listened to nattering MSNBC nabob Jill Nelson on the Michael Medved Show. Nelson had just written an article, "A mean-spirited America" in which she claimed that she was more afraid of our government than of any foreign terrorist.

The interview was painful, of course. Nelson is a "Journalist" who never learned to substantiate her story, and Medved tore her apart for it. Her article lapses frequently into the type of paranoia that seems, in a backhanded way, to justify her premise.

It was almost more than I could handle to stay on the road, rather than to find some gas station and call Medved, when Nelson said things like:

These days, a sense of apprehension and foreboding lurks in the back of my head and the pit of my stomach. It’s a gut-wrenching reminder that something very bad has happened and is about to happen anew. It is an anticipation of the next insult and injury in an America that has been defined under the Bush administration by a profound meanness of spirit.

I wanted, badly, to pull over and call, and ask the following:

Mizz Nelson? You do realize that you sound exactly like the Apocalyptic Libertarians I used to know back when I was...well, an Apocalyptic Libertarian, back during the Clinton Adminstration, right? One of those people for whom the sky is always falling - because you can always see bits of it up above you? For whom every piece of evidence proves the premise, but then all lack of evidence also proves the premise? You do know this, right?

I didn't, but and I doubt it'd have done any good.

The piece is so invincible in its paranoia that fisking its nearly-invincible ignorance is probably like cleaning the living room while the kitchen and basement are on fire.

For example, Nelson says in one printed breath:

...to question this war and its aftermath is characterized as at worst treason and at best anti-American cynicism. And woe unto those who criticize Halliburton, Kellogg Brown & Root and the rest of the corporate sponsors of the Bush administration as they line up at the trough of government contracts to rebuild Iraq and control its oil.

However, she doesn't say what sort of "woe" betides those questioners.

Nor could Michael Medved get that answer from her. Oh, there was bleating about "chilling effects"; Nelson has supposedly "heard from many colleagues" who had supposedly "become reticent about criticizing the government". When presented with the sheer prevalence of the criticism before the war, and especially in the major media in the days before the final rush to Baghdad when things were looking dicey, Nelson said, in effect, "Er, that chilled things, too..".

She goes through several paragraphs of half-witted economic ignorance before she concludes the article:

Meanwhile, here in our great democracy, Americans go along with the program or remain silent, too afraid of the Muslim bogeymen thousands of miles away to recognize the Christian ones in our midst. Fearful that we will be verbally attacked, or shunned, or lose our livelihoods if we dare question the meanness that characterizes our government and, increasingly, defines our national character.

Nelson could provide no examples of "attacks". Her example of a journalist who'd "lost his livelihood" was, as Medved pointed out, an editorial rather than a political matter, no different than Ann Coulter being fired at the "National Review Online" for writing, jokingly, that American should forcibly convert Moslems.

She was, of course, unswayed.

Three years ago, before the bloodless coup d’etat that made George W. Bush president, America was a far-from-perfect nation. Yet there was the possibility, almost gone now, that our country might evolve into a place that lived up to its loftiest democratic rhetoric. Today, I live in an America that makes my stomach hurt and fills me with terror. A nation run by greedy, frightened, violent bullies. It is time to take our country back before it is too late.

I'm going to take a moment to savor the irony here. Eight years ago, Apocalyptic Libertarians who talked like this (although never heard on outlets like MSNBC) were told to adjust the tinfoil under their hats.

But that, of course, would have a chilling effect. And probably be hateful and "mean".

Absent a single example of any action taken against a critic, it'd seem Nelson's main point is this: Dissenting from me is mean. And paranoid. And bad. And poopyheaded.

Read the whole depressing thing.

Posted by Mitch at May 8, 2003 05:57 AM