The Peevish Left - I
The Peevish Left - I found a surprising editorial in today's Strib, by Paul Scott.
I'm a lefty. But lately, instead of inspiring me, the left keeps making me feel awful about the world.
Awful? When the world is about to suffocated from global warming and we're about to led into a quagmire by the government? Why awful?
Sorry, I digress:
My latest lefty-awful moment happened on Martin Luther King Day last week, as I turned on an MPR call-in show. The subject was the peace movement, and host Katherine Lanpher's guest was New York-based professor of sociology and commentator Todd Gitlin.
An older listener had called in to say he had lived through World War II, had seen what happened when you appeased a megalomaniac, and was starting to get uncomfortable about the reflexive opposition to war with Iraq. He was comparing Saddam Hussein to Adolf Hitler, of course, and mentioned that he remembered Neville Chamberlain's visit to Berlin. Greatest Generation be damned, however; after a minute or so Lanpher told Grandpa to get to his point, argued with him when he asked for more time, then cut him off and turned the mike over to Gitlin.
Let me make a quick aside here: Katherine Lanpher is inexcusable. She's the most inept talk show host in the Twin Cities today. She's a terrible interviewer (heaven help her if the talkback from the producer went out), she handles callers incredibly badly...
...and as much as I respect MPR's news division (yes, fellow conservatives, I think the hard-news people there do a decent job) Lanpher is about as blinkeredly leftist as Ira Glass, without being able to hide behind "art". She's positioned as a pseudo-journalistic "News and issues" host, but she's no less biased than Jason Lewis or Syl Jones. Just less honest about it.
Back to the article:
"The caller can't possibly remember Neville Chamberlain going to Berlin," said the eagle-eyed professor, "because Chamberlain went to Munich. And the rest of his statement is about that accurate."
Touché!
Gitlin has himself written about the alienating ways of the peace movement, so it was disappointing to see him assume the stance that minds are changed through argument and ridicule. After a point-by-point refuting of the comparison between Saddam and Hitler -- steadfastly avoiding any acknowledgment the caller might just be a fellow member of the human race, responding to his very real and affecting experience in life -- our thoughtful radio expert submitted his rhetorical coup de grace: "The analogy crumbles," he said. "It's made of proverbial sand."
Beating up on callers - nervous, fumbling with their thoughts under pressure - is the hallmark of the cheapshot artist.
If you've never called a talk show - it's not easy. You hold...and hold...and hold...
...and suddenly, there's a harsh screeching sound as the host says your name and the telemixer puts you on the air. And BOOM - you have to be coherent.
It's hard enough all by itself. Then, Cacklin' Katherine starts with her little song and dance (if you dare to disagree with her).
It's not easy.
Back to Scott:
I felt bad for the caller -- how shabbily the two had treated him on their little morning show here in the waning years of his life. I also began to wonder where the left gets its harshness -- a know-it-all style of dark grievance-dom that has increasingly come to define the peace movement.
When I was filling in on KSTP the other night, James Lileks summed it up nicely. There are three categories of leftists:
- People who view their disagreements with conservatives as honest differences between peers
- people who are liberals and just don't think about it that much - it's all they've known, they really don't care about alternatives, and
- those who view liberalism as a force that must wipe out a benighted, ugly, stupid, evil opposition. We know who we're dealing with here, don't we?
Back to Mr. Scott:
It was on my mind because I had seen this belief system in full bloom two nights earlier, as I watched a replay of the day's big Washington, D.C., antiwar demonstration.
At the march, speaker upon speaker proclaimed the supposed true motivation behind the current U.S. build-up: The rush to war is about oil. The rush to war is about U.S. global aggression. The rush to war is about Bush Jr. finishing the work of Bush Sr. The rush to war, according to the very name of the organizing body behind Saturday's protest march -- International ANSWER, or Act Now to Stop War and End Racism -- is about race.
The soup of causes, theories and pronouncements made my head spin. It also made me wary of my spokespersons. Much has been made of late of the unlikely bed-partners at these marches -- how the merely conscientious must sit through the orations of the terminally consternated. How the presence of former Milosevic-defender and attorney general Ramsey Clark shouting for impeachment might just alienate the less-cynical pastors, housewives and earnest teenagers who had boarded buses to Washington.
Indeed, it may be the best we can hope for.
I just wish that every gathering of my lefties didn't have to become such a tedious exercise in cause-linking, chant-bullhorning and supposed truth-telling. I have the fantasy of a progressive cause with no Youth and Student Coordinator, no West Coast Representative, no brother from the movement in the country to the south and no presumption that words like Solidarity, Network, Action and Uprising are always to be treated as gospel, the code words that say we are all the same.
An acquaintance described a Green Party convention as being like a Puritan gathering - serious to the point of obsession, dour, clenched...
...that's the impression I - and apparently Scott - got while looking at the demonestrations: like Temperance protesters of the 1890's, awash in the seriousness of their cause, not wanting to sully its purity with any false levity.
The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. didn't play this game. Look at his face, full of dignity and calm while being pushed into the police station counter like a petty thief. Far from being consumed with rhetorical swordsmanship, crowd counts and secret agendas, he seemed to gain confidence in standing up against the simple, obvious truth -- the whack jobs that the Southern whites had become. He may have come out against the Vietnam War, he may have embraced a peripheral cause or two, but I can't imagine he would have strayed from the optimism of his dream to support the grab-bag of activism and sour outlooks of the scoundrels who would try to use the moment to sign us up for less defensible causes. (Long live the Palestinian people? Isn't theirs the cause that bombed a Sbarro?)
And I can't see him doing something so ineffectual or insecure as pointing out a mistake about an event that happened 70 years ago, not when there was a potential friend to be made.
I suggest this: To the left, there are no potential friends. There are allies, and there are enemies.
It all boils down to the most noxious, caustic phrase to gain acceptance in recent years: "If you're not with us, you're against us", or it's collegiate cousin, "if you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem".
All of us who aren't convinced? Yep. We're the problem.
Posted by Mitch at
January 29, 2003 06:10 PM
