To: Strib “Hot Dish Politics” Blog
From: Mitch Berg, long-time ex-subscriber
Re: Narrative

Hey,

This is a screenshot of the online Strib this morning: 

The Strib is devoting its usual vast space to whatever it is that advances the DFL’s narrative and undercuts the party’s opposition.  In this case, the non-story that a pro-marriage group compared their opposition’s propaganda effort to that of the Nazis.

I know.  Baaaaad marriage group.  Godwin Godwin Godwin.  No Nazis here.

The thing is, I’m scanning back through a decade and change of Strib coverage, looking for evidence of earnest tut-tutting about eight solid years of what was at one point the cultural left’s supreme intellectual statement, the “Bushitler” reference…

…and, mirabile dictu, I’m finding not a thing.

This comes, of course, at the end of a solid decade of clucking from the Strib editorial board about the need to “return civility (like we had when the DFL and the “Independent Republicans” were basically the same party with different hairdos) to politics”, wrapped up with constant badgering about the “toxic influence” of all the “vitriol” that the right-wing alt-media (and sure, maybe the left juuuuust a little, but mostly the right, according to the Strib, ignoring a decade and change of inconvenient fact) was making politics ugly and hateful and just not as fun for y’all as it was when Elmer Anderson and Wendell Anderson and Nick Coleman Senior painted each others toenails on the floor of the House Chamber.

And so a pro-traditional-marriage group has transgressed the narrative and compared the gay-marriage crowd with Josef Göbbels, and the Strib makes certain the left’s high-horse dudgeon is transmitted verbatim.

Because goodness knows the mainstream left has been so very, very scrupulous about being true to and literate about history in dragging Hitler references into the national conversation.

The thing is, there is a time and a place for invoking totalitarians.

There are legitimate comparisons between things we see today and things people saw 80-85 years ago in the streets of Germany; the drift of one side or the other to the extreme, the use of extremely martial rhetoric (“Wars” on this and that and the other group, designed to get one constituency or the other whipped up), the beating up boogeymen, the use of compliant media to serve as a regime’s praetorian guard…

…well, I’m getting ahead of myself, now.

Suffice to say, Star/Tribune, that your concern for civility and the historical sanctity of Hitler references (says me, mit meine Nebenfäche auf Deutsch und Geschichte, und die Jahre ich an diese Subjekte studiert, and you can look up exactly what that means on your way to learning the damn subject for real and not at the trite, Hollywood-via-Junior-High history level most Americans know it) is observed, its hypocrisy noted, and its sincerity mocked without mercy.

That is all.