SOME DISPARATE THOUGHTS: Never one to shy away from supporting the war in Iraq, I certainly felt at least a little odd hearing the Bush administration rap
Newsweek on the knuckles for spreading a false story that caused many people to die. There is such a growing gap between this administration's rhetoric and its behavior that it's suprising that Bush's Republican coalition remains largely intact. The torture scandals present yet another instance of Bush publicly standing for accountability but otherwise shirking his administration's own responsibility. Such textbook demagoguery as the Republicans have been engaging in would, one might think, stir up some decent criticism from the press corps. But the liberal mainstream media seems yet again blinkered and uninspiring. Kaus had a great bit the other day on a
NYT's reference to Sen. Harry Reid's "flashes of candor" and the trouble this tendency causes him. Not to entirely restate Kaus, but how is calling the president a "loser" much of a flash of candor? Candor implies being straightforward about a subject people tend to privately understand but would publicly rather not acknowledge. Such a petty insult doesn't really qualify as such. Instead Kaus hypothesizes that Reid's remarks were calculated ones, calculated, perhaps, to dish out a little red meat to a constituency he will eventually have to sell out when the legislative scaps with the Republicans kick into full gear. Kaus is right on the money, of course. But caricaturing Reid as a candid westerner seems to be the package the
NYT thinks its readership is most interested in buying. And they're probably right. However, this kind of media sleepwalking is as much to blame for the current depressing political scene as the current depressing group of politicians are.
Apropos of nothing, conversations with an old friend have made me work a little harder to pinpoint just what my disagreement with cultural liberalism (PCness, etc) is. Whenever I discuss racism, I am guided by an instinct that repells me from special treatment or consideration for minority groups and willful ignorance of empirical fact (i.e. pretending that everyone is just as capable as everyone else). Let me excerpt a bit of my email to her to illustrate the gist:
"just as an example, i've always felt that part of the problem between white and black people is white people's refusal to acknowledge the dumbness, but also logic, of racism. let's say that white people in the south think that black people resemble ghosts with only their eyes and teeth being able to be made out at night. it's a totally foolish sentiment, but also one that is in many ways true. many black people are pretty dark and their eyes and teeth are more visible than most other things about them at night. the leap to them being strange mystical beings is silly, but it has some logical basis. modern liberalism wants to deny racism that logical basis and just pretend it is maniacal and wrong. liberalism can't reckon with the fact that there is ample reason to believe that black people look like ghosts, are lazy, only want to collect welfare, etc (any number of gross generalizations). the double edged problem with this is that statistically many of these assumptions are true. black people are typically darker than white people, making their eyes look more phosphorescent at night, and many blacks are unemployed or involved in the illicit drug trade. the problem with racism is that is assigns the wrong CAUSE to these problems. these things aren't true BECAUSE the people are black, they're true due to certain factors associated with the way people who are black have been treated in this country. however, to deny that many black people are afflicted with these problems, like many liberals would like to do, is to deny reality. that causes a disjuncture wherein racism breeds. any black person worth his salt understands that black people face many problems that can't be solved by pretending they don't exists, and a liberal's condescending "compassion" is very unappealing for those kind of people."
I go on to say that my solution to the problem of racism is to match it until it collapses under its own weight. And by match it, I mean say racist things until their absurdity is self-evident. For instance, let's say I was talking to someone who didn't like hispanic people and I wanted to disabuse her of this prejudice. I might say, "I hope my new gardener is a spic because they are really good at landscaping," and consider it a direct assault on her racist tendencies. Such a statement might detonate some assumptions she makes by confronting them on their face, such as the acceptability of using ethnic slurs in casual conversation and the lazy assumption that hispanic = good at landscaping. This might denature a bit of the vitriol in her prejudice. I might then continue to pile on statements like, "But you have to watch those wetbacks because they'll get into the beer if you don't monitor them closely" and perhaps close with "maybe, with all the new genetic manipulation that going on, someone can find a way to alter the hispanic gene so they all don't end up like such drunks." The final statement would be a stretch, but not an illogical one if you happen to be prejudiced towards hispanics. After all, the qualities in them you find universal and unpleasant have to come from somewhere. Why not a gene? I might say all this in public at a volume that could easily be overheard. Might she begin to feel a little uncomfortable about her assumptions about hispanics? Perhaps. Certainly she'd be more disposed towards reconsideration than if I had sat her down and given her a lecture about how everyone is the same and she is a bad person.
Now imagine this process happening on a grand scale. Imagine people being pushed to their limits and beyond by others matching their unthought assumptions tit for tat. Most of racism comes from unpacked ideas that accumulate in people's heads based on anecdotal evidence. Factor in the need many people have to feel superior to and/or pure from people who are different and you'll understand that the racist mindset has little to do with preternatural hatred and more to do with a large group of people for whom Gladwell's
Blink hypothesis has malfuctioned. I've begun work on an essay along these lines, which will hopefully flow a little more logically than what I've written here. Just wanted to send a trial balloon up for a little online reconnaissance.