Similarly, there are those who watch The Sopranos and, seeing the world through Tony’s eyes, start pulling for him. His fans gloss over his faults. They focus on his struggles with his enemies. They hope he succeeds in evading the law. They cheer for murder.

Then there are those who ingest mainstream news, corporate TV, advertisements, government provided history textbooks, etc., and start pulling for the corporate interests that run America. They root for successful air strikes on Iraqi villages, think poor countries should be happy to receive exploitative loans, and get pissed off at Russia for not wanting American missiles in its backyard.

The following is a brief overview of ways to build consensus by providing perspective through discussions with fellow countrypeople on some key topics. In the end, using refined arguments may be the equivalent of decorating the pebbles you throw at Tony Soprano’s advancing tank but…(I don’t know, but I don’t know).

Nationalism

Emphasize the distinction between U.S. government and U.S. citizens.

• Ask “What is America?” (best source: common sense; correct answer: it’s us.)
• Demonstrate that the United States is not a functioning democracy. (best source: public opinion polls)
• Explain U.S. imperialist history in terms that convey the difference between normal American citizens and the decision makers who claim to represent us. (best sources: Zinn, Chomsky, etc.)
• Emphasize the Constitution. It does generally side with the people, after all, in spite of being written by rich racists. Sure, no one’s read it, but it’s good in the same way that freedom and justice are good. (best source: The Constitution)
• When Americans think about war they generally think of sexy machines nobly conquering bearded evildoers. This is a lie. For every vanquished evildoer, there are hundreds of vanquished innocents. The American people do not approve of killing civilians. They never have. Studies show it. (a source: Tom Engelhardt analyzes the U.S. government’s use of air power against civilians here.)

Religion

Corporate/government behavior is the cause of most major problems social conservatives blame on the left.

• Abortion– a socio-economic problem, the main causes being the wealth gap, the so-called drug war, and dehumanizing corporate TV programs, among other things.
• Hollywood and MTV are not pushed on us by wacky hippy liberals but by amoral corporations. You know, the rich people who own all that stuff and make the actual decisions? Dumbasses like Tom Green wouldn’t have careers without rich corporate assholes.
• Video game violence– hmm…who’s behind that? Rich corporate assholes? What do you fuckin know!
• The breakdown of the family? Rich corporate assholes.
• Homosexuality? Oh whoops, never mind. Let’s forget I mentioned it.

Economics

Kill Horatio Alger.

• Demonstrate that objective and subjective factors in SES determination are not mutually exclusive. In other words, when Mariah Carey claims to be living proof that believing in oneself and following one’s dreams (subjective factors) are sufficient to achieve superstardom, she neglects to mention the causal role played by musical DNA and the high demand for singing prostitutes (objective factors). Both are important. Similarly, confident, driven athletes are more likely to perform than self-doubting, don’t-give-a-damn athletes while genetically gifted athletes are more likely to perform than less gifted athletes. Sounds pretty obvious, no? Pathetically, the (sometimes complete) denial of objective factors’ causal role in SES determination is one of the major pillars upholding our faux meritocracy.
• Being born into poverty is the primary cause of poverty. Bad character is not.
• Objective factors such as the drug war (waged by corporations for profit) and poverty (which is what happens when corporations have all the money) are indisputably more relevant and readily addressed causes of crime than bad character, which in turn is a major cause of corporate success.

Another NYT article titled “Suharto Dies at 86; Indonesian Dictator Brought Order and Bloodshed”, by Seth Mydans, offered some hope of less misleading coverage.
But alas, the same story. “…good fortune came to him. Just as the United States was becoming embroiled in Vietnam, he stood as a bulwark against Communism in Asia. The United States rewarded him with a foreign aid program that eventually amounted to more than $4 billion a year. In addition, a consortium of Western countries and Japan established an aid program that in 1994 alone totaled almost $5 billion.” What a fucking hero.  Standing so bravely against democratic movements connected to the Soviet Union only in the minds of the most twisted CIA operatives.  Oh, and democratic movements that were in other countries.  He invaded a democratic country newly freed from Western imperialism.  “Bulwark” is defined, according to dictionary.com, as “protection against external danger, injury, or annoyance.” Goddamn peaceful democrats, so annoyingly living in their country next to a murderous dictator.

Mydans covers a lot of Suharto’s abuses but doesn’t come close to criticism of U.S. support.  Suharto’s a bad guy, the U.S. needed a bulwark, next question please.

Finishing her bottled water, she gets up re-energized, ready to do some serious climbing. I still have 2 hours of daylight, she thinks, looking at her watch.

After a long climb, she recites some pre-scripted introductory remarks about saving the state park to a middle-aged man standing at the gate of his hilltop fortress. He writes a check for $50, half for the environment, the other half for the solicitor. Her first big score of the day.

He was surprisingly nice, she decides, as she follows a convenient path to the next house to avoid the long descent to the street. Knock, knock. No answer. A lone drop of rain smacks her forehead as she hurries on to the next mansion, again taking the high road. She hadn’t noticed the approaching clouds. This is gonna suck. She rings a bell and again, no response. Not home from your bullshit corporate job yet, huh, asshole?, she denounces the imaginary white guy.

Oh shit, she mumbles as a downpour hammers the sidewalk and she scurries to the next porch. A trio of brown-skinned workers below has made it to their Japanese pickup and packed themselves in tightly. An old woman looks out her window across the street. The canvasser clings to her clipboard, impatiently watching the rain assault an unusually bright green lawn, wondering if her boss will be pissed about her pathetic day’s work, her third bad day in a row.  This is a nice friggin’ porch. I wonder how much…wow… The dirty brown water, growing to a torrent, follows the winding steps to the street.

Media Matters flew right into that storm, using a delicate rational cotton swab to attend to Kerry’s shit-bespeckled face. They countered accusations by printing them verbatim, then systematically debunking them. It didn’t matter. After the media was finished validating Swift claims with their incessant “maybe it’s not true but (in a subtle whisper) maybe…it is” routine, only Kerry’s frighteningly white teeth could be seen. And who’s gonna vote for that?

After a 3 year break from politics/thinking, I revisited the Media Matters site again only recently. How are they doing? They’re still great compilers of the most egregious quotes by the Right’s defenders of the Christian virtues of peace, love, and putting your poor brown neighbor in jails, ghettos, and Guantanamos. I do have a few concerns, however:

1. Their aim is to get the Limbaughs to apologize and shut up (the Al Sharpton approach). Sounds like a worthwhile goal, of course, but the Limbaughs never mean their apologies, obviously, and the issues are rarely addressed, only buried. Political discourse becomes even more restricted. Populism needs to breathe. If you’re going to restrict its airways, you better have a good tactical reason. Is there such a reason?

There’s a risk, and I’m just speculating here, that even if you can bury the Limbaughs, the corporate media will simply resurrect them in a less patently obnoxious form — corporate reps who will support the same fucked up policies while more tactfully concealing their elitist motivations. In a sick Darwinian twist, increasingly more deceptive facades may evolve, at which point we’ll have to deal with Limbaugh 2.0.

Limbaugh is already a toned down version of himself. He doesn’t say “I hate black people. They all need to go to jail.” He says, “We need to put the rapists, murderers, and drug dealers behind bars.” He knows he means black people (or non-white, more accurately), his listeners know it, Media Matters knows it, but he doesn’t say it. When he slips up and makes statements that more or less give away his hand, Media Matters is waiting to catch him, which is comforting and troubling at once.

Is Media Matters further constricting democracy’s trachea? Are they whacking the less evolved corporate moles? Quite possibly.

2. They defend their candidates and their supporters to a fault. Here’s an example:

In a 60 minutes interview, Michelle Obama says, “I don’t lose sleep over [Barack possibly getting assassinated], because the realities are that, you know, as a black man, you know, Barack can get shot going to the gas station, you know. So, you know, you can’t — you know, you can’t make decisions based on fear and the possibility of what might happen. We just weren’t raised that way.” Uber-racist Shelby Steele, discussing the interview in her book, writes, “[Obama] is telling the larger truth of black victimization in America. She is facilitating her race’s manipulation of the American mainstream.”

First of all, if black people are manipulating the mainstream, they’re doing a pretty shitty job.

Secondly, Obama’s comment, while not offensive, isn’t something that should be defended. Was Barack ever at real risk of getting shot at a gas station because of his brown skin? Comparing Barack’s situation to the very real threat of violence in troubled inner city black communities is disingenuous.

Media Matters would acknowledge as much if they weren’t knee-deep in America’s nastified political sludge, as likely to point out Democratic candidates’ flaws and deceptions as the candidates’ handlers.

Media Matters doesn’t lie. They’re consistently careful and technically correct (though they ignore context, when convenient, in favor of literalism). I’m glad to have them on my side and no one really knows the net effects of their efforts, which I’d guess favor the people.  They also have fine columnists, who work outside the basic “shut up, Matthews!” paradigm, to whom the above analysis doesn’t apply.  With W out of the picture, however, and the candidates all uncannily resembling each other, sacrificing honesty to the political gods no longer seems warranted.

Actually, he doesn’t predict a Chinese invasion, more of a Soviet style implosion received by the world with a similar level of enthusiasm. The military-industrial complex can’t be sustained. Military Keynesianism, as he calls it, is a tremendous economic liability, dragging the U.S. down while other giants race ahead. Well, Britain still hasn’t been invaded by its former oppressees (yet), so we’ve got that going for us.

(This Johnson’s one calm old dude, breaking down the impending disappearance from the American suburbascape of bottled water and spoiled punk teenagers like he’s telling his grandkids a twisted German fairytale.)

video Harry Kreisler interview

article “Going Bankrupt: Why the Debt Crisis Is Now the Greatest Threat to the American Republic”

Kilkenny is apparently speaking only to liberals, telling them to unite against Republicans. “We can build a foundation of unity even if that means defining ourselves by what we are not. We are not racists, we are not bigots, and we do not deny respect to any decent human being. In other words, we are not Republicans. And that is good.”

I’m not sure why the line should be drawn between conservatives and liberals. That’s a line that’s been drawn for us by the rich and powerful. A more relevant line is that between the corporate forces waging war on Americans and the Americans who are suffering as a result. This takes another form as a civil war between the rationally inclined and the rationally disinclined who fall for the convenient comfort offered by the lies of the rich and powerful.

Ways to deal with true-believer neocons

1. Them Angry Liberals

There’s outright hatred, sometimes coupled with death wishes and sadistic verbiage, a childish wish for the complete disappearance of the hated object. No discussion is possible, they think, with the morons, idiots, assholes, etc. on the right. If your grandma is a neocon, that’s too bad — fuck your grandma. They seem to be pursuing tribal catharsis after taking the abuses of an insanely irrational political climate. This is common on message boards, where an angry liberals can get solace from their tribe without actually confronting the people they attack. They see a propagandist dumping horse shit all over the American public and are helpless to stop it. They can’t penetrate the absurdity, don’t have the time or willpower to think of a rebuttal that would shut the propagandist up and have a lingering nugget of doubt “I’m not crazy, they’re crazy, right?”.

2. The Krugmans

There’s a belief in rational discussions with the rationally disinclined. The fruitlessness of this approach is the cause of the visceral hatred prevalent in group 1. If you have to explain that W is a criminal, you shouldn’t be worried primarily about facts and arguments.

3. Beasted

At buffalobeast.com, where I found Kilkenny’s article, there’s a self-assured, condescending mockery of the rationally disinclined.  Fundababble is viciously ridiculed rather than treated as refutation-demanding theses.  Confident that even if they’re not right, they’re far less wrong than Corporate Vocal Defecator X, they offer the kind of intellectual conviction sorely needed by the Krugmans and Angry Liberals who, vicariously relishing CVDX’s initial pummeling at the hands of the Beast, shriek “Let him up! He’s had enough!” as the intellectual severing of limbs and tendons leaves any decent human feeling ethically nauseous.

Admittedly, this sounds like a flawed argument the moment one puts oneself near the better end of the continuum. It sounds like Bush-league, us versus them logic.

Here’s the difference.  Bush-league logic holds that there’s an us and a them, the us being good and the them being bad, and of course we (anyone who agrees with Bush) are the us, therefore we’re right about everything.  In other words, we’re good, therefore we’re good.

However, my claim is not the basis for any specific political argument. If one were to postulate this continuum, claim to be on the preferred end, then claim that as a result of this, one is correct about something, that would be Bush-league.  That’s not the implication here.    When I say that someone like Tony Snow is severely rationally disinclined, that’s not an argument against him.  One makes the judgment that he’s rationally disinclined based on his defense of rationally indefensible positions, not the other way around.  It’s simply, in attempting to answer the question, “why would he say that?,” the best hypothesis going.

Further, if I ever say anything that flies in the face of all evidence, like, for example, that the earth is less than 8000 years old, I’d hope someone would look into my motives for maintaining such a position.

And finally, I’m not favoring any particular viewpoint but a particular approach to forming one’s viewpoints.  Simply put, it’s a meta- argument.

“We voters — all of us — make emotional, intuitive decisions about who we prefer, and then come up with post-hoc rationalizations to explain the choices that were already made beneath conscious awareness.”

Good point. We should try to reverse this process when making voting decisions, beginning with questions rather than answers, and choose the people who represent the people’s interests, right?

“My own intuition is that this unconscious cognition is pretty effective. People are skilled at judging character.” (…especially when judging a group of people whose occupational success depends on their ability to deceive.)

Well, never mind, then.

Here’s the link.