The End of Reality

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I often talk to my students about the ways in which arguments are framed.  Anyone, with enough time and research skills, can find a way to set up an argument that, on its surface, will seem devastating, if not scary.  Take, for example, Republican claims in 2004 that Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry was the most liberal member of the Senate — even more liberal than his Massachusetts counterpart, Ted Kennedy — and was thus too radical to become President.  Technically Kerry was judged to be the most liberal member of the Senate by National Journal, but that metric was only for votes cast over a one-year period, and National Journal‘s methodology for grading divided senators’ votes into three blocks, two of which National Journal said they couldn’t judge Kerry because he’d skipped too many votes while running his campaign.  Saying Kerry was the most liberal member of the Senate was specious at best, but it sounded good, and so Republicans and their mouthpieces in the media repeated it ad nauseum throughout the 2004 campaign.

One or two of those disingenuous statements can be enough to frame an eight-page paper or a fifteen-minute speech, on anything from how the Bush Administration staged the 09.11 attacks to how the current President is part of a secret international conspiracy to create a new shadow international government that will destroy America.  The more of those framing devices you create, the longer your paper or speech can go, building on fabrication after fabrication.  If you can sneak in outright lies and they go unchallenged, they become powerful weapons in your arsenal, allowing you to expand your existing arguments and even create new ones out of thin air.

The question then becomes, how many disingenuously-framed statements and outright lies are necessary to go beyond the boundaries of a speech or a politician or a political party, all the way into a fully-functioning “reality” where anything outside that reality can be, if not completely dismissed, then at least willfully and successfully ignored.  Sadly, I think this week’s elections prove that the Republican/conservative business-political-media monster has now accomplished that.

The conservative canard that mainstream media has a “left-wing bias” has been around since time immemorial, to the point where it is not challenged like it should be because those who can challenge it have simply given up doing so.  Conservatives will keep on saying it regardless of any empirical evidence they’re presented with, so why bother?  Still, for as much as conservatives spout that line like a lame sitcom character’s catchphrase, it used to be that they would, at the very least, still go on said mainstream media outlets and answer questions posed to them by mainstream journalists, just as no elected Democrat (key word there being elected) refuses to go on Fox News.  Even if you think the game is rigged, even when you knowthe people on the other end of the microphone are out to distort your words and spread outright lies about you, you still go on every news outlet you can, because in a media-laden democratic culture such as ours, the press is supposed to provide one of the primary layers of accountability to the public.  If you say something stupid or do something stupid, the press is supposed to be right there on your heels, demanding answers.  Maybe you can run away from the microphones once or twice, but either you have to face the music, or people will see that you’re too much of a coward to own up to your own record, and even if they agree with you on things, they won’t vote for you because you lack the basic accountability required to be an elected official.

This past Tuesday proved that is no longer the case.  For all the absurdities in the positions that this new wave of Republican politicians holds, what was most galling to me about them as the election drew near was their steadfast refusal to address the mainstream media at all.  They were all too happy to go on Fox News, or the radio shows of stalwart conservatives like Rush Limbaugh and Seam Hannity, but when anyone else came to ask questions, they ran away, in many cases quite literally.  In the case of one reporter who tried to ask questions to Alaska Republican Senate candidate Joe Miller, Miller’s security detail put the man in handcuffs and threatened to do the same to two others who tried to document what the security detail was doing.

In the past, the thought of only campaigning to the base, only appearing on media outlets that were predisposed to favour you, if not outright campaign for you, would have been laughable.  The refusal to answer to the press would be such a handicap that no candidate who did so would even be considered seriously within a party’s own primary voting.  In a few weeks, several Republicans who only campaigned in right-wing media, who often said little to nothing about their Democratic opponents and instead spent all their time rallying against President Obama, or Nancy Pelosi, or Harry Reid, will be sworn into office in Washington DC and in state and local legislatures throughout the country.

Perhaps we should have seen this coming back when George W. Bush was still in office.  As opposition to his policies mounted, people who came to the then-President’s appearances to exercise their constitutional right to protest were often shepherded to “free speech zones” blocks away, where no one — people or media — would, or even could, see them.  The phrase “out of sight, out of mind” has never held more true.  Comtrast that to the current administration, where protestors come close to the President with openly-carried firearms on their persons, and even get interviewed on shows like Hardball.

What we are facing now is a logical extension of that practice.  The faux-grassroots organizing of big business against Obama and his policies, combined with the existing institutions of Fox News and conservative talk radio, as well as the emerging right-wing blogosphere, have now created a universe of deceit and misinformation so complete, so convoluted, and so ubiquitous, that there are now enough people living within this universe to elect politicians to local and state offices.  Are we only two years removed from the Fox News presidential candidate, who refuses to speak to any “journalist” not on Rupert Murdoch’s payroll?

These are not people who are merely philosophical conservatives, people who just believe that smaller government is better (except in the bedroom).  These are people who believe that President Obama is a “secret Muslim,” that he was born in Kenya, that he has never produced his birth certificate to prove that he was born in America.  These are people who believe that the President’s health care legislation gives government health care to illegal aliens, that it creates government panels that will determine whether or not elderly Americans will get the care they need to live out their golden years.  These are people who believe that Van Jones “masterminded” the Rodney King riots, that he served six months in prison.  These are people who think that President Obama and the Democratic Congress increased the record-setting deficits of the Bush years.  These are not matters of conjecture, lines of argument of dubious rationality.  These are all things that are patently, provably false.

What is real and truthful, however, doesn’t matter any longer.  Conservatives, Republicans, and their big business brethren have now created such a far-spanning media universe that sucks in enough people that candidates for elected office can campaign only within that universe and get enough votes to get swept into office.  Time will only tell if these candidates, once they become elected officials, will limit their press availability to only “journalists” from the Murdoch empire, but I think it safe to assume that will be the case.

It isn’t like the mainstream press is going to help.  The shrill shrieks of “Left-wing bias!  Left-wing bias!” have intimidated too many of them to take a stand, even when their own livelihood, their own profession, is threatened with extinction by this new dynamic.  It was bad enough when no one stood up to challenge Glenn Beck and his repulsive, repugnant desecration of the memory of Martin Luther King, using the anniversary of King’s “I Have a Dream” speech to hold his own rally in which he ostentatiously declared that he and his followers were going to bring the civil rights movement back to those who started it in the first place: Rich, white right-wing conservatives.  In any sane civilization, such a claim would have been met with enough indignant screams and peals of laughter that Beck couldn’t have blabbered loud enough to be heard over the din of protest.  Not only did mainstream media balk at shining the light on Beck’s offensive opprobrium, but a month later, when liberal and left-wing groups held their own rally on the Washington Mall, attracting a similar number of people, it got barely a mention in the press, even by the supposedly liberal MSNBC.

It’s not like President Whitmore — I mean, Obama — is going to help either.  After this past Tuesday, Obama pledged more of exactly what led to Democrats’ downfall in the midterms: Compromise.  Every major piece of legislation he passed — health care reform, Wall Street reform — was watered down with Republican amendments for no purpose at all.  The final pieces of legislation still garnered literally zero Republican votes, they were one of the main reasons Democratic enthusiasm in this past election was nothing short of abysmal, and Republicans were still able to use the legislation to rally their base against him.  Republican congressional leaders are already saying that they are not going to compromise in any way, that it’s their way or the highway, and come January they will have far greater numbers with which to block any legislation that doesn’t come from the pens of the big business interests that run the Republican party and the conservative movement.  Despite all this, the President has been completely contrite, and it wouldn’t surprise me if he signed new legislation repealing all the major legislation of the past two years if that’s what Republicans told him to do, as if doing so would mean that the Republicans and conservatives would stop their smear campaigns against him, that they would sit out his presumptive re-election bid in 2012 and not run a candidate against him.

If the Bush years taught us anything, it was that the modern Republican/conservative movement, when invested by voters with power, will only serve the interests of the radical right-wing base.  Those of us who do not fall into lockstep with their worldview, who dare even to vote against them let alone speak out against them, might as well not exist.  No, I take that back.  We do exist for them, but only as “the enemy,” bogey-people to point at and yell, “Hater of freedom!  Heathen!  Traitor!”  We certainly don’t deserve the tax breaks and government handouts they give to big business, or the right to marry who we love, or the ability to improve our lots in life.

For all that Kanye West’s “George Bush doesn’t care about black people” line has re-entered the current cultural consciousness as a result of the former president’s memoir, and as much as I agree with the current president’s evaluation of Kanye West, I dare say his line did not go nearly far enough.  It isn’t just George Bush, it’s the entirety of modern conservatism, and it isn’t just black people that they don’t care about, it’s all of us who are different from them ideologically, whether through our personal. individual beliefs, or because we belong to a group, whether by choice or by birth, that is predisposed to not agreeing with conservative ideology.  African-Americans, Hispanic-Americans, the poor, the working class, non-heterosexuals, non-gender-normatives, we’re all the same to them, the same “enemy” pool that includes the monsters who killed thousands of innocents in the 09.11 attacks, dictators like Saddam Hussein and Kim Jong-Il, murderous masterminds like Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda.  We only differ to them in that we ourselves have not yet killed people, but they use the threat that our philosophies and actions might result in catastrophe — elect X person and the terrorists win, and the American sky will explode from coast to coast with mushroom clouds — to whip their base into line, to scare people into voting Republican.

Although the democratization of media through the Internet has made it easier for people to bypass the limits of traditional media, to make their stories and situations known to the world at large, it has also made it easier for the right-wing to expand their “reality” to be so all-encompassing that we will now have elected officials who came into power through that reality, but will govern all of us.  Given the ways Republicans have governed since the Reagan Revolution, it is all too safe to assume that they will once again use their power to benefit, legislatively and financially, the very same big business, conservative, theocratic institutions that got them elected, and make things worse for the rest of us because that is, in their minds and the minds of those who voted them into office, what we deserve.

There was a time when I used this Website for essays like this, to point out the absurdities in modern right-wing thought, to rally against right-wing beliefs, right-wing people, and right-wing actions that I believe to be, for lack of a better word, inhuman.  My efforts, however, were predicated in a belief that the facts would win out, that although there can always be rational philosophical disagreement on the size and scope and role of government — indeed, strong voices for reducing government are nothing short of necessary in a sane political environment — the current composition of the conservative movement in America and its stated objectives will do nothing short of devastate this country, destroying personal freedom and opportunity to consolidate power and wealth in the hands of those who are already far too powerful and far too wealthy and who have already proven themselves to oppose equality and fairness and, above all else, the faintest trait of that human quality that I prize above all else: Compassion.

I think that my time for being a political animal has come to an end.  I will not say that I will never write about politics again, because surely there will be times in the coming months, if not weeks, when something happens in politics that so outrages me that I won’t be able to stop myself from writing about it.  However, I don’t think I can allow politics to play as large a role in my life as it has these past several years, for the main reason that, as I detailed above, politics itself has changed, I fear unalterably, so that what matters most is not that you have facts, let alone reason, on your side, but that you are able to create a compelling, encompassing fiction that lures in enough people to vote for your ideology, your candidates.  Although I may or may not be able to create compelling fiction, I certainly lack the resources — read that as “money” — to make such a fiction encompassing enough to meet what the right-wing has constructed through Fox News and conservative radio and the so-called Tea Party Movement over the past decades.

I have enough work to do with my teaching and my writing, and I need to focus my energies on those things.  Most importantly, I want to develop my fiction and my skills for writing it, the first novel I wrote this spring and am currently trying to edit into something publishable, the second novel I’m stuck on but will keep coming back to until I get the rough draft finished, the short stories I’m polishing and trying to get published in journals.  That is where I feel I can make the most difference, the most impact now, and more importantly, that’s where my bliss is now.  If I’m going to create fictions, if I’m going to create different realities from the one we all inhabit right now, at least I want to be honest about the fact that I’m lying to people.

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