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[wstera2]

A reflection on the election

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I have been avoiding politics lately -- partly because I don't think I can add constructively to the billions of words that have been circulating about this election, and partly because I find this election so disturbing. But two days before the event, I'm going to try once more to articulate what I find so disturbing.

Briefly, it's the "Bush-bashing." Not opposition to Bush, but hatred of the man that spills over into denigration of those who dare to support him.

My most recent post sums up this phenomenon by quoting Leon Wieseltier's NYT review of Nicholson Baker's "scummy little book," Checkpoint. Wieseltier observes:

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For the virulence that calls itself critical thinking, the merry diabolization of other opinions and the other people who hold them, the confusion of rightness with righteousness, the preference for aspersion to argument, the view that the strongest statement is the truest statement -- these deformations of political discourse now thrive in the houses of liberalism too. The radicalism of the right has hectored into being a radicalism of the left.

Yes, as the lefties age, folks who used to pride themselves on tolerance now turn to virulent and destructive hatred. They justify their attitude by speaking of the intolerance of those they hate -- of gays, of the poor, of African-Americans, etc. They also claim being disturbed by Bush's inflexibility and insularity. But hatred distorts their vision. They ignore, for example, the irony that these supposed lovers of all the world's people should scorn Bush's idealism, denigrate the Iraqis' impulse for freedom, and despair about the economic rise of third world countries at the expense of our own jobs. And in any event such hatred cannot be justified by the supposed errors of its target.

What causes this attitude is not Bush, the man, but something he represents. I believe that this is Bush's faith-based reasoning. The "thinking" class -- journalists, novelists, pundits -- finds this posture disturbing because it resists their own supposedly nuanced, perceptive, educated appeals. Give us back one of our own, who speaks French, and probably reads books.

Bush-hatred does not spring from the left's revulsion over the war in Iraq. At most, that provided convenient fuel. After all, the left rejected the man who would have ended that war, nominating instead the "war hero" who has endorsed it, while of course appropriately holding his nose. No, Bush-hatred antedated Iraq.

Consider the following excerpts from an email Michael Moore broadcast on 9/12/2001. {It's worth reading now, a couple of days before the election (and a couple of days after OBL has officially taken credit for 9/11).}

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Well, the pundits are in full diarrhea mode, gushing on about the “terrorist threat” and today’s scariest dude on planet earth -- Osama bin Laden. Hey, who knows, maybe he did it. But, something just doesn’t add up. Am I being asked to believe that this guy who sleeps in a tent in a desert has been training pilots to fly our most modern, sophisticated jumbo jets with such pinpoint accuracy that they are able to hit these three targets without anyone wondering why these planes were so far off path? Or am I being asked to believe that there were four religious/political fanatics who JUST HAPPENED to be skilled airline pilots who JUST HAPPENED to want to kill themselves today? Maybe you can find one jumbo jet pilot willing to die for the cause -- but FOUR? Ok, maybe you can -- I don’t know. . . . .

[O]ur recent domestic terrorism bombings have not been conducted by a guy from the desert but rather by our own citizens: a couple of ex-military guys who hated the federal government.

From the first minutes of today’s events, I never heard that possibility suggested. Why is that?

Maybe it’s because the A-rabs are much better foils. A key ingredient in getting Americans whipped into a frenzy against a new enemy is the all-important race card. It’s much easier to get us to hate when the object of our hatred doesn’t look like us. . . .

In just 8 months, Bush gets the whole world back to hating us again. He withdraws from the Kyoto agreement, walks us out of the Durban conference on racism, insists on restarting the arms race -- you name it, and Baby Bush has blown it all. . . . .

Many families have been devastated tonight. This just is not right. They did not deserve to die. If someone did this to get back at Bush, then they did so by killing thousands of people who DID NOT VOTE for him! Boston, New York, DC, and the planes’ destination of California -- these were places that voted AGAINST Bush! Why kill them? Why kill anyone? Such insanity…Let’s mourn, let’s grieve, and when it’s appropriate let’s examine our contribution to the unsafe world we live in.


Reflect on what this initial reaction to 9/11 says about the attitudes of Moore, and of those in his wide and enthusiastic audience. A day after 9/11, Moore's impulse was to blame Bush and his policies. As the identity and nature of our attackers became apparent, Moore and his friends had to devise more elaborate explanations of how Bush was at fault. Not surprisingly, OBL noted in his recent message that Bush cost lives by continuing to read to the school children after he learned of the attack. OBL must have read Michael Moore's email -- if they'll believe that, they'll believe anything. And the worst injustice of the attack? Killing Democrats!

I only hope that, if Bush wins on 11/2 (or sometime thereafter) as expected, our supposedly best and brightest can get past blind hatred and back to thinking, and the tolerance of different ways of thinking that used to characterize liberalism.

http://busmovie.typepad.com/ideoblog/2004/10/a_reflection_on.html