Lance Mannion

A study of liberal reading habits

Hope you don’t mind if I indulge in some egregious caricature.

In this morning’s post I wrote:

what liberal vanity loves about the facts is that having them makes the possessor feel smart.  Liberals live to be able to say, “Did I tell you what I read last week?” and to then tell you.  We don’t need what we read to justify what we feel because we feel justified by having read, period.

I stand by this.  Liberals tend to be vain about being readers.  And I’ll go further.

If you hear your average Right Winger saying something like “I never read Proust,” it’s a boast.  He’s telling you, with a manly sneer, that he doesn’t have time for effete, elitist, Frenchy wastes of time and thought.

Now, if you hear your average liberal saying, “I’ve never read Proust,” and it’s not followed by, “in the original French,” it’s probably still a boast.  But what he’s vain about is the reason, which he assumes you know, he hasn’t read Proust.  He’s been too busy reading other authors.

Turgenev, for instance.

Alternatively, you might hear a liberal say, “Oh, I’ve never read Proust” in a way that sounds like apologetic self-recrimination, but that’s just a different kind of boast.  This guy’s vain about the fact that he knows he should have read Proust by this time in his life.  He’s vain in the same way some sinners are vain about their guilty consciences.

As it happens, I have read some Proust, but far from the whole of In Search of Lost Time.  I suppose I could start now, Swan’s Way is sitting on the bookcase right behind me, but I just started another book.  It’s called Virgin Soil.

It’s by Turgenev.

Blowhards. Part Two.

This is more of an aside than a follow-up to last week’s post on the Right’s addiction to violent rhetoric.

My point in Blowhards. Part One is that Right Wingers tend to use words for how they make them feel rather than for what those words mean and that because power and domination define the way the world works in their minds and most of them don’t have power or dominate over anyone, at least not to the degree they feel they should, they’re always reaching for words that make them feel as if they have that power and are fighting to hold onto it.  They need to feel tough, strong, brave, and scary in order to feel they are powerful and dominant, and in that context only fightin’ words will do the trick. 

Their language is combative, belligerent, violent because their feelings are violent. 

I don’t mean that they feel the need to commit violence, necessarily.  I mean that the surge of feeling within them is violent.  Frustration, anger, fear, and hatred are not feelings that just sit there inside you.

Using words for how they feel instead of for what they mean is not just a habit of the Right.  For most people, words are the sounds their feelings make.  Ideally, we would all use the words that both sound right and mean right, that express the feeling and identify it and give it the shape of thought.  That’s the job of poets.  Most of us aren’t poets.  We grab at whatever words we can and hope that people listening will understand what we would have said if we were poets.

I’m repeating myself.

But people don’t use words only for how they feel.  We use them to make us feel.  We can talk ourselves into feeling most anything.  Usually, what we talk ourselves into feeling is right.

It’s astounding, and sometimes amusing, to hear someone tell an obvious lie using the most trite, cliched, and inappropriate words and realize that while everyone in the room clearly knows it for a lie and is not even bothering to hide their derision, the liar himself seems to believe himself absolutely, even to the point of tearing up at his totally fabricated emotions.

But we aren’t the audience.  He is.  He is talking to make himself feel right.

He is using words that make him feel that he is not what he is, that he didn’t do the bad, stupid, mean, or otherwise wrong thing he did.

Even when no real wrong has been done, at least not by them personally, people will talk to make themselves feel better.

This is the attraction of gossip.  Talking about other people’s failures and mistakes makes us feel better, better than the people failing and making those mistakes.  All gossip has a single them:  “I am better than that.” 

The need to feel better, to feel good, to feel right is human, and liberals and progressives have a rhetoric of self-righteous congratulation too.  Forget politics.  Listen to us talk about books, about the movies we like, about music.  Especially music.

But over the last couple of generations the American Right has perfected a Politics of Feeling Virtuous.

The Right believes in power and domination as the measures of all things.  But wanting power and domination and fearing that you don’t have it or are losing it are not pleasant ways to feel. 

For one thing, it’s the way villains and cowards feel.

The right thing to do would be to resist those feelings, to recognize them as belonging to villains and cowards and look instead for, as Lincoln said, the better angels of our nature.  But the human, as opposed to the angelic, thing to do is to indulge those feelings while pretending they’re something else, to dress them up with words that mean the exact opposite of those feelings but carry powerful feelings of their own, feelings belonging to heroes and saints.

It also helps if you can use words that make you feel that those other, less noble feelings are justified.  It’s ok to want power and domination if you deserve to have them, if God or Nature has intended you to have them and that your having them is a sign of your moral superiority.

But it’s also human nature to find our goodness in comparison.  Maybe I can’t be sure I’m right, but I can be damn sure you are wrong.

Which is why demonization is such a key trope in Right Wing rhetoric.  They can’t be sure they’re right, but they can make damn sure they feel that we are wrong.

Of course, the less right they feel---and since they measure everything in terms of power and domination including rightness and righteousness, and they feel themselves losing power, they feel themselves losing rightness and righteousness, not to mention legitimacy---the more wrong they have to feel we are.

Losing is both a sign of weakness and a punishment for it.  It is also a sign of the withdrawal of God’s favor.  But God wouldn’t do that to us!  (Would He?)  And we aren’t weak or deserving of punishment!  (Are we?)  Of course not!  Then, the only way this could happen, the only way we could lose the power we’ve been granted by God is if it’s being stolen from us by a side that is not of God.  The side taking it must be of the Devil.  The other side must be supernaturally wicked.

And words get chosen that make that wish feel like the truth.

And it goes on.  If I am good, and you are bad, there is no way that I can do or say anything bad or you can do or say anything good.  Consequently, if there are still racists in the country, then they must be on your side.  If violence is being threatened and committed in the name of politics, then it must be coming from your side.  If anything I do or say can be construed as violent and threatening then I must be doing it in self-defense.  I must be doing it because you pushed me to the wall.  I must be justified in retaliating.

The publishing industry has long known how profitable is to sell people the notion that they are right.  Gossip and self-help advice are the two most obvious niche products marketed directly to our vanity.  Politics is a fast-growing market though.  There are books written to shamelessly flatter liberal vanities but the fact is they are mostly unnecessary and not worth the money to print them.  You can make a liberal feel good about himself just by giving him the facts. 

Now, it is a fact that the facts have a liberal bias, but what liberal vanity loves about the facts is that having them makes the possessor feel smart.  Liberals live to be able to say, “Did I tell you what I read last week?” and to then tell you.  We don’t need what we read to justify what we feel because we feel justified by having read, period.  Besides which, we assume that whatever the facts are they somehow justify our liberal feelings, so we’re open to anything as long as it is substantiated, that is given the intellectual seal of approval by accredited experts.  Trusting to experts is a feature of liberal vanity.   There’s no need to sell us a liberal view of history or a liberal view of science.

But whether or not the facts are as strongly on our side as we like to believe, they are decidedly not on the side of the Right.

What the Right needs are alternative facts.  It’s hard to feel you are right, and in the right, if the facts are against you.  The easiest and most natural way to deal with this is to deny the facts are in fact facts.  Believing that college professors and scientists are spreading lies is helpful, to a point.  Another helpful dodge is to convince yourself that it’s liberals who don’t know the facts, not just because they’ve been taught lies, but because they believe things that are obviously crazy.    And from Dave Noon at Edge of the American West I’ve just learned that there are conservative historians and college professors who are willing to sign their names to the notion that liberals believe and teach lunacy instead of the truth, as in a book called 48 Liberal Lies About America.

Here are three examples of those lies:

• “John F. Kennedy was Killed by LBJ and a Secret Team to Prevent Him from Getting Us Out of Vietnam”
• “Ronald Reagan Knew ‘Star Wars’ Wouldn’t Work but Wanted to Provoke a War with the USSR.”
• “September 11 Was Not the Work of Terrorists.  It Was a Government Conspiracy.”

I can’t wait to read the other 45.

The author claims that these notions are endorsed by history textbooks, thanks to the efforts of liberals.  I didn’t know Oliver Stone wrote textbooks.

As Dave says, the author, “must be confusing ‘liberal US history textbooks’ with ‘amateur videos I found on YouTube.’”

Read Dave’s post and be sure to follow the links.

______________

Related:  The McEwan reacts to another variant on the Right’s love of the It’s Not Me Who Thinks What I Appear to Think, It’s You Who Thinks It method of feeling right, Mrs Doctor Instapundit on the Left’s lack of empathy for the poor, misunderstood Right.

Please help keep this blog running strong by making a small donation.

Davy Crockett, the Green Hornet, the Phantom and other heroes of my youth who weren’t really heroes of my youth

The debate over the best Sherlock Holmes will continue forever.  Although I think Jeremy Brett settled the question once and for all, and my father-in-law thinks the question didn’t need to be settled because the answer has always been, obviously, Basil Rathbone, the fun of Robert Downey’s Holmes was that Downey didn’t even try to be a definitive Holmes---his Holmes was a comic pastiche of every Holmes that ever was and ever will be and suggested that like Hamlet the number of satisfying interpretations is possibly infinite.  It wasn’t Downey, but someone is going to come along and create a new, true, best Sherlock Holmes for another generation.

Christopher Reeve was Superman and always will be to the point that all future Supermen will be playing him, just as Dean Cain and Tom Welling had to incorporate Reeve into their Clark Kents.  (They did it pretty well, too.) Someday, though, somebody could come along and do a better job of playing Reeve playing Superman than Reeve.

Russell Crowe isn’t going to come close to replacing Errol Flynn as Robin Hood but Flynn is my sons’ third favorite Robin after Jonas Armstrong and Cary Elwes.

There probably will be a better Batman than Christian Bale some day.  Chris Pine may be in the process of taking Captain Kirk away from William Shatner. 

But who’s the real Zorro?  Tyrone Power, Guy Williams, or Antonio Banderas?

Extra points if your answer was none of the above, it’s Douglas Fairbanks or Anthony Hopkins or George Hamilton, twice over.

There hasn’t been a definitive Philip Marlowe, not even Humphrey Bogart’s.  (I’m actually kind of partial to James Garner’s.)  Nor has there been a definitive Natty Bumpo, Long John Silver, or Wyatt Earp (although again I’m partial to Garner’s.)  So far King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table have stumped every movie director except John Boorman and Terry Gilliam et al but off the top of your head can you name the actors who played Arthur and Lancelot in Excalibur?  Good as they were they didn’t make either hero their own, nor, as much as I love them all in the roles, did Michael York, Oliver Reed, Richard Chamberlain, and Frank Finley make it impossible for anyone else to play D’Artagnan and the Musketeers.

Well, Reed made it very difficult for every future Athos.

Captain Nemo and Phillias Fogg, David Copperfield, Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, Dick Tracy, Tarzan, the Lone Ranger, Frank and Joe Hardy, Ivanhoe, and all the other of the comic book, novel, and TV show heroes I idolized when I was a kid have remained themselves apart from any actor who’s played them in movies or on TV, no matter how perfectly that actor was suited for the role and how fine a job he did.

But there has been and always only will be one Davy Crockett.

John Wayne was fun.  Billy Bob Thornton was interesting for the way he suggested that the real David Crockett might not have been as outsized a hero as the legendary Davy but still might have been admirable and heroic.  But that’s just it.  Thornton’s Crockett was a history lesson and Wayne’s was just Wayne having fun.

Nope.  The one, the true, the real King of the Wild Frontier, Davy, Davy Crockett is Fess Parker.

It’s not that no one could play a character named Davy Crockett and play him well.

It’s simply that he’d just be playing a character named Davy Crockett.

Davy Crockett is somebody, and some thing, else.

Parker brought the legend to life.  He embodied it.  He gave it a face and a shape and a voice.  He made Davy Crockett real.

He didn’t do this alone.  He had help from the Disney marketing department and a generation of children.  But together they gave the legend its own existence to the point that there was Fess Parker and there was Davy Crockett, and sometimes they occupied the same space, but for the most part Davy Crockett lived on his own, no matter what Fess Parker was up to, and that includes dying.

Fess Parker passed away the week before last, but Davy Crockett didn’t.

This might explain why I didn’t feel the same pang of lost youth and approaching mortality I felt when I heard that two other stars of TV shows I enjoyed when I was a kid, Peter Graves and Robert Culp, died within a week on either side of Parker.

Jim Phelps and Kelly Robinson were just characters Graves and Culp played.

Fess Parker was some guy Davy Crockett chose to look and sound like.

Parker died but he didn’t take any of Davy with him.

I suppose you could say that for me Fess Parker is the definitive Davy Crockett or that he’ll always be my Davy the way Jeremy Brett will always be my Holmes.

But there’s a problem with putting it that way.

I never saw those Disney Davy Crocketts.

I wasn’t born when they first aired and though I always hoped Disney would show them again on the Wonderful World of Color some Sunday night in the 60s, either it never happened or for some reason I wasn’t watching when they they did.

By all rights, Fess Parker should be my Daniel Boone.

He’s not.  I barely remember him as Daniel Boone.  I barely remember the show at all, although I can sing the the theme song.

Daniel Boone was a man,
Yes, a big man!
And he fought for America
To make all America free!

What a Boone, what a doer,
What a dream-come-truer was he!

That proves to me that I watched it regularly.  But I can’t prove it to myself in the usual way of remembering specific episodes or quoting lines of dialog the way I can to prove I watched and enjoyed, say, Mission Impossible or Star Trek or Maverick.

But I shouldn’t be able to do that with Maverick.  Maverick went off the air in 1962.  James Garner left the show in 1960.  But I remember Maverick vividly and James Garner is still the only Maverick brother or cousin who matters to me, the first and only one I think of when I think of the show.

How can that be?

Easy answer.

Syndication.

Looking back, I realize that the TV shows I remember best from when I was a little kid I actually remember from when I was a bigger kid watching them in re-runs after school and on days when I was home sick from school.  I can’t say for sure if I ever watched some shows when they were on at their right times in the evening.  So with many shows I think I loved when I was very young, it’s the case that I liked them enough to want to watch them again when I was not quite as young.  It was re-watching them, several times over, many of them, that fixed them in my heart and in my memory.

If Daniel Boone went into syndication, and it must have, I didn’t make a point of re-watching it.  But I was still watching episodes of Mission: Impossible in college.  Even shows I know I watched regularly in prime time and loved, like MASH and Barney Miller, I really remember from watching again and again in re-runs.

And it’s the same for the books I loved as a kid.  Treasure Island, which I first read when I was ten, means so much to me now because when I was fourteen it meant so much to me that it meant so much to me when I was ten that I read it again to find out why and because when I was in college it meant so much to me that it meant so much to me that when I was fourteen it meant so much that it meant so much to me when I was ten that I read it again that I read it again…and so it has gone, all my life since.

It’s been said that we don’t remember anything, we only remember the last time we remembered it.

This would explain why I don’t remember Fess Parker as Daniel Boone.

It doesn’t explain why I don’t need to remember him as Davy Crockett because Davy just is.

_______________

I used to read and enjoy The Phantom in the Sunday comics but he wasn’t one of my absolute favorites.  I much preferred Prince Valiant.  And I think I gave up on the Phantom when it occurred to me that a purple leotard and tights are not the wisest choice for jungle-wear.  I think I was also disappointed when I figured out that the Ghost Who Walks wasn’t really a ghost at all.

And I probably watched episodes of The Green Hornet when it was on but I don’t remember it at all.  I do remember getting a Green Hornet coloring book in a Christmas grab bag at Cub Scouts.  Can’t say it made the Green Hornet and Kato childhood heroes of mine.

So the news that Seth Rogen’s playing Britt Reid in the upcoming Green Hornet movie doesn’t fill me with dread.

Well, no more dread than the news that any movie starring Seth Rogen’s on its way.

But the great science fiction Harlan Ellison writer grew up listening to The Green Hornet on the radio and The Phantom was his favorite Sunday comic.

So it came as a shock to him that he couldn’t complete the short story he started bringing his two childhood heroes together.

And in this interview Ellison tries to explain what went wrong.

Tip of the hat to Dan Coyle.

Earwigged myself update:  Now I can’t get the Daniel Boone theme out of my head!

From the coonskin cap on the top of old Dan
To the heel of his rawhide shoe,
The rippin'est, roarin'ist, fightin'ist man
The frontier ever knew!

Daniel Boone was a man,
Yes, a big man!
And he fought for America
To make all America free!

Everybody!

Yes, Daniel Boone was a man,
Yes, a big man!
And he fought for America
To make all America free!

Happy Passover!

A joyful night and a cheerful week to all!

The Known Universe

I am sorry though that I won’t be able to make this lecture.

The Silk Road

Fortunately, I’ve got until August to get to this exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History.

You can keep your Jesus Fish, you can keep your Darwin fish. I want one of these for my car.

Outside the grocery store.  Around ten this morning.  Stardate 102803.01.

The Leaky Faucet

All through the night, the leaky faucet
searches the stillness of the house
with its radar blip: who is awake?
Who lies out there as full of worry
as a pan in the sink? Cheer up,
cheer up, the little faucet calls,
someone will help you through your life.

---by Ted Kooser.  From Flying at Night.

Sitting All Evening Alone in the Kitchen

The cat has fallen asleep,
the dull book of a dead moth
loose in its paws.

The moon in the window, the tide
gurgling out through the broken shells
in the old refrigerator.

Late, I turn out the lights.
The little towns on top of the stove
glow faintly neon,
sad women alone at the bar.

---by Ted Kooser.  From Flying at Night.

The Giant Slide

Beside the highway, the Giant Slide
with its rusty undulations lifts
out of the weeds. It hasn't been used
for a generation. The ticket booth
tilts to that side where the nickels shifted
over the years. A chain link fence keeps out
the children and drunks. Blue morning glories
climb halfway up the stairs, bright clusters
of laughter. Call it a passing fancy,
this slide that nobody slides down now.
Those screams have all gone east
on a wind that will never stop blowing
down from the Rockies and over the plains,
where things catch on for a little while,
bright leaves in a fence, and then are gone.

---by Ted Kooser.  From Flying At Night: Poems 1965-1985 (Pitt Poetry Series).

Wes Anderson: “It’s rare when you have the chance to say I have an idea for a cloud…”

Fantastic Mr Fox was the feature for Mannion Family Movie Night last night.  Thumbs up all around.  Gave me renewed appreciation for Wes Anderson’s other movies.  Also made me wish he’d remake The Life Aquatic and The Darjeeling Limited with stop-action puppets.

Both movies were already puppet shows.  Anderson is, at heart, I think, a puppetmaster.  And that’s not a dismissal or a criticism.  Anderson’s characters are stripped down to the essentials and present attitudes more than personalities, his plots are fabulous as in like the plots of fables, and his dialog is simplistic, mildly didactic, and  gently moralistic.  He’s not telling children’s stories but he tells his stories as if they were for children.  I don’t mean he’s talking down to his audience.  I think that what he’s doing is reminding his audiences of the basic delights of hearing and telling stories and trying to get them to pay attention to his stories with the same openness and wonder that they gave to the first stories they heard and loved.

So it’s not a surprise to hear in this Fresh Air interview with Terry Gross that Anderson loved the stories of Roald Dahl when he was a kid and that Fantastic Mr. Fox , the shortest and simplest of Dahl’s books, was his favorite and the book he’s taken everywhere with him since.

It was a surprise that Terry Gross had never read any of Dahl’s books before she saw Fantastic Mr Fox.  I didn’t think it was possible to have turned 10 after 1964 and not have read Charlie and the Chocolate Factory or James and the Giant Peach by the time you’d turned 12.  Turns out Gross is a little older than I thought and turned 10 a little too soon.

The good news for her is that Dahl’s stories, like all the best children’s stories, aren’t just for children.  They are grown-up stories told in a way children can follow.

Which is what I was trying to say about Anderson’s puppet show-movies.

This is my favorite part of the interview though.

Anderson: I didn’t know what it was going to be like to make this movie [in stop-animation] when we started out.  I sort of had this thought that I was going to [write] the script, and work on the sets, and sort of prepare the shots, and have this plan, and then hand over to a team of animators and they were going to hand me back a film a year later or something.  I was going to put in an order for one Fantastic Mr Fox, according to these specifications, and they would send it back.  That is not what happened.

It ends up being the most involving kind of filmmaking I’ve ever had anything to do with and very fun.  But the thing you quickly realize is that everything that is going to go on camera has to be manufactured from scratch, everything has to be designed, and that means every little prop and every little moment is going to have a lot of thought go into it, and that’s an opportunity, but it’s not going to take care of itself.  Nothing’s going to just be discovered, like stumbling across a location.

Gross:  You have to create the bodies of the animals, the clothes they wear, the houses they live in, the street they live on, the sunrise, the sunset, the ground beneath their feet, you have to create everything?

Anderson: Yes.  It’s rare you get the chance to say, “I have an idea for a cloud…”

That might explain why I’d like to see Anderson’s stop-action version of The Darjeeling Limited.  An India designed according to his specifications might have been a better backdrop to his story than the real India.

Listen to the whole interview at NPR.

___________________

Interesting that the movie adaptation of James and the Giant Peach, which is very good, is also stop-action.  That was produced by Tim Burton but not directed by him.  Burton did direct the recent Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.  Didn’t work out so well.  Burton is a problematic choice for adapting Dahl.  Burton specializes in nightmares for adults.  Dahl took children’s nightmares and turned them inside out to make them into funny daydreams.  The nightmare is always still there, but it’s held to the shadows.  To have shadows, though, you need sunlight, and Burton doesn’t seem to know there is such a thing as the sun.  Anybody seen Alice in Wonderland yet?  Can you see it?  It looks awfully dark, and I mean that both ways.

Blowhards. Part One.

Andrew Sullivan thinks it’s getting a little scary out there and he links to this post by Ezra Klein, We have something to fear from fear-mongering itself, to illustrate the point.  Ezra writes:

I don't want to exaggerate the importance of the death threats being made against congressmen who voted for health-care reform. Nuts are nuts. But there is a danger to the sort of rhetoric the GOP has used over the past few months. When Rep. Devin Nunes begs his colleagues to say "no to socialism, no to totalitarianism and no to this bill"; when Glenn Beck says the bill "is the end of America as you know it"; when Sarah Palin says the bill has "death panels" -- that stuff matters…

..take the universe of people who really respect right-wing politicians and listen to right-wing media. Most of them will hear this stuff and turn against the bill. Some will hear this stuff and really be afraid of the bill. And then a small group will hear this stuff and believe it and wonder whether they need to do something more significant to stop this bill from becoming law. And then a couple will actually follow through. And one will cut the gas lines leading to house of Rep. Tom Perriello's brother after seeing a tea partier post the address online.

Beck and Palin are brazen demagogues and shameless opportunists out to make a buck off the anger and frustration of their fans and adherents.  They answer to nobody and nothing but their vanity and bottom lines and feel no responsibility except to continue their cults of personality so the money keeps pouring in.

But Devin Nunes is a member of the United States Congress.  Even if Nunes has no constituents who support health care reform, although he probably he has tens of thousands who by implication Nunes has accused of being eager for totalitarianism, he should be mindful of his colleagues in the House of Representatives with whom he has to work for the benefit of all his constituents and those colleagues might resent having to cooperate with someone who believes they’re out to destroy the nation.

Ezra asks if Nunes really thinks what Nunes appears to think:

[T]otalitarianism? Death panels? The end of America as we know it? These critiques aren't just wrong in their description of a cautious, compromised reform that uses private insurers and spends only 4 percent of what we spend on health care in an average year. They're shocking in terms of what the speakers believe their colleagues and representatives are willing to do to the American people. Nunes, for instance, has served with Democrats for decades. He might believe them too willing to tax society's most-productive members to fund social benefits. But does he really believe them friends of totalitarianism?

My bet would be that if you tried to pin him down on this he’d tell you that he didn’t say what he said.  If he’s like most people, he wouldn’t recognize his own words as his own words even if you showed him a video of him saying those very words.  That’s because for most people words don’t matter as conveyors of meaning.  Words are merely sounds that express feeling.

Try to use their own words against them and they will reply, “You know what I meant.”

Of course they won’t have said what they meant with that rejoinder either, because what they meant to was, “You know how I feel.”

People will say anything when they’re upset and they can expect that everybody who hears them will understand and not take it personally or excuse them on the spot.  And usually that’s how it goes.  “Nevermind.  I understand.  Heat of the moment.  No big fucking deal.”

In the heat of passion, when carried away by excitement, when overwhelmed by terrible sorrow or terrific happiness, people might as well talk gibberish as try to make sense.

And sometimes the only words that sound right, that sound like how we feel, are the “wrong” words, sometimes only the ugliest words are strong enough for the most ecstatic emotions and out of the mouths of people who normally don’t use four letters words harsher than darn and pooh will come vehement, loud, and accurate concatenations of Anglo-Saxon nouns and verbs that in other circumstances would offend the ears of convicts, Marines, and stand-up comics, as any one who has been to bed with a  former Catholic schoolgirl can tell you.

Or, in other situations, has gotten one mad.

The best words are the ones that not only mean exactly what the person speaking them need them to mean but also sound like what they mean, words that convey both the idea and the feeling together.  And unless your audience is made up entirely of lawyers and schoolteachers, if you’re going to use the wrong word, it’s better to use one that sounds right but doesn’t quite mean right than one that means perfectly but sounds weak, silly, priggish, pedantic, or just plain boring and doesn’t carry with it the right feeling if it carries any feeling at all.  People are more impressed and more likely to approve your meaning if they share your feelings.

You can change most people’s feelings, at least for the moment, far more easily than you can change their thinking.

Demagogues and other con artists don’t even need to change the way people feel.  They just need to incite people to feel instead of think.

This is where I think the Right has had it over the Left for decades now.  Right Wing politicians and pundits and talk show clowns will say anything.  They will exaggerate, lie, make things up, insult and ridicule anybody for any reason, spout incoherent nonsense to the point where they might as well be talking gibberish, and not care, because what their words mean doesn’t matter to them.  They use words for how those words feel.  And for how they want their audiences to feel.

Liberal politicians and pundits, though, tend to precision.  They choose their words carefully and choose the ones that most closely mean what they need them to mean.  They don’t just talk as if their audiences are made up of lawyers and schoolteachers.  They talk as if they are lawyers and schoolteachers.  Which is not surprising since that is what many of them are.

And they don’t just favor meaning over feeling when they choose their words.  They reject words because they sound too much like feelings.

When they choose words for their feelings it’s often because those words make them feel clever.

I should know.

The Right has traded on fear and hate for decades now.  They’ve become addicted to the feelings and dependent on words that express those feelings strongly and persuasively, persuasion here being a matter of infection and contagion.  A Right Winger doesn’t try to convince you to think his way as much as he tries to get you to catch his feeling.

Or a feeling.

They don’t care if Liberals are demonstrably not fascists, communists, or aiders and abettors of Islamic terrorists.  Liberals make them as angry and afraid as any and every enemy, real and imagined, because Liberals are trying to bring about the same thing as those other enemies---a world in which the American Right isn’t the reason for that world’s existence.

A world where they don’t control everything is a world where they control nothing.  Power and domination define every relationship and if you aren’t the powerful and dominant party you are as good as nothing.  So bosses dominate over employees.  Men dominate over women.  Adults dominate over their children.  White people dominate over non-white people.  Christianity dominates over every other religion.  America dominates over every other nation.

Where their rhetoric has any consistency or coherence it is where they are promising each other power and dominance or warning each other that they have lost or are losing one or the other or both.

It’s not surprising, then, that they love to use words that make them feel powerful and dominating, that make them feel strong and brave and tough and scary, all the things they are at heart afraid they aren’t.

And for them, strength, bravery, toughness, and the ability to make others afraid are all inherently violent qualities because they are all about power and dominance.

Power and dominance are achieved by beating your enemy into powerlessness and abject submission.

So it’s not enough to use words that make you feel strong, brave, tough, and scary.  You need words that make you feel as though you are being strong, brave, tough, and scary, that you are beating your enemy into submission.

In a culture that privileges strength, bravery, toughness, and scariness but sees them all as expressions of power and dominance, the weak and afraid, as you can imagine, are going to suffer ridicule and ostracizing at the least.  Imagine then to be one of the weak or to be someone who suspects he is weak.  Someone like that needs words that make him feel strong and brave but he needs those words even more to make others feel he is strong and brave.

You don’t think Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh don’t know what they are?  

The old veterans march

St Patrick’s Day Parade.  March 21, 2010.  Oliver Mannion, ace photographer.

The Mannionville Daily Gazette Favorite Blogs of the Day: Sciencey guys

Today’s theme:  SCIENCE!

Three favorites today.

Bora Zivkovic’s A Blog Around the Clock.

Ed Yong’s Not Exactly Rocket Science.

And Chad Orzell’s Uncertain Principles.

Because they’re smart, they write well, you can learn stuff, and all three are winners of Seed Media Group’s 2010 Research Blogging Awards.  Bora for Best Biology Blog, Ed for Research Blog of the Year and Blog Post of the Year---Ballistic penises and corkscrew vaginas - the sexual battles of ducks, and you know you’ve got to go read that one---and Chad for Best Blog—Chemistry, Physics, or Astronomy.

Bora, a longtime favorite here in Mannionville and known around these parts by his blogging name Coturnix, was also honored as Research Twitterer of the Year.  Seriously.  And here’s why.

Congratulations, oh you men of SCIENCE!

A nice way to send your congrats to Chad would be to buy his book, How to Teach Physics to Your Dog .  Pop Mannion, a trained physicist himself, gives it a thumbs up:

Professor Orzel has found a unique way to teach (quantum) physics to his dog (and to the reader, of course). The material is covered just as rigorously as in competitive introductory textbooks on the subject but is far more easily digested.

Pop’s way of saying it’s one of the best-written, liveliest, and fun intros to the subject he’s read.

The Constitution as Holy Writ

It’s a good thing Republicans are opposed to judicial activism, otherwise they might try to use the courts to reverse their recent legislative loss in Congress.

Oh.  Wait.

The Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder has a post up about a Republican scheme to scuttle health care reform by casting about for some party stooge of a judge to issue a stay or even rule it or key provisions of the bill unconstitutional.  Ambinder sums up the legal arguments and concludes none of them has much of a chance of succeeding, although to me that sounds like saying that pulling the fire alarm on exam day won’t result in you getting an A for the course.

What these partisan hack state Attorneys General are up to is political vandalism.   Their aim is to postpone the inevitable by making a distracting mess while their political bosses try to figure out some other way out of their predicament.

To be fair, not all of these AG’s are mere vandals breaking windows on the orders of their bosses.  Some of them are sincere and principled opportunists who expect their assault on health care reform to win them votes in their campaigns for re-election and higher office.

But after going over some of the arguments and the legal precedents that will likely get them shot down---one of them, to succeed, if it gets to the Supreme Court, will require Justice Scalia to set aside one of his own arguments, which, if you remember 2000 is something Scalia won’t lose sleep over if he has the temerity to pretend he didn’t mean what he wrote.  We’ll have to count on his vanity to keep him from over-ruling himself---Ambinder writes:

There is a final argument that conservatives will use in public and probably in court as well. It is that something like this -- this behemoth of a health care bill -- would never have been envisioned by the framers.

Ambinder doesn’t see this one getting anywhere either.

Good, because, boy, do I hate this “What the Framers/Founders thought/said/intended/envisioned” line of pietistic bullshit.  One thing the Framers surely did not envision was a nation of 300 million people scattered across a continent 3000 miles wide and living in a post-industrial global economy trying to govern itself according to the supposed dictates of a legal document written by a committee of politicians after a lot of wheeling and dealing and compromises 230 years ago for a nation of 3 million people living in a largely agrarian society mostly confined to the eastern shoreline.

Not only did they not envision their Constitution as still existing as the supreme law of the land a couple of centuries and change later, they didn’t envision it lasting a couple of generations.  They didn’t think it should last that long.  They didn’t think it would be right.  They didn’t think that people should be governed by the dictates of their dead great-grandfathers.

“The earth belongs to the living,” Jefferson wrote.

Jefferson thought the Constitution should be re-written every 19 years or so.  He believed that having a present generation try to live under a system built for a past and dead one was like expecting a young man to wear the winter coat that fit him when he was a boy.  Nations grow and change.  Their laws and customs and mores and responsibilities have to grow and change with them.

There are plenty of other things the Framers didn’t envision, women voting being one of them.  They did envision the abolition of slavery but they didn’t put that vision in the Constitution and it was a long while before you could find a conservative who didn’t think that meant they intended slavery to continue as long as the Republic continued.  Took a war to change people’s minds about the Framers’ intent on that one.

I don’t know what the Framers envisioned about the future of health care when they cobbled together the Constitution.  Considering the invention of the vaccine was still seven years down the road, most of them probably couldn’t envision the eradication of smallpox.  The vaccine was still seven years in the future.  None of them---Franklin possibly excepted---envisioned X-rays, CAT scans, heart and kidney transplants, chemotherapy, blood pressure medication, anti-depressants, or any form of successful brain surgery more advanced than trepanning.  They did not envision the cost of extremely expensive procedures we take for granted to identify, treat, and cure diseases the Framers took it for granted people who had them would just die from.

I guess, then, you could make the argument that what the Framers’ envisioned for national health care was the same as what the Republicans advocate for people who can’t afford health insurance, shrugging fatalistically as death and illness take their natural course, except that the Framers’ would have been being simply realistic and merciful while the Republicans are just being mean, cheap, and heartless.

Mean, cheap, and heartless was probably not what the Framers intended when they opened the Constitution with a statement that one of the purposes of establishing the Constitution was to promote the general Welfare.

But whatever else they intended or envisioned, they certainly did not intend for the Constitution to treated as a religious document and for themselves to be revered and deferred to as if they were doctors and divines of a political religion. 

And they did not intend that conservatives of future generations should set themselves up as high priests of that religion.

One thing the Framers pretty much all agreed on.  They did not like priests and they wanted them to have no part in governing the new nation.  They were an anti-clerical lot, the Framers, even the clerics among them.

A class of priests is as antithetical to democracy as an aristocracy.  Funny, how conservatives love both.  Priests assume unto themselves their authority by claiming a special insight into God’s thinking which they derive by consulting sacred texts that, surprise, only they have the secret knowledge necessary to interpret and understand, and what they say God wants trumps anything those of us without that special insight and secret knowledge may want for ourselves.

And this is what conservatives who claim to speak for the Framers and to interpret their “intent” for the rest of us are doing, setting themselves up as priests by treating the Constitution as Holy Writ and the spur of the moment, ad hoc political and partisan writings of the Framers as sacred texts that only they know how to read correctly.

They are the Holy Rollers of the High Church of the Constitution, no different from bible thumping preachers who awe their flocks (as in sheep to be fleeced) by waving aloft their holy books.  They wave around their copies of the Federalist, spout whatever nonsense that pops into their heads as serving their purpose at the moment, claim divine authority for the nonsense, and  like the preachers who hope that nobody actually looks into their bibles to find out what Jesus really said, count on no one bothering to actually read the damn thing and interrupting the sermon to stand up and shout from their pew, “Hey, that’s not what Madison said at all!  I think you’re full of shit.”

The Mannionville Daily Gazette Week in Review: March 16-22, 2010.

The week started out last Tuesday with some speculating on why the War in the Pacific isn’t remembered as vividly as New Yorker TV critic Nancy Franklin wishes it was.  Lots of good commentary on this post, Where we started the War by almost losing it.

Wednesday we previewed Thursday night’s live-blogging of Robert Altman’s Popeye with the original Popeye cartoon the movie was kinda, sorta based on, Goonland.

And we had some news from Terry Pratchett’s Discworld, a quote from Carpe Jugulum, On talking to kings.

Thursday morning’s newspaper delivered a couple of interesting stories, one on crime, From the Department of Refining the Definition of Chutzpah, an one on pets, Thursday morning homeless animal blogging.

Thursday night the First Annual I Hate Robert Altman Film Festival finished up with my live-blogging of Popeye.  Two more classic Popeye cartoons are included in the post Well, blow me down!

Friday I related a story from our old pal Chris the Cop about a foot chase that didn’t go as well as it might have, Stop! (Pant) In the (gasp) name of (wheeze) the Law!

Saturday morning I wrote from the front porch to praise the new breakfast sandwiches at Subway, even though I have yet to try one, and whine once again about current business practices at big and little box chain stores.

Also, I posted another quote from Carpe Jugulum and a pretty picture of the sunset Saturday evening.

Sunday I was back out on the porch to do some bird watching and miss out on some parade watching, as I reported in a post called Drummers in Love.

And yesterday was all about the House of Representatives passing health care reform.  It’s far from the ideal, too far from it for some Progressives, but still, Congress has passed nothing like it in my memory.

Nothing like it in my memory!

The bill’s flawed.  The process was ugly.  There’s still a lot of work to be done and who knows what will happen in November.

But I don’t care.

They did it!

They did it.

Nothing like this has happened in my memory.

I was too young to be paying attention to the last great Progressive legislative victories on Civil Rights and Medicare and Medicaid.

Since then all the victories have been in one way or another occasions more for sadness than celebration.

Ending the war in Vietnam, running Richard Nixon out of town, saving Bill Clinton.

Even preventing George Bush from destroying Social Security.  That was holding the line.  Which has pretty much been the Progressive record for the last thirty years.  Holding the line against Right Wing Corporatist and Right Wing Christianist assaults on the New Deal, the Great Society, Civil Rights---for African-Americans, women, gays, immigrants, and just about everybody who isn’t “us”---and the Social Contract.

Holding the line and making smaller-scale improvements to programs already in place, expanding rights and benefits incrementally---although much of that work was left to the courts---and undoing some of the harm done by stupid and mean-spirited Republican legislative and executive and, lately, judicial decisions.

Progressivism, at least in Washington, became a defense of the status quo.

This is different.  This is progress.

We can argue later about how much or how little.

But the bill, soon to become the law, is significant for what it signifies as much or more than for what it actually does.

It is the first time since the passage of the minimum wage and child labor laws and workplace safety regulations that it’s been said in law that profits do not matter as much as a human being’s life.

I know.  It doesn’t say profits don’t matter.  But it does say that from here on out no one will die so that people working in the insurance industry can get their Christmas bonuses.

It will take a few years before that’s what actually happens.  But think about it.  For a hundred and thirty years, the guiding principle of the party of Big Business has been that the right of the privileged few to make gobs of money trumps the rights of the rest of us to anything else, a decent wage, a decent job that doesn’t kill us or make us sick, a secure old age, clean water, clean air, food that doesn’t poison us, and, when we or our kids get sick, the right to get treatment without having someone else decide whether or not we can get it based on whether or not it is profitable for them.

And this victory is significant because it is a significant defeat for the the forces of Right Wing reaction.

No movement whose adherents spit on people they disagree with, let alone on United States Congressmen, call anyone nigger, let alone heroes of the Civil Rights movement, jeer and cheer when one of their own calls another human being a faggot, believe that they are the only real Americans, the only ones whose votes and opinions count, the only ones with rights, and raise signs and banners advocating violence and murder just because they’re not getting their way can be allowed to get its way.  No politician who cheerleads for that movement and eggs its followers on and stokes their anger and encourages them to believe that the proper functioning of republican democracy is illegitimate and the duly-elected President of the United States is their enemy can be allowed to go home to his or her district and brag about how they helped win another one for the cause of Right Wing Reaction.

It’s a flawed bill.  There’s a lot of work left to do.  The challenge to women’s rights is serious and dismaying.  The fight isn’t over, on health care, reproductive rights, or any other front.  As Peter Daou says, the fundamental dynamic hasn’t changed and the “GOP and rightwing attack machine will [continue to] do everything possible to destroy Obama's presidency”.

And don’t think for a minute that John Roberts and his fellow Republican Party stooges on the Supreme Court aren’t already looking forward to their chance to declare the whole thing unconstitutional.

And like I said, who knows what’s going to happen in November, except to say that whatever happens, it’s going to happen after a rough and ugly campaign.

Bur right now, I don’t care.

They did it.

They did it!

Last night I said on Twitter God bless Nancy Pelosi and one of my followers said that he appreciated the sentiment but he doesn’t believe in God.  I replied that I don’t believe in Him either, but Nancy Pelosi does and at the moment whatever Nancy Pelosi says goes with me.  God bless her!

And God rest Teddy Kennedy.

__________________

Related reading:

From Crooks and Liars, Ten immediate benefits of HCR.

From Kathy Flake, Armageddon.  Next door to Waterloo.

From Andrew Tobias, A Great Day for America.

A Progressive dissent from Jane Hamsher, submitted by regular reader Mac Magillicuddy.

Paul Krugman: Fear Strikes Out.

Kiko’s House.

Atrios’ Great Big Health Care Reform Post.

Adam Serwer, The American Prospect: A Diversity Win.

More as I find ‘em throughout the day.

Drummers in love

Morning of our local St Patrick’s Day Parade, which is always held the Sunday after Mach 17.  Parade starts after lunch.  After breakfast there’s a 5K charity run.  The race starts from the parking lot of the middle school right up the street.  I’m having coffee on our front porch.  The gun has gone off and I’m watching the crowd of runners, many in T-shirts that are bright yellow or red, official colors of this year’s race, I guess, chugging by with whoops and hollers and cheers of self-encouragement.

Past few years we’ve hosted a brunch for people from the blonde’s office who ran in the race or tagged along to cheer on their colleagues, friends, and loved ones.  No brunch this year.  Blonde decided we’d wind up with too many left-overs.  Only a couple of the usual suspects entered this year.  The novelty or the challenge has worn off for a lot of them.  Age has caught up with some of the others.  But I suspect the real cause of the fall-off of enthusiasm is that the two prettiest young women who used to come to cheer the gang on have both moved on to new jobs out of state and the younger guys don’t have anyone to show off for.

It’s too bad because this is the first year in a long while that we’ve had a nice day for the run and the parade.  It’s not as nice as yesterday.  More clouds, the breeze is stiffer, so it’s a bit chilly.  Chillier here in the shadows on the porch.  But the sun’s out and there are no puddles or snow drifts to wade through.

This is my second morning of coffee and blogging on the porch of the season.  I’m sitting on the top step with my back against the post, not exactly comfortable but I’m not dragging out the porch furniture yet or putting away the snow shovels because I don’t want to give the weather gods any ideas.  March may come in like a lion and go out like a lamb where the poets live, but around here most days it is just the tired, indecisive tail-end of winter and if the weather gods make up their minds to do something big on any given day it’s as likely to be a blizzard as a spring shower, with warm, or warmish, sunny days like today and yesterday tending to show up randomly throughout the month as pleasant surprises.

As far as the birds seem concerned, though, it’s spring.  No human beings will be stopping by for a free meal, but I’ve got plenty of company out here.  Robins, more robins, cardinals in the hedges at the far end of the yard, at least one mockingbird going back and forth from the roof to the ornamental I’ve never been able to identify, and a bold and inquisitive catbird who spends a lot of time in the holly bushes under the living room window.  I don’t know if he lives there or regards it as his office, but whichever it is he thinks of it as his and he keeps hopping over from the bushes onto the porch railing to give me a challenging and inquisitive look, probably wondering what I think I’m doing intruding on his property.

The presence of robins isn’t the sure sign of spring I used to think it was.  The robins aren’t back.  Robins don’t come back because they don’t go away.  Robins don’t migrate.  They hide.  When the weather starts to turn in the fall they take shelter in the deeper parts of the woods.  There are whole flocks roosting in there, biding their time, and this is how they can fool you in the late winter because it’s not much of a haul for them to leave the woods for a snack  and a look around on your front lawn during a thaw.

There’ll be a warm spell, the patches of brown grass will have grown in the yard, pushing back the snow to the shadow lines, birds that don’t go anywhere in the winter---blue jays and cardinals and chickadees and sparrows---have started acting friskier and making more noise, and then there’ll be a robin or two pulling at something in the dead leaves and people will think, Tra la, it’s spring! and dash inside to put away the snow shovels, change into shorts, and come running back outside ready to toss around the Frisbees and find themselves standing in a blizzard, snow up to their bare knees, and not a robin in sight, they’re back in the woods laughing at how they caught another one.

Robins have a mean, merciless laugh.  Listen to them sometime.

I keep looking around and listening for our woodpecker.  He wasn’t around yesterday either.  I think he’s an early riser and finishes up his business in the neighborhood before the other birds clock in.  Few days ago he woke me up with his drumming on the gutters of the house behind ours.  I know better but in my grogginess I forgot and thought, “Stupid bird.  What kind of bug you think you’re going to drill through metal to eat?”

Of course, when I’m fully awake and can think straight I know that when a woodpecker is pecking the way woodpeckers peck in cartoons he’s not trying to make a hole, he’s trying to make noise.  What he, or she, females do it too, although not as insistently or often, is doing is called drumming, because that’s exactly what it is.  Woodpeckers drum instead of sing but it’s their music and they make it for the same reason other birds do, to announce territorial boundaries and attract mates.  When they want to put a hole in a tree to get at insects they dig and scratch with their beaks.  Then they drum to show off and call out, “Look at these great holes I made.  Want to join me for lunch?”

The race is over.  Sore and tired-looking humans are wandering back from the finish line down by the firehouse.  The birds are quieting down.  The clouds are breaking up, the breeze is falling.  It’s going to be quite warm for the parade.  The parade assembles on our street.  Pretty soon the bagpipers, Civil War re-enactors, leprechauns, step-dancers, and Boy Scout fife and drum corps will start to gather right in front of our house.  I’d better get out of here before the driveway’s blocked by a float full of little kids dressed as shamrocks and sheep.

First beautiful day for a St Patrick’s Day parade in ages and wouldn’t you know it, I have to go to work.

Looking west while the rotisserie chicken gets cold

Cell phone shot.  Sunset outside the grocery store.  Around seven-thirty tonight.   Saturday, March 20, 2010. 

The smug mask of virtue triumphant

The smug mask of virtue triumphant can be almost as horrifying as wickedness revealed.

---from Carpe Jugulum by Terry Pratchett