Most of us were, at some point in our education, assigned to read Jonathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal," an essay that mocks mistreatment of the Irish poor by proposing that Irish children be bred for their meat. It works as satire because cannibalism is a powerful taboo in most societies. Blandly proposing it as a solution to poverty is, therefore, a shocking, obviously tongue-in-cheek indictment of the uncaring and inhumane policies towards the poor that were in place at that time.

Of course, if eating children had seriously been proposed as a solution in 18th century Ireland, "A Modest Proposal" would not have been very effective satire.

This is why I'm annoyed rather than amused by the latest New Yorker cover depicting Obama as a Muslim and his wife as gun-toting black radical. In a society where the likes of Ann Coulter, Glenn Beck, and Rush Limbaugh were consigned to the fringes of political discourse it might be a nice punchy, obviously over-the-top bit of satire.

Unfortunately, that's not the society we live in. On the contrary, people like Ann Coulter, Glenn Beck, and Rush Limbaugh are invited to air their views on nationally broadcast shows and treated as though they are serious political thinkers. They are, in effect, part of the "mainstream."

And while there are many complacent liberals and moderates trying very, very hard to pretend otherwise, the images in that cartoon are not taken as fact only on the margins of society. They, too, have been mainstreamed. Ergo, they don't embarrass or outrage either that dumb section of the right wing who believe Michelle Obama is a black radical and Barack Obama a secret Muslim, or that smarter section of the right wing who don't believe it but are delighted that other people do.

Let me make it clear that I'm not redfaced with rage, demanding apologies from the cartoonist and threatening to cancel my New Yorker subscription. The smug naivete that cartoon reveals, however, does irritate the Hell out of me. I'm reminded of the dozey moderates who, when confronted with our country's dangerous slide into hateful political rhetoric, declare that "Coulter is just crazy" and "Limbaugh is just an idiot" as if these facts render both Coulter and Limbaugh harmless. Many Americans seem unable to get their heads around the idea that a crazy woman and an idiot could do a tremendous amount of damage given the kind of national coverage enjoyed by both Coulter and Limbaugh. And they also seem unwilling to admit the deep inroads raw hatred and irrationality have already made into the American mainstream, and the effect it is having on our political process. Somehow they missed the Swift Boat veteran attacks on John Kerry.

No doubt being annoyed rather than amused at the cartoon qualifies me as one of those stone-faced liberal dogmatists Gary Kamiya has deounced in Salon. I just don't think political satire can be separated from its context.

In fact, I don't see how political satire can be separated from its context.

“Should I feel guilty because I’m glad he’s dead? If I feel like liberal democrats are American traitors, isn’t that a logical response?”

Comment made in the wake of Paul Wellstone's death on Lucianne.com

First of all, let's make something clear -- the announcement by the moderators about removing inappropriate comments in the wake of Snows death was NOT prompted by mere criticism of Snow's career. It was prompted by ugly "jokes" that were posted here in the wake of news about Snow's relapse several months ago. Some people here are trying very hard to pretend that the moderators are overreacting to "thoughtful criticism" of Snow. That's not what it is about. It's about people mocking the man's suffering, and the suffering of his family.

Now, to answer your questions:

Why exactly is it bad to acknowledge that the world is a slightly better place now that some people are gone, if for nothing more than a sense of justice?

In most cases it takes a rather staggering freight of hubris and malice to declare unequivocally that the death of an individual human being has made the world "a slightly better place." Making this assumption in the context of politics isn't just arrogant and malicious -- it's dangerous. The notion that the death of certain human beings will make the world a better place is what has driven institutionalized mass murder on both the right and the left.

"They aren't here to defend themselves" is a weak argument, since many bad people, while living, felt no guilt in attacking the defenseless.

Whether or not the person in question felt guilt about "attacking the defenseless" is completely beside the point. Moral and decent people do not take their cues on morality and decency from the immoral and the indecent. A system of "ethics" that's applied ONLY to people you like is not a system of ethics.

"It's disrespectful" also does not work. What is it about death that automatically grants one the respect that many were not willing to grant them in life because of their evil deeds?"

It's not just Tony Snow's death. It was just as disgusting when people were mocking him for his terminal illness when he was still alive.

"Think of the family?" Did the deceased think of the families of those who they were hurting? Did the deceaseds' families try and prevent the evil done by their loved ones? Didn't the deceaseds' families usually directly benefit from the actions taken by their dead relations at the expense of someone else?

I had no idea you knew Snow's family so well and on such a personal basis that you can make such a confident assertion. That said, I can only repeat: Moral and decent people do not take their cues on morality and decency from the immoral and the indecent. A system of "ethics" that's applied ONLY to people you like is not a system of ethics.

"It makes us look bad." Should we really care about what "they" think of us at this point? "They" have been working so hard for so long to hurt us; what they think of us should be the least of our concerns at this point.

Inasmuch as "they" are not just Freepers and right-wingers, but other liberals and Democrats who loathe Freeper-like behavior whether it comes from Freepers or DU-ers, yes, we should care. This is a POLITICAL BLOG. Much of politics involves not engaging in such repulsive behavior that you alienate the very people you are trying to convince and embarrass those who would otherwise be on your side.

I've written a great deal about this kind of malice, and how destructive, how ugly it is. In most of my writings, I've used the many, many examples available from the right side of the aisle.

So I'm not going to bite my tongue when I see Democrats and liberals engaging in similar mockery of the personal tragedies of Republicans and Conservatives.

I really have to say I'm astounded by the emotional stake so many DUers seem to have in hatred. Some of you clutch it to your chests like an alky hugging a bottle. Is reserving a group of people you can despise unreservedly so very important to you guys? Is everything truly spoiled for you if you DON'T have someone whose sufferings you can mock? I'm reminded of the people who become outraged at the prospect of prison inmates NOT being mistreated, NOT being abused, NOT being raped or tortured.

Is that nasty tickle you get when contemplating the pain of someone whose politics you dislike so very, very important to you?

Some call it desperation. I call it a sense of impunity. Never underestimate the lobotomizing comfort of uttering malicious crap secure in the knowledge that you’ll be surrounded and backed up by many others repeating the same malicious crap. The latest kerfuffle in the right-wing blogosphere, still fresh from their triumph over Rachael Ray’s terroristic accessorizing, has to do with Obama’s “gaffe” in citing an uncle who was among the American troops that liberated Auschwitz.

Except that it was a great uncle, and the camp was Buchenwald.

Which, of course, changes everything. How could Obama have gotten such a thing wrong? I mean, really, doesn’t every school child knows the difference between Auschwitz and Buchenwald? And he called his great uncle his uncle! Pretty damning that. Nobody calls a great uncle “uncle.” It’s just not done! These gross inconsistencies call for a closer look. After all, nobody who has ever recounted a family story from two generations back could possibly be so imprecise unless they were either willfully lying or so stunningly ignorant they are unfit to hold office.

Fortunately, eagle-eyed rightwing bloggers are on the case, and they’ve discovered some disturbing discrepancies involving the “uncle's” middle initial, which naturally raises the question -- was this so-called “uncle” of Obama’s really at Buchenwald? Boy detective Steve Gilbert, of the right wing website Sweetness and Light contacted a website devoted to the 89th division and posted the following question to him:

Mr. Kitchell,

As you may have heard by now, Barack Obama has claimed that his great uncle Charlie Payne was a member of the 89th Div that liberated Buchenwald.

According to records his full name is either Charles W Payne or Charles T Payne (most likely the former), and he was born in 1924 — and he is still alive today.

He most likely was from Kansas at the time of enlistment.

Do you have any record of this gentleman?

Thank you,

Steve Gilbert
sweetness-light.com

And blushing prettily, he added the following postscript:

PS - If you go to my website, you will see that I was probably the first to note the error in Mr. Obama’s first claims about his “uncle.”

The response he got from the website manager, 89th infantry division veteran Raymond Kitchell, was sensible and succinct:

Please crawl back under the rock you came out from.

Good day

Raymond Kitchell, veteran 89th Inf Div

The reaction from Steve Gilbert and other right-wingers has been pretty fascinating. Gilbert described the website as one that “purports to honor the 89th Infantry Division.” (Other people might be fooled by the website’s sections on the 89th’s combat history, personal accounts, and reunion events, but not Mr. Gilbert!) Rightwing blogger Macsmind declared that, “While there are no doubt some antiwar WWII vets who are against the present conflict, after knowing a lot of them I’ve never heard this type of language or rhetoric coming from them” and snidely implied that Raymond Kitchell was too senile to have actually responded, adding, “Of course the man is 83, but if the father is indeed - the website claims - active, mentally vital, he should be able to answer his own emails.”

This last is a bizarre form of skepticism that’s endemic among bloggers who fancy themselves online detectives. Frequently the self-appointed expert will make comments intended to impress readers with his or her knowledge and experience, but instead leave the impression of startling naivete – in this case, the notion that WWII vets opposed to the current Iraqi war are so rare and gentle a breed that acerbic language calls into question whether or not it’s actually a veteran who is speaking.

No, I don’t know for sure whether or not it was Raymond or Mark Kitchell who told Gilbert to crawl back under a rock – but I have no trouble imagining a WWII vet saying such a thing to someone questioning the war record of a soldier who served in his infantry division. And it certainly doesn’t strain belief to the breaking point to imagine someone in his 80s dictating this response to his more Internet-savvy son.

It’s possible that not only Obama’s great uncle, but the Kitchells and their site are going to be subjected to the kind of rightwing “detective work” already endured by Graeme Frost’s family and the late Andy Stephenson. If that’s the case, I can only hope that the online spectacle it creates will at last give this manner of blogging the unsavory reputation it deserves and embarrass the right wing mainstream into reassessing its tolerance for this kind of garbage.

Tell me, my fellow Americans, when we speak of World War I, is the renaming of sauerkraut “Liberty Cabbage” cited as one of our finer hours? How about the harassment of German Americans? When we talk about World War II, are “patriotic” American shopkeepers who put up signs like “No Jap Trade for the Duration” or wags who bought amusing “Jap hunting licenses” remembered fondly by most of us? Are these things ever cited by reputable historians as factors that ensured our victory in these wars?

Of course not.

Time and time again over the decades, there’s been a segment of our population who imagine that wars are won by harassing their fellow citizens, instituting loyalty oaths, insulting people with German/Japanese/Arabic names, renaming foods so that hamburgers become “Liberty steak,” and French Fries, “Freedom Fries,” demanding that others refrain from owning dachshunds/listening to Madame Butterfly/wearing anything that looks like it might be a kaffiyeh. Time and again, after a few years have passed, these manifestations of “patriotism” are remembered with emotions ranging from embarrassment to profound shame.

And yet, we keep doing them. It’s as if some incurably dumb part of humanity is incapable of learning from history. “Sure,” some of us think,” it was stupid and wrong back in 1917 to drive that hardware store out of business because the owner’s name was Gerstein and he had been spotted wearing lederhosen at a picnic the summer before. But this time it makes sense…”

It’s latest manifestation took place last week, when a dastardly attempt to brainwash America through accessorizing was foiled by the wide-awake folks at Little Green Footballs and other right wing websites. It seems that Rachael Ray wore a black and white fringed scarf in an ad for Dunkin’ Donuts that looked kind of like a kaffiyeh. And we all know what that means, right? As a poster on Exurbanleague so sagely and civilly put it:

“You see Rachael donning the Palestinian kaffiyeh above, while shilling Homer Simpson's favorite toric delicacies. I must admit that the scarf pairs nicely with the Swastika earrings.

I'll take one glazed, a large coffee, and death to the Jews... to go!”

Now, quite aside from the fact that a close look at the ad in question reveals Ray to be wearing a fringed black and white paisley scarf – not a kaffiyeh – there’s the offensiveness of assuming that this widely used and practical item of middle-eastern clothing is the equivalent to a Nazi lapel pin. Countless people wear kaffiyehs who are not genocidal anti-Semites and have no connection whatsoever with terrorism -- except in the minds of those who equate wearing a kaffiyeh with being Palestinian/Arab and being Palestinian/Arab with being a terrorist.

But the sheer power of bone stupid has once again revealed itself. Dunkin’ Donuts has withdrawn the ad and now Little Green Footballs and Exurbanleague are exchanging high fives.

It’s tempting to dismiss this kind of thing as a joke – until you consider that it’s really all about bullying people into compliance with the bully’s narrowly defined notion of “patriotism.” A passage in Exurbanleague’s post on the subject is especially revealing: “The last thing we need is for the kaffiyeh to become the next version of the ubiquitous Che T-shirts.”

We all know the dire results of the promiscuous wearing of Che’s image, right? Who can forget back in the seventies, all those desperate suburbanites battling the armed cadres of roaming reds? Exhausted Republican householders could only pause occasionally behind the barricades they’d constructed to shake their heads with regret and think, “If only I’d done something about that college boy who was spotted wearing Che t-shirt in the park last year…”

It’s not about protecting western civilization. It’s about intimidation, about conformity. It’s about these cowards having the power to smear and punish those of us who dare to wear something they don’t like because it looks like something those durned AY-rabs wear. Don’t imagine for one instant that this is not going to result in individuals who wear kaffiyehs getting hassled or insulted, equated with Nazis. That’s what it’s all about, and the people who spearheaded this campaign know it.

Thirty or forty years from now, when the attacks on the Rachael Ray Dunkin Donuts ad are being cited as another example of stupid bigotry akin to kicking the Grubers’ pet dachshund to death during WWI, many of those who participated will, if they’re still around, be damned grateful they were doing it using pseudonyms.

Or maybe they’ll be too busy protecting America by writing angry letters about an ad campaign featuring a model who looks like she’s wearing something similar to a Bolivian pollera, a choice of costume that shows a criminal ignorance of, or possibly even sympathy for, the Bolivian menace…

“is there a Tony Snow’s tumor appreciation thread? I hope his tumor makes a full recovery from that bad case of Tony it’s got.”

From a DU thread on Tony Snow’s recent trip to the hospital

It’s one thing to blurt out something hateful on the spur of the moment -- to say “good” after hearing news of some personal tragedy striking a public figure you despise.

It’s another thing to sit down and write something celebrating such a tragedy, proofread it, and then hit the send button so that it’s posted on a public forum.

And it’s quite another thing to embrace hatred in this manner, and attack anyone who refuses to join in.

The current freepification of political rhetoric is understandable on an intellectual level in the same way that intoxication is understandable. We’ve all seen at some point in our lives the person who’s had a few too many and who truly believes that he or she is being funny and/or brave, and/or brilliant. Such drunks will often get belligerent with anyone who tries to get them to sit down, shut up, and eat something. And if you dare to touch their bottles or put a full glass out of their reach – well, they sometimes have to be physically restrained from smacking you. You are now officially their enemy.

Not so long ago getting drunk on hatred was mainly the province of people who posted to sites like Free Republic or Little Green Footballs. Unfortunately, quite a few people on the left side of the political equation have apparently watched Freepers post on subjects like the death of Paul Wellstone, Rachel Corrie, and Marla Ruzicka, and, instead of being revolted, have been envious. “Kewel!” they’ve exclaimed. “We should do that!”

And so they ran out and bought themselves case of the same stuff, guzzled it down, and are now staggering around the blogosphere slurring their words, waving their fists, and throwing up on anyone who gets in their way. They are distinguishable from Freepers only because they insert the names of right-wingers or perceived right-wingers in the places where Freepers would insert the names of liberals or perceived liberals. And to make the spectacle truly pathetic, they seem to fondly imagine themselves as courageous defenders of their cause, tough hombres contemptuously brushing aside all those weak namby-pambys who draw the line at gloating about a man quite possibly dying from cancer.

One of the side effects of hate intoxication is a blurring of vision, an inability to perceive nuance. Objecting to their behavior is instantly interpreted as praise for the individual they’ve attacked. “Wassamatta wid you” they ask, focusing blearily on the person who’s just objected to Hillary Clinton being called a “fucking whore” or has expressed the hope for Tony Snow’s recovery. “You some kinda big fanna Bush? You think you’re some kinda high and mighty saint?” Frequently they’ll launch into imitations, miming attempts at common decency. “Oh, geeze, poooooooor so-and-so! He just got rushed to the hospital! Ima gonna cry!” Then, “Nope!” they’ll declare triumphantly, with all the archness of that man at the end of the bar who’s had four strong martinis and thinks he’s being cute, “the tears just ain’t cummin. I’m a baaad, baaaaaaad person!”

Another symptom is a queasiness that’s at odds with the macho stance these guys frequently adopt. One minute they’re marching about unshaven, an ammo belt draped over their chest, a cigar stub clenched in their gritted teeth, railing about all those squeamish sissies who don’t courageously join in cheering some horrific personal tragedy striking either a Republican or a perceived Republican. The next minute they’re asking to be excused because, faced with the statement that the Republican or perceived Republican is a human being, Sergeant Rock’s tummy has gone all flopsie and he has to go upchuck in the bushes.

Sorry to spoil the fun guys, but you really need to lay off that stuff. It’ll kill ya. Yes, I know, while you’re on it you feel ever so tough, ever so smart and strong and brave, but that’s just an illusion.

To anyone who’s not drinking from that bottle you look as dumb, out of control, and easily manipulated as any Freeper.

“I see you’re a fellow I can talk plainly to, Jaggar,” Waffing said in a deep, bluff voice. “A man much like myself. I like what you’re doing. As I’ve said many times myself, the only way to treat enemies of genetic purity is to smash their skulls.”
From the Iron Dream, by Norman Spinrad

Linda Vester: You say you'd rather not talk to liberals at all?;
Ann Coulter: I think a baseball bat is the most effective way these days.
From FOX News Channel, DaySide with Linda Vester, 10/6/04

So we've been talking about police protection during the upcoming convention when all those stinky protesters are coming… You know, I'll tell you what works on a crowd like this -- a machine gun, that always works very well...You must have order, you cannot have a civilized society without order and if that means cracking a few skulls, so be it. A good ole boy network is what you need and hand out some ax handles.
Chris Baker KTLK radio morning show, 4/4/08

Most of Norman Spinrad’s The Iron Dream consists of the posthumously published novel of that famous Golden Age science fiction writer, Adolf Hitler. As any science fiction fan knows, Hitler relocated to the United States shortly after Germany won the war in 1919. His final work was the Hugo Award-winning novel and cult classic, Lord of the Swastika, a bizarre meld of hard science fiction and high fantasy that tells the story of Feric Jaggar, a genetically pure “trueman” in a post-apocalyptic world polluted with evil, foul-smelling mutants. “Let Adolf Hitler transport you to a far-future Earth, where only FERIC JAGGAR and his mighty weapon, the Steel Commander, stand between the remnants of true humanity and annihilation at the hands of the totally evil Dominators and the mindless mutant hordes they completely control.” reads the intro. Lord of the Swastika is a retelling of the rise of the Third Reich, as filtered through the lens of an Adolf Hitler who never became chancellor of Germany.

There are many vivid and memorable monsters in “Hitler’s” book – regiments of pinheaded mutant warriors, enormous amoebas covered with rows of fanged mouths, legless pigs, mucous encased chickens… But for readers outside the alternate history timeline in which Spinrad has nested his novel, some of the most monstrous passages can be found in the chapter where Feric Jaggar and his storm troopers, the Soldiers of the Swastika, take the fictional stand-ins for Weimar Republic leaders prisoner:

Only Krull, out of his senile whining arrogance, presumed to address Feric under these circumstances. ‘What is this filthy outrage, Jaggar?’ he wheezed, ‘How dare you -- “

Before the old degenerate could further pollute the atmosphere, the nearest SS guard ended the outburst with a smart backhanded blow across the mouth that left the old pirate drooling blood.

Feric favored this fine young fanatic with a modest nod of approval…

“I will now inform you of the reason for your arrest,” Feric said.

“Arrest!” Guilder cried. “You mean kidnapping!”

A gun butt to the back of the head ended this unseemly outburst….

”I see that it is time to clear the air once and for all,” Feric observed, unsheathing the Steel Commander and raising the gleaming shaft high above his head. He stepped forward a few steps, and with one irresistible strike brought the headball of the Great Truncheon down on the top of Gelbart’s skull, and dashed the Dom’s head to pieces.

With the dominator who had controlled them lying inert in his chair with his putrid brains spattered all over the Council table, the seven remaining Councilors had no further illusions as to the gravity of their situation…

The defiance of men taken prisoner by an armed, lawless band is depicted as contemptible. Striking an old man across the jaw is depicted as admirable. This topsy-turvy presentation illustrates the alien nature, not just of the setting that “Adolf Hitler, Science Fiction author” has created, but of the mindset that the real Hitler enabled. Lord of the Swastika is presented as having been written in an alternate universe where countless science fiction fans read these passages and were enraptured by them. It seemed incredible in post-war America that anyone could read such a scene and maintain the illusion of Feric Jaggar as a “hero.”

It’s not so incredible today. We’re not as aware in 2008 of how the inverted morality of the Third Reich came to seem normal to so many German citizens in the 1930s. We have deliberately forgotten it.

In 1972, when The Iron Dream was first published, Nazi Germany was still well within living memory. “Godwin’s Law” had yet to be formulated. Writers still felt there was an object lesson to be gleaned from the rise and fall of the Third Reich other than “Genocide is bad,” and that one of those lessons had to do with the effects of dehumanizing language. Readers of that time would have drawn a direct line from the language used in the quote from “Waffing/Goering” with which I opened this piece to Feric Jaggar’s bludgeoning to death an unarmed opponent a few pages later.

It’s not so obvious to readers today -- not in a new century where the right is trying to redraw Hitler as a liberal. Not where nationally broadcast propagandists like Ann Coulter and Michael Savage use language similar to the rhetoric of Julius Streicher and are paid for it and applauded by legions of enthusiastic fans:

… the scum at CNN, the verminist traitors at MSNBC have gone over to the enemy's side.
5/13/04,Michael Savage

...these big-mouthed, phony scum of the ACLU ... should be put into Abu Ghraib prison.
4/19/2004 Michael Savage

If liberals are not traitors, their only fallback argument at this point is that they’re really stupid.
9/12/2007 Ann Coulter

Women like Pamela Harriman and Patricia Duff are basically Anna Nicole Smith from the waist down. Let's just call it for what it is. They're whores.
11/16/00 Ann Coulter

Scum, traitors, whores, vermin… No wonder that a tragedy suffered by a liberal or a perceived liberal is frequently met on the right, not with the fellow feeling owed to another human being, but ridicule. It’s the act of a “bleeding heart” to angst over the problems of “vermin” or “traitors.”

Have some women who lost their husbands in 9/11 voiced criticism of Bush and his war? Imply they are enjoying their widowhood, that their dead husbands probably didn’t love them anyway and had wanted to divorce them. Suggest they pose for pornography.

Has an actor afflicted with Parkinson’s made an impassioned and public plea for stem cell research? Accuse him of deliberately exaggerating his symptoms. Do an amusing imitation of him while you’re at it.

Has a young peace activist named Marla Ruzicka been killed in Iraq? Say that it’s not such a sad thing, given this dead girl’s politics. Call it poetic justice.

And those are just examples involving public figures, paid commentators like Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, and Debbie Schlussel. Visit sites like Free Republic, listen to some of the callers to talk radio, and you encounter rhetoric that sometimes does more than merely border on the violent. We haven’t reached the point, as far as I know, where right-wingers are openly applauding someone backhanding an old man across the mouth. We are, however, at the point where a photograph of a policeman arresting an elderly code-pink demonstrator, gets the following comment on FR without any demurrals from other Free Republic readers:

“I wish I was the arresting officer. I may be on suspension, but giving that witches arm an extra twist and ‘accidental’ baning her head into the all would have been worth it.”

At the end of The Iron Dream Spinrad added an addendum, an “afterword to the second edition” by “Homer Whipple of New York University.” “Whipple” comments on the clunkiness of the prose, the unconvincing characters, the absurd phallic imagery running through the story, and the “psychotic” violence. But his insight into Hitler’s fiction is limited by the alternate timeline in which he lives, a time where “The Greater Soviet Union bestrides Eurasia like a drunken brute,” and the second world war as we know it never took place. And so the afterword denounces as absurd “the ridiculous notion that an entire nation would throw itself at the feet of a leader simply on the basis of mass displays of public fetishism, orgies of blatant phallic symbolism, and mass rallies enlivened with torchlight and rabid oratory. Obviously such a mass national psychosis could never occur in the real world.”

In 1972 this was an unsubtle bow to readers who knew for a fact that such a “mass national psychosis” is quite possible. Rereading it today, I feel as if I’ve awakened into the world of that other universe, the one where the history of the Third Reich is little more than a fantastic piece of fiction.

We don’t dismiss Nazi Germany as a science fiction novel – we just treat it like one. We have refused to take seriously what it reveals about the ways in which government can manipulate hatred, dehumanization, and violence. We’ve clapped our hands over our ears, squeezed our eyes shut, and shouted “Godwin’s Law,” every time it’s implied that those lessons might apply to us, every time ugly similarities are pointed out, however timidly, however indirectly.

While claiming to be “respectful” of the victims of Hitler’s Nazism, we’ve allowed the same dehumanization that ultimately destroyed those victims to take root and flourish.

The word for this is not “respect.”

The war on language continues. Today the word of the week is “racism.” I popped off an essay on racism over the weekend. It wasn’t anything I considered especially insightful or ground-breaking, just a reminder that racism is primarily defined as:

“A belief or doctrine that inherent differences among the various human races determine cultural or individual achievement, usually involving the idea that one's own race is superior and has the right to rule others.”


I pointed out that it doesn’t matter how sincerely you believe it, or how convinced you are that your belief is backed up by personal experience or science. It doesn’t matter how good your diction is, how much you liked the movie Mississippi Burning, or how assiduously you avoid using the “N” word or wearing white hoods or brown shirts. If you believe the above, even if you defend it by offering cites from The Bell Curve with a Boston accent, you are a racist.

Not rocket science. Not even basic bottle-rocket construction. And since I posted it to liberal websites, I expected maybe a few chuckles and a tepid compliment or two, but not much more.

The outrage! The horror! Oh, oh, oh, that icky “R” word! I should be ashamed! I was the one who was the bigot. What about all those white people who are afraid of walking through black neighborhoods? What about the Hispanics? What about the disabled? What about obnoxious black people who play their music too loud and wear baggy pants? What about black anti-Semitism? Black people can be racist too! Did I ever think of that? Huh? Well, did I?

A couple of helpful souls told me that the whole issue could be solved by avoiding those awful “R” words and thinking up something else. That way, people wouldn’t get all upset and the lines of communication would stay open. In fact, let’s get rid of the whole concept of “race” altogether! Don’t use it in any form at all.

Okay everybody, listen up, let’s all agree to not use words like “race” or “racist” or “racism,” or for that matter, “white” or “black!” Why, within a year or two (a decade, tops) the entire concept of race will fade from our collective consciousness and peace and brotherhood would reign forevermore on this earth!

The word I suggest is “Igglepop.” It’s neutral, it’s cheerful, it’s unthreatening. For instance, if someone announces that, as much as it pains them to say so, and while there are certainly exceptions among their black friends, the simple fact is that science shows people of African descent to have an unchangeable and significant intellectual deficit when compared to Europeans, they won’t be upset by being called a “racist.”

Instead, they’ll be called “Igglepopians,” a brand spanking new word that doesn’t conjure up images from the Nazi or the Jim Crow era, which really would be awfully unfair because people just don’t wear their hair like that anymore. The lines of communication would stay open, and they could proudly affirm that they are not “racists” advocating “racism” but “Igglepopians” advocating “Igglepop.” They could even put it in the title of books without their main sales being conducted at gun shows or the Stormfront website. I picture a thousand blossoms blooming: How I Became an Igglepopian, In Defense of Igglepop, Igglepop and Reason, The Myth of the 21st Century…

And if some bigoted person said “Hey, that’s racism,” everyone could laughingly set them straight. “Racism” is a long dead twentieth-century, pre-911 phenomenon that often proved to have a deceptive veneer of benevolent paternalism overlaying a foundation of violence and sometimes, even genocide. “Igglepop” would not have that kind of history.

Pretty soon, “racism” will be no more. In its place will be the truly new form of thinking known as “Igglepop.”

The only problem I foresee is that as new paradigms like “Igglepop” become widespread and put into practice, other new words have to be invented.

We’ll have to come up with some new word for “discrimination.”

Racism: A belief or doctrine that inherent differences among the various human races determine cultural or individual achievement, usually involving the idea that one's own race is superior and has the right to rule others.

One of the best public service ads on racism that I’ve ever seen aired some time in the 1970s. It showed a man, white, well groomed and in a business suit, explaining with a plausible smile and the diction of a college graduate how really, he’s not prejudiced, but well, you know, people are just different. I can’t remember the exact script, but as I recall the smiling man said something to the effect that it’s not that he objected to them moving into the neighborhood or working in his office. But come on, let’s face it, differences in education can mean differences in behavior, and often these people just don’t understand what’s required…

The ad then faded to a boy of about ten or eleven, plainly meant to be this guy’s son. He was talking too, and smiling, but with the sly glee of a child who believes he’s been given permission to hate. “…They expect the government to take care of them, and they lay around drinking all day, throwing garbage all over the place. And then they say they want to be your friend…”

What’s striking about this old ad for a twenty-first century viewer is that it assumes its audience was sophisticated enough to shudder at the thought of their children repeating what the boy in the commercial was naively spouting.

Times have changed. More and more I’m hearing, not just the racism-wrapped-in-euphemism of the man in that ad, but the more unvarnished version offered by the boy. I’m hearing that kid’s riff not from children, but from adults who proudly cite their presumed wisdom and experience, not from semi-literate souls in trailer parks but from supposedly educated people. It’s as if that boy grew up and acquired his father’s veneer of adulthood, but not his ability to soft-pedal his racism.

A typical example that recently attracted attention online via Glenn Greenwald, is from a contributor to a blog called Instapunk.

…I am sick to death of black people as a group. The truth. That is part of the conversation Obama is asking for, isn't it?... I see young black males wearing tee shirts down to their knees -- and jeans belted just above their knees…. I want to smack them. All of them. They are egregious stereotypes. It's impossible not to think the unthinkable N-Word when they roll up beside you…

… There ARE niggers. Black people know it. White people know it. …
I'm not proposing the generalized use of the term, just trying to be clear for once, in the wake of Obama's call for us to have a dialogue about race….black people will know what I mean when I demand they concede that the following people are niggers:

- Jeremiah Wright
- O.J. Simpson
- Marion Barry
- Alan Iverson
- William Jefferson
- Louis Farrakhan
- Mike Tyson

You know what I mean. They hold you back. They're dirty, violent, and stupid…Here's the biggest thing we "racists" notice. Every single immigrant group that ever came to America -- including the Chinese who came as railroad slaves -- has risen out of poverty and want to prosperity and respect. The Irish, the Italians, the Polish, the Jews, the Koreans, the Vietnamese. Every group but you…

The man who wrote this describes himself as an “old guy,” but I can’t think of a better example of schoolyard nastiness than to take Barack Obama’s call for an honest dialogue on race as license to scream “nigger” at African Americans. And there are few more insulting and arrogant than to demand that, as some twisted gesture of goodwill, African Americans join in with you in calling fellow African Americans “niggers.”

A lot of people these days, online and off, apparently don’t have a clue about what “racism” entails. They have the vague idea that it is undesirable to be called a “racist,” but they truly don’t seem to realize that the term “racism” describes what they are embracing.

It does. What follows is a sort of refresher course aimed, not just at the “old guy” who posted the garbage on Instapunk, but various online bloggers and posters who, over the years, have offered the same arguments, over and over again, during discussions about racism:

1. First of all, you folks need to get over the notion that everybody is like you. Don’t tell us what we “know” or what we “feel.” Not all of us are constantly biting back the “N” word. When I hear the word “nigger,” I can honestly say that I don’t think of an African American. I don’t even think of a young African American man in a big t-shirt, low-belted jeans, driving a Honda and listening to rap music. When I hear or read the word “nigger,” I think of a white bigot saying it.

2. The fact that some predominantly black neighborhoods are dangerous places does not mean that white people are as victimized by racism as black people are. Everybody, white and black, is afraid of being mugged or murdered. The difference is that a law-abiding, nervous white person walking through a black neighborhood at night is likely to be relieved at the sight of a police car. A law-abiding, nervous black person walking through a white neighborhood might not be relieved at all (especially in the south.) The white menacing figure for many black Americans has all too often worn the uniform of a policeman or a sheriff.

3. The word “racism” describes a certain set of beliefs. It does not describe your diction, your clothing, or even whether or not you are civil to your black acquaintances. If you believe that people of African descent are, as a group, inherently lazier/less intelligent/ more violent than people of European descent, yes, you are a racist. It’s absurd to object to being called a “racist” after defending The Bell Curve’s premise that African Americans have a significant and unchangeable intellectual deficit when compared to white Americans. It’s like advocating that all private property be confiscated and handed over to the community and then objecting to being called a communist.

4. If you sincerely believe that people of African descent are, as a group, inherently lazier, less intelligent, and more prone to violence than people of European descent, yes, you are still a racist. You remain a racist no matter how earnestly you explain it, how much sorrow and regret you mime about being forced to utter this awful “truth,” how firmly rooted in first-hand experience you imagine your opinion to be. I’ve yet to see anything in any dictionary definition of racism that excludes sincerity from its meaning.

5. If you believe that people of African descent are, as a group, inherently lazier, less intelligent, and more prone to violence than people of European descent, and you cite all kinds of scientific charts, research, and measurements to back up your claim yes, you are still a racist, as were the many Nazis who cited all kinds of scientific charts, research, and measurements to back up Party claims about the inferiority of Jews. Claiming that there is scientific and/or statistical evidence for your racism does not make it any less racism.

6. If you have black friends, or black acquaintances whom you consider exceptions to the rule of people of African descent being inherently lazier/less intelligent/more prone to violence than people of European descent, yes, you are still a racist. You are a racist because you consider them “exceptions.”

7. If you believe that people of African descent are, as a group, inherently lazier/less intelligent/ more prone to violence than people of European descent, and you recently found out your great-great-granddad might have been a Cherokee and you are now going around describing yourself as “non-white” during online conversations about race, yes, you are still a racist. The belief that black Americans are inherently less competent than white Americans makes you a racist, whether you’re a Native American who grew up on a reservation or someone who may have some Native American ancestors several generations back.

8. And finally, here’s a tip. It has to do with punctuation, so it may seem a bit picayune, but it’s important.

If the word “nigger” keeps rising unbidden into your consciousness when you see young black men in big t-shirts and low belted jeans, or hear rap music, if your hatred for them is such that you want to hit them, if you describe black men you dislike as “dirty, violent, and stupid,” whether those adjectives apply or not, and if you strongly imply that African Americans are somehow uniquely incompetent when compared to other ethnic groups who came here, you are not a “racist.”

You are a racist.

"President Bush on Saturday further cemented his legacy of fighting for strong executive powers, using his veto to shut down a Congressional effort to limit the Central Intelligence Agency’s latitude to subject terrorism suspects to harsh interrogation techniques." New York Times 3/9/08

President Bush vetoed a bill that would have outlawed torture.

Ten words. Ten straightforward words as opposed to the thirty-eight in the above opening sentence to the New York Times story. There’s a reason why the Times uses triple the verbiage required. Journalists today are doing their best to edge around a truth too ugly for our media to confront directly. The writing must instead be carefully unfocussed so that it’s not about torture but about Bush’s “legacy,” about “strong executive power,” nice, bloodless terms that help stretch the sentence out and further dilute its actual meaning.

And of course the word “torture” must on no account be typed into that lead. “Harsh interrogation techniques” is ever so much nicer, since “harsh” is a word most frequently invoked to describe, not gross brutality, but a certain acerbity born of impatience, a brisk unwillingness to waste time with tact or unnecessary gentleness. Sending a very naughty child to bed without dinner is “harsh.” Chewing out an employee for making a stupid and expensive mistake is “harsh.” Even a jail is “harsh” and uninviting because, after all, it’s a jail, and the guy serving a few months for drunk and disorderly isn’t meant to enjoy his stint mopping floors and picking up trash along the highway.

Locking a naughty child in solitary confinement for a year, beating your employee to a pulp and tying up a convict naked and in a stress position for seven hours is a magnitude beyond the common usage of “harsh.”

“Techniques” is another nice bit of misdirection in that it dignifies torture by referring to it as a skill. I have no doubt that there are torturers who are very, very good at inflicting pain, but decent people – and decent governments -- consider that form of technical competence beside the point. The enormity of what he is doing as he pours another gout of water into the lungs of a bound, terrified prisoner makes the torturer’s boast, “Check out my technique,” at best a moment of dark satire.

This entire New York Times piece illustrates two unsettling realities. First, we have reached the point where directly describing what is happening to our country is considered too inflammatory for a mainstream publication. Second, the way our craven media copes with this is by adopting the vocabulary of the administration and its apologists.

Note, as you read down the column, the language used to describe Bush’s veto which, we are told “deepens his battle” with the Democrats. Bush “…does not intend to bend in this or other confrontations on issues…unflinchingly defended an interrogation program…” and the veto “underscored his determination to preserve many of the executive prerogatives his administration has claimed in the name of fighting terrorism, and to enshrine them into law.”

He’s battling! He’s unflinching! He’s determined! He’s preserving, and fighting, and enshrining! You can almost see Bush standing on some imaginary promontory overlooking Washington DC, chest and jaw heroically thrust out, hand tucked into his shirt like Napoleon’s, the wind stirring his hair as the Battle Hymn of the Republic plays on the soundtrack and an American flag ripples in the background.

It’s only after this three-hundred-word clash of cymbals and blast of trumpets that the writers hunker down and begin to seriously discuss the gist of the piece, which is that President Bush vetoed a bill that would have outlawed torture. For the next thousand words, the article describes in a relatively sober and lucid manner the actual issues surrounding this veto, though it does occasionally relapse into pallid discussion of Bush “protecting his legacy.” (What else can you expect in a quote from someone at the Brookings Institute?) Obviously I have no way of knowing for sure, but this article reads like the work of different people with different agendas.

Maybe those different people were the name listed on the byline, Steven Lee Myers, and the Mark Mazzetti listed as a contributing reporter. Maybe they were the actual writers and some uncited New York Times editors calling the shots. For whatever reason, there seems to have been someone who wanted to write a story about this administration’s embrace of torture, and someone else who wanted to avoid the “inflammatory” writing necessary in such a piece.

Especially striking is the closing paragraph, which quotes Massachusetts Democratic Representative Bill Delahunt:

“They’re excellent at manipulating the arguments so that if Congress should assert itself, members expose themselves to charges of being soft, not tough enough on terrorism,” he said. “My view is history is going to judge us all.”

Indeed, it will. And at least one of the people involved in writing this article seems aware that this judgment is not going to be flattering.

There are pathetic people who truly are so clueless, so devoid of empathy and ethics that they don’t understand the objections to torture, and genuinely see Bush’s stand as heroic. Quite a few of these people are working in our media. But I think some people in our press are afraid, both for their jobs, and for what posterity will say about how they did their jobs. I think some people in our press are painfully aware of the extent to which they have corrupted and are still corrupting language in the service of murderous and indefensible policies.

As a writer, with a writer’s reverence for words, I’m reminded of a line from Macbeth, the comment of a woman observing the tormented, sleepwalking Lady Macbeth as she tries to wash the blood of women and children from her hands.

“I would not have such a heart in my bosom for the dignity of the whole body.”

The Don Siegelman case recently publicized on 60 Minutes marks yet another nasty convergence between reality and the “You’re-with-us-or-you’re-against-us” rhetoric driving the American right these days. For anyone who somehow managed to miss the story, which aired on February 24th, Don Siegelman was the Democratic ex-governor of Alabama. He is currently serving a prison term for what looks like a politically motivated frame-up. His greatest “crime” was apparently being a powerful and popular Democrat.

There’s been a good bit of emoting from the Alabama GOP in response. Before the 60 Minutes segment even broadcast they sent out a press release that was almost British in its dignified anger, bristling with Peter Cushing-ish words like “perfidy,” “ludicrous charges,” and “grotesque imaginings” and describing the segment as a “hatchet job.” Afterwards, the Alabama GOP demanded a retraction. "Only the most committed anti-Rove/Bush activist could swallow such a tale," wrote party chairman Rep. Mike Hubbard.

“What?” The right wing sputters, opening its eyes very wide and laying a hand upon its chest to still the pounding of its outraged heart. “You say Karl Rove wrecked someone’s life and career using trumped up criminal charges merely because he was a political threat to the Republicans?”

“Why, that’s… that’s just crazy talk!”

Of course, the problem is that the right has, for the past twenty years, been doing its best to blur in the minds of thousands of people, the difference between being a liberal or a Democrat or anyone else perceived as an adversary of the G.O.P., and being a criminal. At the rock-bottom level you’ve got the Freepers Michael Savage, and that fun bunch at KSFO wishing that Democrats or other perceived critics of Bush could be arrested and charged with treason, or hanged, or electrocuted slowly and painfully in defective electric chairs. Higher up on the food chain you’ve got more well known personalities like Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, and Ann Coulter describing Harry Reid as “a propaganda minister for our enemies,” and coverage of the Haditha scandal as “a gang rape by the Democratic Party… to finally take us out in the war against Iraq,” or writing bestselling books with titles like Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism.

And at the top you have GOP strategists who’ve exploited this equation of dissent with disloyalty and criminal behavior and consider themselves clever bunnies indeed for doing so. As far back as 1994, Newt Gingrich described supporters of Bill Clinton as “the enemies of normal Americans.” At a 2005 Conservative Party fundraiser in Manhattan Karl Rove opined "Let me just put this in fairly simple terms: Al Jazeera now broadcasts the words of Sen. Durbin to the Mideast, certainly putting our troops in greater danger. No more needs to be said about the motives of liberals."

The string that holds all these nasty little pearls together, from Free Republic to the DC Beltway, can be found in a 2001 online essay written by someone named Eric Heubeck for the Free Congress Foundation and entitled “The Integration of Theory and Practice: A Program for the New Traditionalist Movement.” The Free Congress Foundation, I should point out, is a conservative think tank headed by Paul Weyrich, with close ties to Karl Rove.

“We must channel undesirable impulses to serve good purposes,”…wrote Heubeck. “We must be feared, so that they (the opposition) will think twice before opening their mouths…We must learn to treat leftists as natural disasters or rabid dogs. If we act as if this were in fact true (of course, it is not), we will not needlessly expend our energy on being upset with our opponents.”

In short, Heubeck advocates spreading unreasoning loathing among the masses and using it as a political weapon. After reading his essay it’s difficult to imagine Heubeck – or anyone else at the Free Congress Foundation -- being shocked or upset by the prospect of imprisoning a prominent Democrat solely because he’s a prominent Democrat. It’s certainly consistent with “channeling undesirable impulses.”

In the seven years since it was published, it looks like Heubeck’s strategy has been used to good effect. As language from the right equating liberalism with criminality becomes more and more mainstreamed, the idea of sending someone to prison on a flimsy pretext because they’re a powerful Democrat has become more and more palatable to a certain segment of the American population. The recent scandal surrounding the firing of attorneys in the Justice Department who were reluctant to pursue weak cases against Democrats indicates that “certain segment” is not confined to the relatively powerless crackpots who post to Free Republic and send mash notes to Ann Coulter.

One of the most depressing successes of the right has been the shutting down of dialogue. Online, the far right has pretty much made it their policy to talk only to other right-wingers in echo chambers like Free Republic or Little Green Footballs or, (at a rock-bottom level of malicious stupidity that makes FR look like Harvard) Conservapedia. When a conversation with a liberal does take place, offline or online, it tends to be for a very limited amount of time in venues where the right-winger has control, like talk radio or on a cable news show with a sympathetic host.

The people who utter statements like Karl Rove’s vile insinuation that liberals are motivated by the desire to put our troops in greater danger, or Hannity’s equation of Reid saying that the “ War is lost” with being a “propaganda minister for our enemies,” are rarely confronted directly and in detail with the actual meanings and implications of their words. And that’s exactly how they want it to stay.

Because it’s becoming increasingly obvious that the question to ask them, whether they are operating on the level of Freepers or of eager young aides to Karl Rove, is not “Is Don Siegelman in prison now because he’s a Democrat.”

The question to ask them is, “would it bother you if he were?”

Don’t assume, even for a minute, that the answer would be a simple and unequivocal “yes.”

…that buck-toothed witch Satan, Hillary Clinton… No, she is a -- she is a -- Oh, God! She is evil…Bill Clinton and his fat ugly wife, Satan….” (Don Imus, writhing his way through a hategasm on Imus in the Morning, 5/24/06)

The word “misogyny” frequently induces eye-rolls and resigned sighs from men, especially when they come up in the context of a political campaign and a woman candidate. Utter the “M” word while talking about the kind of coverage Hillary Clinton has endured in the course of her campaign, and some men, liberal and conservative, will wearily shake their heads.

Then they’ll lean forward in their seats, resting their elbows on their knees and, gazing earnestly into our faces, explain with a great show of patience that “if you run for office, you will be criticized.” They will say this gently, enunciating carefully so we’ll be sure to understand. The word “pretty” will be invoked, as in “politics isn’t a pretty business.” (This is an effort to speak our language. Men who engage in this brand of theater seem to think women use the word “pretty” a lot.)

In short, many of the men out there – not all, but many – will respond to female complaints about sexism as they would to a group of not very bright twelve-year-old girls.

Misogyny, like any other form of bigotry, involves imposing a narrative. The bigot dons a costume (reasonable and/or experienced), dresses his or her target up (uppity/dishonest/violent if the target is black, shrill/hysterical/irrational if it’s a woman) and then acts out a little scene.

This is not to say that every accusation of racism or sexism is warranted, or that every person who argues with such accusations is a racist or a sexist. It is to say that all too often, the response to complaints about “racism” or “sexism” is based, not on the facts presented or the arguments offered, but on the race or gender of the accuser.

I’m offering here a quick overview of three of the most common breed of misogynists infesting both the online and offline world. Most women of a certain age will probably recognize them. As for younger women, if you haven’t met all of these yet, don’t get too complacent. Eventually you will.

And yes guys, I know, not all men are misogynists – not by a long shot. But enough of you are to warrant this guide.

We begin with misogyny at its most primitive, the kind anyone over the age of six can recognize because it’s the first form of it we encounter, usually on a playground at grammar school. Most men grow out of it. There is, however, a noisy minority who sailed through puberty and into adulthood without getting past the “icky-gurls” stage. You can find them most frequently on talk radio or the Internet (particularly in comments on youtube.) Some of them are probably about fourteen, but far too many of them don’t have that excuse.

THE SLOBBERING YAHOO

Who are you fooling? Just who do you think you're fooling, you little weasel, you. You harridan, you. Who do you think you're fooling with your new hairdo and your lipstick going up to your nose? How many different Botox treatments do you have to get till you realize that nobody believes you…You lying little witch, you….. (Michael Savage on The Savage Nation, 1/8/07)

I’m not talking here about some guy who’s had a bad day and is venting to his buddies about Cindy Sheehan or Ann Coulter. The Slobbering Yahoo hates women so much he can barely sit still in his seat when he talks about us. His rhetoric consistently reveals a psyche riddled with images of whores, witches, harridans, cosmetic surgery, cucumbers, alimony, etc... He may deny hating women, claiming that his heterosexuality and a string of failed marriages indicates otherwise, but this alleged sexual preference seems to have something, shall we say, “conflicted” about it. (It can’t be healthy to be erotically attracted to any group for whom you feel such unbridled contempt.)

One way to attract specimens of Slobbering Yahoos online is for someone using a feminine name to post either a pro-gun control or an anti-war opinion online. Another is to post regular pieces on matters like sexual harassment and discrimination, something guaranteed to upset the SY crowd. Since the Slobbering Yahoo seems to believe, pitiably, that all women are intent on enticing him into sex, his arguments frequently begin with -- and often consist almost entirely of -- calling women who’ve displeased him “ugly/fat/old.” Obviously, this is not intended to convince anyone. (“I was originally leaning in favor of a government ban on assault rifles, but now that Realtexasmarine has responded to her cited statistics on gun deaths by saying that Pamela Troy is probably single, overweight, and physically unattractive, I’ve reassessed that stance.”) My guess is that the SY, still emotionally mired in third grade, fondly imagines the woman he’s insulted reading it bursting into tears, and avoiding mirrors and the computer for the rest of the day.

I'd much rather have a pole dancer than a burnt out hag like you…

Now I know you are a fattie and single…

I love women, but would not be with a fat one, which I am sure you are representative of.

(From a regular contributor to the comments section of a blog on women’s issues)

The reality, of course, is that any normal female blogger or letter writer is going to be more relieved than dismayed by the implication that the SY isn’t attracted to her. While sensible women are profoundly wary of Slobbering Yahoos, the overriding emotion SYs inspire is not shock and awe but contempt. They’re so obvious they embarrass the other misogynists.

Now, on to the more insidious examples like:

THE COURTLY GENT

You are -- I'm not allowed to say this, but I'll say it -- you're beautiful and you're smart. And you've got a huge radio audience. OK?.. .I get in trouble for this, but you're great looking, obviously. You're one of the gods' gifts to men in this country.
(Chris Matthews to author Laura Ingraham 9/12/07)

The Courtly Gent’s basic premise is similar to the Slobbering Yahoo’s in that he believes -- or pretends to believe -- that women are so obsessed with our personal appearance that we enjoy having our looks expounded on by someone who’s supposed to be talking about our writing or discussing the day’s stock market. The woman being “complimented” in this manner just can’t win. If she complains about it, the misogynist will affect wide-eyed bewilderment – “but it was a compliment!” If she doesn’t complain, her silence is cited when the rest of us complain about his treatment of her. “She wasn’t insulted!”

An alternative approach by the Courtly Gent is to affect the air of an old fashioned romantic who “idealizes” women and just can’t understand why we would want to get involved in such sordid activities as politics, law, high finance, etc. One of the most well-publicized instances of this occurred back in the ‘80s when Ronald Reagan, speaking before a woman’s organization, said something to the effect that if it weren’t for women, men would still be unshaven grunters living in caves. (As I recall, his audience was politely uncharmed by the image of woman as the eternal nag who at last got mankind out of its sloppy bachelor pad and into a tie.) A more recent example came from Tucker Carlson:

You could make the counter case that most women are so sensible, they don't want to get involved in something as stupid as politics. (Tucker Carlson to Feminist Majority President Eleanor Smeal, Tucker 11/6/07)

Most women don’t buy this approach for one moment, but when we say so the response from Courtly Gents is generally more “bewilderment.” If there’s a lot of publicity, we get to watch prominent CGs telling each other on talk shows and editorial pages they just can’t for the life of them, figure out what was insulting about what was said…

I’ll believe that Tucker Carlson and other Courtly Gents are unable to grasp what was insulting about his comments the day I see them offering similarly stereotypical “compliments” to black or Jewish guests on their talk shows.

“Senator Obama, I saw you last night at the Washington Ball, and you truly are a amazing dancer. Such a great sense of rhythm! And you looked so handsome, so manly, shucking and jiving out on that dance floor! You know, if it weren’t for black people, American music would still be stuck in barbershop quartets and square dances. Why do African Americans want to get involved in something as silly as politics anyway?”

“Hey, what’s the matter? Where are you going? It was a compliment!”

THE “HONEST” GUY

It can`t be just me. I know it`s not. I mean, if there`s somebody in your life whose voice just sticks in your ear like an ice pick, somebody who makes every part of you just clench every time they speak. Yes, the senator and presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton has a voice like that. It makes me envy the deaf. It does. 

She could be saying, "All right, Glenn, I want to give Glenn Beck $1 million," and all I`d hear is, "Take out the garbage…Oh, I swear to you. I think Hillary`s voice makes angels cry.” (Glenn Beck, 3/29/07)

Like The Courtly Gent, The “Honest” Guy feigns good-natured confusion about women. The image he seeks to project is that of the nice fellow who tries, truly he tries! But his down home honesty will out, and the truth is that there’s just something about women that’s irritating as Hell. Quite frequently, as in the above quote, what prompts his heartfelt confession is the horrid sound of a woman talking.

That stack of idiotic hay made about Howard Dean’s legendary “scream,” is tiny compared to the barnful we’ve seen about Hillary Clinton’s speaking voice. It’s obviously not surprising to hear a professional SY like Marc Rudov tell Neil Cavuto that Hillary Clinton is, “shrill,” and that “When Hillary speaks, men hear ‘Take out the garbage.’” (What is it about the words “take out the garbage” that sets these guys off?) But often supposedly reasonable male commentators will morph abruptly into HGs, responding with to any sign of female irritation or emotion as if it the woman in question had “lost it.” Most "Honest" Guys these days are savvy enough not to actually use the word “hysteria,” but anyone listening or reading will get the idea.

When Hillary Clinton gave a heated, but quite reasonable and articulate response during the New Hampshire debates, Joel Achenbach, a writer on the supposedly more dignified Washington Post, suggested “a radio-controlled shock collar so that aides can zap her when she starts to get screechy.” The New York Observer claimed she was “almost screaming.” Jake Tapper of ABC News offered up a succinct specimen of the “Honest” Guy on his blog when he declared about that moment that “Frankly, I don’t even really understand what she was saying.” Readers of the above link should note Tapper’s classic “Honest” Guy show of gallant reluctance in delivering the bad news. “And then she…well…she got angry,” he says sadly, acting out a man of good will struggling to find the most tactful way to describe what happened without using the “H” word and offending the gals.

All of this is must be delivered with the appropriate emoticons. Brows are furrowed, heads are shaken, mouths are pursed in moues of dignified distress. Countless little one act plays are enacted about a perplexed guy whose honest efforts to listen to a woman are confounded by her female obnoxiousness. If, like Glenn Beck, the “Honest” Guy has a histrionic streak, his eyes meet the camera and women viewers recognize the staged anguish of that undergraduate breakup line, “It’s not you, it’s me.”

It doesn’t, of course, have to be her voice. It can be how she laughs, how she claps, how she does her hair, how often she blinks, and how she ages. Really, it’s implied, if she wants to be heard, she’s going to have to do something about those annoying tics that he’s tried to ignore, but (sigh) just can’t. He’s a reasonable man, is The “Honest” Guy. All a woman has to do is change the way she talks, dresses, walks, wears her hair, sits, applauds, laughs, ages, smiles, handles her fork, frowns, or expresses annoyance.

She’s sure to hit on something he finds tolerable, if she just keeps trying…

There are, of course, other kinds of misogynists – The Flasher, The Woman Who’s Wunnathaguys, The Expert On Women, The Wounded Little Boy, The Online Troll in Drag, The Self-Appointed Therapist – but these tend to be subsets of the three I’ve described above. And, of course, there’s some overlap. Courtly Gents can become “Honest” Guys and vice versa, and I’ve seen cases where both have devolved into Slobbering Yahoos.

There’s not much a woman can do about these types other than try to avoid being played. Almost all of them are masks some men – and even some women – put on when they don’t want to actually listen to a woman. No, merely disagreeing with a woman and saying so does not make someone a misogynist, but when one of these masks turns up in an argument, any smart woman will take note of it. They are often invoked by someone who’s losing a debate and is hoping to get a woman to shut up and back away.

Shutting women up, is, after all, really what it’s all about.

I guess it was too much to ask that David Oshinsky begin his New York Times review of Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism without the usual eye-rolling reference to 60s-era liberals referring to any and all opponents as “fascists.”

It isn’t actually illegal for an article that contains the word “fascist” to begin in some other manner, though many writers seem to think it is. The piece could have started, for instance, with a dictionary definition of “fascism.” Or Dr. Oshinsky could have provided some context by offering, as a history professor, an overview of the word’s background and usage that conjures up something more than the image of a hippie in a poncho and headband shrieking “Off the pigs!”

But that would be too straight-faced and pertinent. Current convention demands that the word “fascist” not be treated as if it were meaningful in the post WWII world. Instead, the writer must establish his credentials as a levelheaded reviewer by writing something like, “Coming of age in the 1960s, I heard the word ‘fascist’ all the time…the word belonged to those on the political left. It was their verbal weapon, and they used it every chance they got.”

To be fair, this opening does succinctly introduce Oshinsky’s main premise -- that Jonah Goldberg’s book is “less an expose of left-wing hypocrisy than a chance to exact political revenge.” It’s an assumption that’s as smugly naïve – and as dead wrong -- as most mainstream discussion of the far right. Certainly Dr. Oshinsky does a good job of pointing out the glaring historical omissions in Goldberg’s book, even as he describes the author’s rants as “deliciously amusing” (a word combination I’d like to see expunged from all written and spoken English for the next fifty years) and compliments him on his “witty intelligence.” If one were to judge from this review, Jonah Goldberg is just as cheeky as Bugs Bunny, “fascism,” is merely a carelessly tossed buzzword, and Liberal Fascism is nothing more than a diverting exercise in rhetorical tit-for-tat.

I’m profoundly skeptical about the claim that “fascist” has been used so cavalierly that it’s lost all meaning. It’s too similar to the complaints I heard back in the ‘90s about the word “racist” being “overused” when applied to those well-spoken, educated gentlemen who wrote The Bell Curve. Yes, both the words “racist” or “fascist” can and have been misused – as have words like “traitor”, “Communist,” or “Socialist,” with much more devastating consequences for the people labeled as “traitors,” “Communists,” etc. Though I was a kid at the time, I am old enough to remember the ‘60s and ‘70s pretty clearly, and however unfairly the words “fascist” and “racist” may have been thrown by overwrought college students, I don’t recall mass firings of teachers for being “fascist” or “racist.” There were no televised hearings in which nervous witnesses were asked, “Are you now or have you ever been a fascist?”

Which brings us to the current use of the word “fascist” by conservative writers like Jonah Goldberg, who have added it to their lexicon of abuse along with “Commie,” “Pinko” and “Islamacist.” Liberal Fascism was not written in a vacuum. It’s part of an ambitious ongoing effort by conservatives to alter the manner in which the Nazi era is remembered, an attempt to rebrand Nazism so that it’s associated with the left rather than the right. Dismissing Goldberg’s book as a mere reaction to liberal overuse of the word flies in the face of a reality obvious to anyone who bothers to look for it.

Oshinsky mentions Goldberg’s contention that today “Leftists still drop the ‘f word’ to taint their opponents, be they global warming skeptics or members of the Moral Majority.” After reading this, I did a couple of admittedly unscientific Google searches using the search terms “Fascist” and “Moral Majority” and then “Fascist” and “Global warming.” The first search garnered pretty much what I expected, a mixed bag of intemperate liberals referring to the late Jerry Falwell as a “fascist” and articles that mentioned the Moral Majority but contained the word “fascist” in reference to other right wing movements (like Christian Reconstructionism.)

The second search, however, was more revealing. There were quite a few hits, but instances of liberals using around the word “fascist” about Global Warming deniers were in the minority. The norm was articles like that posted by a contributor to Prison Planet opining about “the creeping fascism of Global Warming hysteria.” The Hoosier Gadfly rants about “eco-fascist troglodytes” and Democrats. The Pundit Review declares that Ellen Goodman is an “Islamo-Fascist” and on Article Gold someone named Stew Mayers ups the ante by referring to “Eco-Fascist Pagans.” There also were quite a few hits resulting from right-wingers complaining about Global Warming advocates calling them fascists. David Harsanyi in the Denver Post talks about "challenging Global Warming hysteria" and advises those who do to “Back away slowly. You’ll probably be called a fascist.” Many references to Robert Kennedy Jr. calling Glenn Beck "CNN’s chief corporate fascism advocate" turned up, but even with that example, the right seems to be at least as fond as the left of vehemently and casually invoking terms like “Nazi” and “Fascist.” Given the popularity of terms like "Femnazi" and "eco-Fascist" and "Islamofascist," the right may be even work out to be more prone to such insults than the left.

Why is this very immediate context ignored in favor of an outdated image from the 1960s? Perhaps Dr. Oshinsky, like many mainstream writers, considers the online world of political discussion beneath his notice. Or maybe seriously examining both the meaning of the word “fascist” and the method behind the madness of Jonah Goldberg’s book is just too disturbing.

The closest the review comes to touching on the goals of the right-wing rebranding of “fascism” is when Oshinsky observes: “Oddly, Goldberg has less to say about issues more likely to bolster his case, like the enormous growth of executive power under Roosevelt and his ill-fated attempt to ‘pack’ the United States Supreme Court.” He notices that Goldberg skips over the 1920s, which saw the rise of the KKK and an uncomfortably familiar anti-immigrant fervor, but these omissions don’t get the hard-eyed examination they deserve. Instead, the entire review comes across as a fatherly chuckle and a wag of the finger.

I hope this clueless bemusement is not the template for upcoming MSM reviews of Liberal Fascism, but I have a sinking feeling that it is. Yes, it’s a silly book, with a ridiculous cover and a thesis that any serious student of history will find laughable. It is no accident, however, that the author of this book is the same person who wrote that Augusto Pinochet’s “abuses” -- which included the mass murder of liberals and leftists and the “disappearing” and torture of dissidents -- “helped create a civil society.”

The agenda behind Jonah Goldberg’s effort is no laughing matter, not at a time when the Third Reich is dropping from living memory and tactics like torture and secret detention are being written about as if they were issues upon which moral people can disagree. The lessons we presumably learned from the Nazi era are not just being forgotten. They are being deliberately erased by conservatives who seem less revolted by Nazi brutality and intolerance than by the meaningless use of the word “socialist” in the Nazi party name.

In Stella Gibbons’ 1932 comic novel, Cold Comfort Farm, there’s a moment when the story’s heroine, Flora, learns about a male acquaintance who is working on a book that posits Bramwell Bronte as the actual author of Wuthering Heights:

“Ha! a life of Bramwell Bronte,” thought Flora. “I might have known it. There has been increasing discontent among the male intellectuals for some time at the thought that a woman wrote Wuthering Heights. I thought one of them would produce something of this kind sooner or later.”

A similar sense of resignation settles over me every time I hear about Jonah Goldberg’s upcoming book, Liberal Fascism. To paraphrase Flora Poste, there has been increasing discontent among conservatives for some time at the thought that Hitler was a right-winger. I thought one of them would produce something of this kind sooner or later, and now, inevitably, someone has. Godwin’s Law, that modern debating affectation which presumes that the best way to venerate the millions of victims of the Holocaust is to ignore exactly how the numbers got to the millions in the first place, has at last borne fruit.

Some readers may consider it unfair that my gut reaction is to dropkick Godwin’s Law so hard my metal-toed work boot leaves a dent in it. Yes, I understand it was originally all about Internet discussion threads that had gone on too long. The idea was that if a thread had begun as a discussion of socks getting lost in the dryer, by the time the subject got around to the Nazis it was time to end the thread.

But Godwin’s Law degenerated into a mindless form of “etiquette” in which any analogy to the Nazis, no matter how valid, was dismissed as disrespectful to the victims of Nazism. As a result, apologists for everything from racial eugenics to torture to concentration camps could burble merrily along without fear of anyone making awkward comparisons. If someone had the temerity to bring up the fact that such policies and tactics had already been tried out in the Third Reich, the reaction from the White supremacist/Eugenicist/torture apologist was likely to be something along the lines of “BZZZZZZZT! Godwin’s Law! I win! I win!”

After over a decade of this, much of what my generation and my parents’ generation swore would never, never be forgotten about the Nazis has been forgotten. Heck, facts we never imagined would be forgotten about the Nazis – like their place on the political spectrum and their opposition to liberalism – are now under attack from the right.

Some months ago I wrote at length about Conservapedia's attempt to sell the notion of Nazis being leftists. I have no advance copy of Goldberg’s book and no intention of paying Lucianne’s boy for the damned thing when it does hit the stores, but having examined in some detail other attempts at this form of holocaust revisionism -- and yes, that’s precisely what all this “Hitler-was-a-leftist” garbage is -- I am curious about whether he uses the same arguments to justify his claims. Sadly No has been kind enough to post a few excerpts, and from what I’ve seen there, Liberal Fascism is just a more verbose version of the crap that’s been posted online by right wing crackpots since this trend first began cropping up in the ‘90s.

Much of it falls under “Betcha Didn’t Know!” approach to history. Betcha didn’t know that Hitler “CLAIMED TO BE A DEDICATED VEGETARIAN!” Betcha didn’t know that Himmler was “A CERTIFIED ANIMAL RIGHTS ACTIVIST!” Betcha didn’t know about THE NAZI PARTY PLATFORM! The answer from most people who’ve done even casual reading about the Third Reich is likely to come in two parts: “you’d lose” and “so what?”

It’s not like this trivia about Hitler hating meat and Himmler loving bunnies and the meaningless socialist planks in the party platform were secrets, carefully covered up by conniving historians and diarists. Even left-of-center writers like William Shirer trusted readers to grasp that the Nazis use of the word “Socialism” was not what made Hitler’s name a curse in the mouth of any humane person in the second half of the 20th century. The most chilling scenes in films like Cabaret, or the 1978 TV miniseries Holocaust do not involve a protagonist arguing with a fellow lodger’s belief that eating meat causes cancer or being confronted after the war by the moral nihilism of participation in a government program providing needed medical care to Reich citizens. Niemoller did not begin his famous statement with, “First they came for the smokers.”

We live in an era where the right wing defends torture and secret detention in mainstream venues. McCarthyism and the politics of paranoia are returning in an especially virulent and dangerous form. Violence against liberals is obliquely and sometimes directly advocated by nationally broadcast pundits like Ann Coulter and Michael Savage. The precise words “stab in the back” are not yet on the lips of Bush apologists but accusing liberals and Democrats and other war critics of disloyalty and “America hating” is pretty much routine these days. And the language often being used against Moslems – they’re murderous, unchristian money-grubbers who can’t be trusted and should be driven from public life – is disturbingly similar to language once used against Jews in a certain Western European country back in the ‘30s.

In such an environment, Godwin’s Rule becomes more and more obviously a ridiculous cop-out. In such an environment, nobody should be surprised that a book is now coming out that seeks to tie the evil of the Nazis, not to virulent intolerance of dissent, racism, physical intimidation and anti-intellectualism, but to vegetarianism, animal rights, and the word “socialist” in the Nazi party name.

It’s hard to say whether or not this revisionist approach to the history of Nazism, nurtured for years in the online community, will fly once it’s released onto the offline world. The reception given Goldberg’s book after it hits the shelves is going to be interesting. Let’s just hope it’s not “interesting” in the sense of that old Irish Curse.

Recently I paid a visit to the city where I was born, New Orleans, my first since Katrina. Other members of my family have expressed their feelings about the city through photography. I'm not good at taking pictures, so instead, I wrote this.

Poetry is not something that prose writers really have much business attempting unless they are Shakespeare or Edgar Allen Poe, or Thomas Hardy. Still, nothing else seemed right.

In New Orleans the old spirits still walk
Madame Lalaurie, waving her crusted whip,
And chasing a black girl,
The white-faced soldiers in blue,
Gibbering from their window,
And the sausage maker’s bloody wife
Thumping and flubbering up
From the grinder.
The girl with roses still knocks
At the door where the harlot sleeps,
And the rented ovens still bake bones
Where long grass waves and lizards skitter.
Tourists are still hurried along
In timid herds through the maze of tombs,
Told by the guide never to come alone
Even in daylight.

Take your picture quickly and return
To the city of flesh.
Cayenne and onion,
scallions and garlic
Still sing their song
In iron skillets,
Waiting for meat to send up
Its own smoky ghost to beckon in
Those who pass the open doors.
Under black metal lace
Diners still sip coffee
At tables slightly askew
On the broken sidewalks.
Bourbon and rum is still set aflame.
Music still roars on Bourbon Street.
And at night, plump students carry plastic cups
And shout and shimmy, while the stores
Spill light and masks, t-shirts and beads,
Onto dark streets shining with piss and beer.

I hope Marie Laveau still sends
Uneasy dreams to the pale and the guilty
Who toss her a coin,
Hoping for word from the darkness that covers
Those places where we won’t go when awake.

A few years ago, sitting in my San Francisco apartment, I watched a documentary that within the first half hour had me reduced to a sad-eyed puddle of nostalgia. Most of it was shot in Louisiana and Mississippi and as I watched outdoor shots of that flat green, almost jungle-like landscape with its levees and bayous, as I listened to the soft accents of the people being interviewed, I found myself yearning to go back. God, how I missed those velvet summer nights, the spicy food, the way people talked… Why, oh why had I ever left?

And then, in the course of an interview with a lovely, white-haired southern lady, the subject of the Civil Rights era came up, specifically the case of three young Civil Rights workers who had been murdered by the Klan in Mississippi back in 1964. This lady’s delicate nostrils quivered with revulsion, her small mouth hardened, her eyes grew slightly dreamy and cold and she said that when certain people come south just to make trouble, just to stir the black people up, well, bad things can happen to them. It was unfortunate really, but they brought it on themselves…

My nostalgia vanished in an instant. If I’d stayed in Louisiana, at some point one more lady like that would have made one more comment like that in my presence. And I may very well have reached across some perfectly set table and strangled her with her pearls.

This is an exaggeration. Obviously, I would not have murdered someone at a dinner party, but by the standards of southern society I might have committed a crime just as bad. I might have said something. I might even have said it with enough of an edge in my voice to bring my host or hostess hurrying over with a strained smile.

Biting my tongue for the sake of “politeness” when an educated, presumably moral individual utters socially accepted nastiness is a southern tradition I gladly shed many years ago. I’m not going to get into the habit again. Not in Louisiana, or North Carolina, or California, or Pennsylvania, or anywhere else north or south of the Mason Dixon Line.

Which is awkward because an especially repulsive breed of nastiness is becoming more and more socially acceptable everywhere.

By “nastiness” I don’t mean dirty jokes, or even ethnic jokes. No, by “nastiness” I mean the normalization of brutality. I mean the increasingly widespread habit of treating torture, religious persecution, and racism as if the morality of these things were something upon which ethical and reasonable people can disagree.

They aren’t. And I am not, for the sake of “politeness” going to pretend that rules of common decency change when the victims are Moslems.

This does not mean that I’m planning to canvas people about their views at the next party I attend and then shriek invective at anyone who tells me that sleep deprivation, stress positions and water boarding are not torture. What I will do, if the subject comes up, is argue courteously, without raising my voice, and without cracking so much as the ghost of a reassuring smile.

And I will keep arguing as long as the conversation continues which, experience has taught me, is rarely for very long. In most cases, the torture apologist will very quickly adopt the posture – perhaps because it’s a sincere reflection of their feelings – of the reasonable soul bewildered by the attack of an irrational dogmatist. Frequently they’ll gaze off into space and say something that includes the word “just,” like, “We’ll just have to agree to disagree,” or, “That’s just the way I feel,” or “I just don’t want to talk about it.”

Again, I should emphasize that no voices have to be raised to get this reaction. No insults have to be uttered. All that’s required is a request that they expand on statements like, “what happened at Abu Ghraib wasn’t torture.” And heaven help you if you are so tasteless as to bring up the fact that water boarding, sleep deprivation, and stress positions were used by such icons of evil as the Nazis, the KGB and Spanish Inquisitors. That’s when you start getting dirty looks from other people in the room and the host comes over, fixes you with a freezing glance, and loudly suggests a change of subject.

Yes, it may be rude to argue with someone who was plainly not expecting an argument. But advocating or even countenancing torture while smiling blandly at someone over a cocktail is something much, much worse.

It is a working demonstration of the banality of evil. It is a sign of how morally degraded we, as a society have become. It is whiff of filth, a stink so powerful I can’t understand how anyone in the same room with it can refrain from publicly gagging and holding their nose. The very fact that torture apologists so often evince surprise and dismay at being challenged is the stuff of horror, and I have no intention of indulging it by biting my tongue.

A “just” comment I frequently encounter when I argue with someone about torture is that venerable attempt to personalize the debate -- “I guess I’m just a horrible person.” It’s meaningless as an argument because I don’t casually divide the world between “good” and “horrible” people. But I can’t, in good conscience, hold my tongue when I hear people – even people I like and respect -- advocate horrible things.

This may make me a social liability. So be it. Better that than coming away from a night out feeling as though even the longest hottest bath in the world isn’t going to cover up the smell of moral complicity.