Monthly Archive for November, 2009

Glenn Beck does a pretty interesting thing. If you try to follow what he’s saying, you can’t.  It’s a lot of non sequiturs.  It doesn’t hold together logically, but what’s interesting is that doesn’t seem to matter.  It hold together emotionally, and that seems to be how he holds his audience.  At all times, it feels like he’s saying something credibly.  He stretches a feeling just until it starts to feel confusing, and then he moves on.  And because we were starting to feel confused, we sort of forget what he was talking about, and start listening to the next thing.

I wonder if he’s just exploiting the way we process language.  When we’re listening to language and it starts to make less sense, we look for clues to repair the semantic damage.  But Beck uses a rhythm that makes sure he moves on to the next non sequitur just when we reach that point.

It’s pretty similar to Sarah Palin’s style, which worked great in monologues and speeches, only breaking down in interviews.  It wasn’t until the Katie Couric interview that Palin crashed and burned.  Couric basically wouldn’t let things go, so Palin had to continue trying to reconcile the nonsense statements she was making, and the audience caught up with her.

But Glenn Beck, or Rush Limbaugh for that matter, doesn’t have to worry about cross-examination when he’s monologuing.

I think a lot of what happens in politics and the public discussion is emotional stuff like this.  It’s not thinking through what is going on, seeking our peoples’ experiences and the beliefs that grow out of those experiences.  It’s people looking for validating emotional experiences.

Sometimes I wish our government and laws would be formed by people who actually have experience in the problems, discussing things from the perspective of their own experience.  But maybe I should just accept that that’s not really how things work.

Same-sex couples marriage rights were taken away by a majority vote in Maine yesterday.  Ta-Nehisi Coates has a good post on the subject.

I would go beyond Coates’ statement than the anti-gay-marriage half of the country is “deeply prejudiced against gays”.  I would say the 53% of voters who voted to deny marriage rights to same-sex couples have committed an act of evil.

Evil is something we distance ourselves from.  In our folktales, we reserve evil for people who are pure in their monstrousness.  We shy away from stories where cruelty is administered by ambiguous hands, because want want the world to be separable into Good and Evil people.  And we want to be on the Good team.

But that simplification is incredibly harmful.  That separation is constantly used as a device to justify cruelty.  Almost always when I talk to white people about racism, they wrap themselves in the Good vs. Evil dichotomy, a cloak to relieve them from having to address the cruelty of their actions.  As long as racism is something committed by evil people, and I am acting in good faith, I cannot be racist.  Q.E.D.

But increasingly I see that evil is not carried out by evil people.  It is carried out by me.  It is carried out by all of us.

Because of yesterday’s vote in Maine, several things will happen:

1. Some Maine stay-at-home moms and dads will lose their health insurance coverage.  In some cases this will lead to an accelerated death for them.  Precious remaining days will be taken away from their families.
2. Some Maine residents will die alone in the hospital, without their husband or wife or children legally allowed to be with them.
3. Some Maine children, who lose a parent, will be taken away from their living parent and put in foster care.

I’m sorry, but are these things not evil?  Is it not bigoted to think that these things are OK, just because you think someone else’s family is an abomination?

I don’t see how you can tiptoe around this.  It’s evil, and it’s wrong, and shame on Maine.