Narcissism and the American Left
<p>John Perry Barlow, referring to the 2004 elections, <a href='http://barlow.typepad.com/barlowfriendz/2003/12/safire_takes_a_.html'>writes</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>We can&#8217;t afford to lose this one, folks. If we do, we&#8217;ll have to set our watches back 60 years. If they even let us have watches in the camps, that is.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>&#8220;If they even let us have watches in the camps.&#8221; This is a perfect example<br />
of a kind of left-wing rhetorical posturing that makes me want to go out and<br />
vote for conservatives I normally loathe.  In this it has exactly the opposite<br />
effect from what John Perry Barlow intends.</p>
<p>Barlow wants to leave us with an if-this-goes-on image of a Bush-dominated<br />
future in which Barlow and his friends are hauled off to concentration camps<br />
by mirrorshaded thugs, crushing dissent as though the U.S. were pre-liberation<br />
Iraq or something.</p>
<p>I would love to be able to echo Charles Babbage and say that I am<br />
not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that<br />
could provoke such a statement.  Unfortunately, I&#8217;m afraid I find it<br />
all too comprehensible, and not in a way that&#8217;s very flattering to<br />
John Perry Barlow or others like him.  It&#8217;s a form of posturing by<br />
anticipatory martyrdom, simultaneously demonizing Barlow&#8217;s enemies and<br />
inflating his own importance.</p>
<p>&#8220;Oh, look at <em>me!</em>&#8221; it says.  &#8220;I&#8217;m a brave speaker of truth<br />
to power, so brave that I&#8217;m going to say bad things about Republicans<br />
despite the fact that they will certainly throw me in the gulags as<br />
soon as they think they can get away with it.&#8221;  I&#8217;ve been around long<br />
enough to know that this is a line lefties of Barlow&#8217;s and my age<br />
originally learned in order to pick up women back in those halcyon<br />
radical-chic days of forty years ago.  It gets a bit old after your<br />
third decade of waiting for the Man to bust your door down.</p>
<p>Let&#8217;s get real.  Even supposing Bush were really the concretization<br />
of all those 1960s nightmares, an evil bastard backed by a cabal of<br />
goose-stepping minions, from their point of view throwing John Perry<br />
Barlow in the Lubyanka would be a <em>ridiculous</em> thing to do.<br />
Remember how conservatives think: from their point of view, Barlow is<br />
just another aging hippie burnout given to occasional quasi-coherent<br />
rants about that Internet thing.  In their model of reality, all<br />
they&#8217;d be doing by giving him the Solzhenitzyn treatment is conferring<br />
an importance on him that he doesn&#8217;t possess.</p>
<p>I have somewhat more respect for Barlow myself, enough that it<br />
survived the fact that the last time I was actually face-to-face with<br />
him he was obnoxiously drunk and patronizing.  He&#8217;s an erratic but<br />
occasionally brilliant polemicist.  But trying to imagine anybody in<br />
the inner circle of Skull &amp; Bones (or whatever the left-wingers&#8217; hate<br />
focus is this week) taking him seriously enough to bother bagging and<br />
tagging him just makes me laugh.</p>
<p>And if I can&#8217;t believe John Perry Barlow is enough of a threat to<br />
get gulaged by the mythical Bush stormtroopers, how seriously am I<br />
supposed to take the-Man&#8217;s-coming-for-us posturing from the rank and<br />
file of the Bush-haters?  Yeah, sure, the black marias are coming for<br />
all of you, all you twentysomething unemployed sysadmins and riot grrls<br />
and latte makers with your piercings and your Green Party T-shirts.<br />
As if.</p>
<p>There are lots of objective reasons this scenario is silly.  One of<br />
many is that our institutions won&#8217;t support it.  I know the police in<br />
my town; they wouldn&#8217;t obey orders to throw Dean voters in jail.  I<br />
just got through reading a book about the force structure of today&#8217;s<br />
U.S. infantry, and I can tell you that even if the second Bush<br />
administration were to complete the trashing of the <em>posse<br />
comitatus</em> laws that Clinton began and withdraw every damn grunt<br />
from overseas, <em>there aren&#8217;t enough troops</em>.  Even assuming<br />
100% of them signed up to be concentration-camp guards, <em>there<br />
wouldn&#8217;t be enough of them to man the camps.</em> And the trends are all<br />
towards a smaller, more skill-intensive military, so in the future<br />
assembling enough goons for a darkess-at-noon scenario will be<br />
harder rather than easier.</p>
<p>Then, of course, there&#8217;s the fact that Attorney-General Ashcroft is<br />
not pushing for federalized gun control and a ban on civilian<br />
firearms.  Which is the first damn thing any right-wing cabal (or any<br />
left-wing one, for that matter) would do if they were contemplating<br />
really serious dissent-crushing.  Again, the trend is in the other<br />
direction &mdash; the assault-weapon ban is going to lapse, and the<br />
Bush crowd is going to let it happen.  Much of the American left<br />
fools itself that civilian firearms don&#8217;t matter in the political<br />
power equation, but conservatives know better.</p>
<p>For that matter, I am certain &mdash; because I&#8217;ve discussed<br />
related topics with him &mdash; that John Perry Barlow himself knows<br />
better.  Which makes his willingness to posture about the Man coming<br />
to throw us in concentration camps less forgiveable than it would be<br />
in someone who&#8217;s a complete moron on the subject, like (say) Michael<br />
Moore.</p>
<p>But what really repels me about the kind of posturing I&#8217;m nailing<br />
John Perry Barlow for isn&#8217;t the objective silliness of it, it&#8217;s the<br />
fact that it represents a kind of triumph of paranoid self-absorption<br />
as a political style.  People in the (mainly left-wing) anti-Bush<br />
crowd snort with derision when they hear hard-right propaganda about<br />
how the Zionist Occupation Government is going to come after all true<br />
American white men with those black helicopters; why do they tolerate<br />
rhetoric that is just as narcissistic coming from their own?</p>
<p>Idiots.  They make me want to go vote for somebody like Pat Buchanan<br />
just out of spite.  Fortunately, I&#8217;m not a spiteful person, and have so<br />
far resisted this temptation.</p>
<p>And I don&#8217;t think it&#8217;s just me that sees people like John Perry<br />
Barlow actually dealing themselves out of the future when they make<br />
remarks like this.  Narcissistic politics is not a luxury we can<br />
afford any more.  It was OK during our holiday from history,<br />
1992-2001, between the fall of the Soviet Union and 9/11, but we&#8217;re in<br />
serious times now.  Our nation, and our civilization, are under<br />
continuing threat by terrorists who have demonstrated both the will<br />
and the ability to commit atrocities against Americans, and who loudly<br />
trumpet their intention to keep killing us.</p>
<p>We need people like John Perry Barlow to be <em>in</em> the debate<br />
about how to cope with this.  That means we need people like John Perry<br />
Barlow not to trivialize and disqualify themselves with silly<br />
posturing.  Please get real, people.  George Bush has flaws I could<br />
list from here to Sunday, but pretending that you&#8217;re all doomed<br />
victims if he&#8217;s re-elected is pathological.</p>
<p>And deep down, you know better, too. The last two years have given<br />
us not just relatively smart people like John Perry Barlow but legions<br />
of mindless show-biz glitterati making a particularly ironic spectacle<br />
of themselves &mdash; protesting the crushing of dissent in front of<br />
<em>huge</em> audiences.  Thereby demonstrating their own lack of<br />
contact with reality in a way that can only help the very opponents they<br />
think of as a sinister cabal.  With enemies this visibly stupid and<br />
feckless, who needs friends?  They&#8217;ll drive the big middle of the<br />
electorate right into Republican arms.</p>
<p>Let&#8217;s state the consequences very simply: Every time somebody like<br />
John Perry Barlow goes on in public about how the camps are waiting<br />
for us all, Karl Rove laughs and, quite rightly, figures his guy Bush<br />
is more of a lock this November.  And you know what?  He&#8217;s right.<br />
Because if I hear much more of this crap, even <em>I</em> am going to<br />
vote Republican for the first time in more than a quarter-century.</p>
