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