I don’t know that voters have ever, as a whole, truly understood the issues being laid before them, but Gary Huck is right that it seems we’re in a period of militant, hostile ignorance we haven’t seen since the short-but-nasty rise of the Know-Nothings.
It’s hard to know what to do about it, and not just because they’re taking over school boards and helping to breed more generations of ignoramuses, because that’s a long-range goal that can be intercepted. The question is how to intercept it before it bears fruit.
The original Know Nothing party only existed for 16 years, but that was long enough, given that their hate-filled anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant screeds attracted plenty of votes in that brief period and that what ended the party was a civil war in which three-quarters of a million Americans died.
It’s less comforting to quote Jonathan Swift’s advice “It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into,” knowing that he was writing not as a wickedly clever satirist and fellow wise-guy but as Dean Swift, Anglican cleric, giving advice to young priests.
Nor is it helpful to point out that Elizabeth Cady Stanton advocated making voters pass some sort of test of intelligence, given that (A) such tests were later misused to suppress Black voters and (B) she had begun to make comments that caused the women’s movement to gently shift her to the sidelines.
No, if it’s pointless to argue with knotheads and counterproductive to try to silence them, the best you can do is prove that they form a loud minority, at which point we end up once again quoting Edmund Burke, which is idealistic optimism unless you prove it true at the polls:
Because half a dozen grasshoppers under a fern make the field ring with their importunate chink, whilst thousands of great cattle, reposed beneath the shadow of the British oak, chew the cud and are silent, pray do not imagine that those who make the noise are the only inhabitants of the field.
Frankly, to view the majority as a herd of silent cattle placidly chewing their cud is hardly uplifting and, to reference Huck’s cartoon, certainly not what Jefferson envisioned, nor likely what Jesus had in mind.
Darwin, perhaps, but then I suppose he would hope for people to improve over time, rather than degenerate, though scientists aren’t supposed to hope for things rather than simply examining them.
In any case, here’s our first
Juxtaposition of the Day
The critical factor here is that neither McKee nor Ramirez can be categorized as flaming liberals, so their mockery of Trump’s departures from reality should carry that much more weight.
McKee offers a longer laundry list of lunatic proclamations, but the helicopter story itself is enough of an indictment not only of Trump’s recall but of his honesty.
An honest man would have admitted he misremembered the event, a smart one would have dropped the matter and hoped for it to disappear.
What do you make of someone who, confronted by multiple witnesses to the falseness of his anecdote, insists on its truth, offers records that somehow never actually appear and threatens to sue a major newspaper for challenging his version of the facts?
But never mounts a credible effort to prove he was neither mistaken nor telling a deliberate lie?
If he truly believes what he says, we’re getting into OJ Simpson and Jeff MacDonald territory.
Both of whom have fans willing to vouch for their innocence, to insist that they were falsely accused and who would vote for them, given the chance.
Steve Brodner points out that not only did Donald Trump declare the Medal of Honor less important than a Presidential Medal of Freedom given to a major donor to his campaign, but explained his reasoning:
It’s actually much better, because everyone [who] gets the Congressional Medal, they’re soldiers. They’re either in very bad shape because they’ve been hit so many times by bullets or they’re dead.
Brodner’s suggestion that Trump is considering a monument for Adelson is satire, a natural-but-ridiculous result of the irrational-and-ridiculous insult to veterans, particularly in view of Trump’s repeated insults to dead and disabled veterans.
Though those who oppose Trump and Vance should be cautious about satire, since there are so many perfectly legitimate ways to emphasize GOP insults to women, to minorities and to democracy itself.
As noted here before, if you’ve been circulating couch jokes based on a deliberate lie, you can’t object to deliberate lies being spread about your own chosen candidates.
Besides, it’s easy to get trapped into circulating false charges yourself, without having to invent them, as seen in
Juxtaposition of the Day #2
Given the direct, intentional lies being told about Harris’s crowds, including faked shots of empty runways disproven by both amateur and news footage from the scene, perhaps it’s natural that progressives would believe in a scene of Trump waving to a nonexistent crowd.
But Snopes shows the original footage from that moment, in which a large crowd of cheering supporters can be seen at the end of the block, kept from the front of Trump Towers by barricades and security. That’s who Trump was waving at.
Whoops.
It reminds me of a children’s book of stories about saints in the preface to which the author explained:
Most of the things I have written really did happen to the Saints, but some of the things that I have written are just stories that people tell about them and these are called legends. All the legends could have happened if God wanted them that way and that, I think, is how most of them of them started.
I want that engraved on my headstone. Most of what I’ve written also could have happened if God had wanted it that way.
And speaking of self-made legends, Fiona Katauskas explains that crowd sizes and other marvels could have happened if Trump had wanted them that way.
And that, I think, is how most of them started.
When this is all over, assuming that democracy comes out on top, our whole country is going to have to go back to school twice as long as anyone else. (11/20/55)