#265 Musings Beyond the Bunker (Thursday February 3)
Good morning!
QUOTATION OF THE WEEK
Thank you, Adam Torson, for circulating this quotation, which pretty much summarizes our current political moment as a society:
“A true Democratic Spirit is up there with religious faith and emotional maturity and all those other top-of-the-Maslow-Pyramid-type qualities that people spend their whole lives working on. A Democratic Spirit's constituent rigor and humility and self-honesty are, in fact, so hard to maintain on certain issues that it's almost irresistibly tempting to fall in with some established dogmatic camp and to follow that camp's line on the issue and to let your position harden within the camp and become inflexible and to believe that he other camps are either evil or insane and to spend all your time and energy trying to shout over them.”
--David Foster Wallace, Consider the Lobster
THIS IS HOW COURSE RHETORIC HAS BECOME
In response to Mitt Romney’s posting, “Best of luck to our freestyle skiers competing this week in the International Healthcare International in Park City…” here are a few of the responses:
“Thanks king RINO”
“Best of luck to our great American athletes. Too bad you’re pulling for China MITT.”
“Go crawl under a rock and stay there!”
“The ALL TIME RINO SPEAKS…Just sick up tactic by this trader (sic)…His intrests lie with the boys getting rich from the foreign Ukrainian and other countrys (sic) mess like Hunter Biden.”
“Utah’s shame…”
“Keep pounding this guy…he’s a grifter…”
And then this off-color voice of reason:
“Guys, he made a post about skiing. Could you not be dicks for like two minutes?”
ANTISEMITISM AND RACISM
A number of people commented on my statement that “hate is hate” and that all forms thereof are abhorant. One need not only focus on anti-Black violence merely because it is of such paramount importance these days, to the exclusion of standing against antisemitism or anti-Asian bias.
Whoopi Goldberg is on “leave” from The View because of her assertion (stated not only once) that the Holocaust wasn’t racially-based because it was white-on-white violence. She has a hard time seeing it as racial at all, which it of course was. The Nazis did not kill Jews because of differing philosophical beliefs, or for territory, or over competing economic systems, or because Jews were an existential threat. The Jews were killed because they were Jews. The laws were called racial laws because they were racist.
Curiously, Goldberg’s statement belies a dilemma for Jews in America today. To many in the Black and Brown communities, Jews are perceived as white and any violence against them is, therefore, not racial but either religious or a response to Israeli government policies. And yet, to many whites, particularly in the right-leaning fringes, Jews are “the other.”
We are living in a world that doesn’t take kindly to holding two seemingly competing ideas in one’s head simultaneously. But increasingly, we seem unable to hold even complementary ideas in our minds at the same time. It is possible simultaneously to stand against all forms of hatred, from whatever its source and whomever is the target. I hope that is the message Ms. Goldberg will take to heart.
MORE MEETINGS
Finally, from Skip Kessler, who argues for agendas for both not-for-profit and for-profit meetings, he adds: “In the case of a business meeting, unless there is a long agenda, if the meeting goes on for more than 45 minutes (and usually for even less time), nothing more will be accomplished.”
Have a great day,
Glenn
From the archives: