Freaks and Geeks

Ross Douthat is a religious fundamentalist. It's difficult to believe that a man who is presumably sophisticated enough to make it through Harvard has a Bible-based view of the world, but he does. We can see where he obtained his practice of mealy-mouthed whimpering about smaller and smaller sins and religious issues but it doesn't excuse his actions. If life were a Monty Python sketch, Douthat would be the pet store owner, his religion would be the dead parrot, and the rest of the world would be the dead parrot's unfortunate owner. There's no point in reasoning with someone who has absolutely no intention of admitting he sold a dead parrot to fellow conservatives.

It’s been a melancholy summer for social conservatives. Their movement is fighting a rearguard battle in Barack Obama’s Washington. A cluster of family-values politicians — some of whom bunked down in the same Christian-sponsored D.C. townhouse — have spent the last few months confessing to extramarital affairs. And Sarah Palin ... well, you know how that’s turned out so far.

It's funny how the words "adultery" and "lose" are left out of this lament. Sarah Palin is greedy and not very bright. McCain could have picked someone less greedy and more intelligent, but--surprise!--McCain is greedy and not bright enough as well. Sixty percent of Republicans aren't sure or don't believe the evidence that President Obama is American. They are either too stupid to believe evidence or deliberately stupid so they will not have to question their beliefs. Conservatives are, understandably, very upset at being told that they are stupid, but since they can't change they can't learn and are forced to repeat their mistakes into infinity. When you won't let yourself learn from experience because it makes you feel bad about yourself you don't become smarter or wiser or more experienced or more tolerant. You stay stupid.

Speaking of the stupid:

Worst of all, nobody likes Judd Apatow’s new movie.

Don’t laugh. No contemporary figure has done more than Apatow, the 41-year-old auteur of gross-out comedies, to rebrand social conservatism for a younger generation that associates it primarily with priggishness and puritanism. No recent movie has made the case for abortion look as self-evidently awful as “Knocked Up,” Apatow’s 2007 keep-the-baby farce. No movie has made saving — and saving, and saving — your virginity seem as enviable as “The 40-Year Old Virgin,” whose closing segue into connubial bliss played like an infomercial for True Love Waits.

“We make extremely right-wing movies with extremely filthy dialogue,” Seth Rogen, Apatow’s favorite leading man, told an interviewer during the promotional blitz for “Knocked Up.” He was half-joking, of course, and it’s safe to say that you won’t see Apatow and his merry men at the next Christian Coalition fundraiser. But the one-liner got something important right. By marrying raunch and moralism, Apatow’s movies have done the near impossible: They’ve made an effectively conservative message about relationships and reproduction seem relatable, funny, down-to-earth and even sexy.

Aptow believes that loving his wife and valuing his family make him conservative. So does Douthat. That's a very self-flattering portrayal which just happens to leave out everything in Aptow's movies that conservatives see as signs of the Apocalypse: premarital sex, drug use, profanity, divorce, homosexuality, and an almost complete lack of religion in the lives of its characters. But hey, the main characters in the movies marry in the end (and when do they ever do that in Hollywood movies?), so the movies are conservative--as long as you ignore reality.

But there's a liberal snake in the garden, and it's dragging good conservatives straight to Hell.

More than most Westerners, Americans believe — deeply, madly, truly — in the sanctity of marriage. But we also have some of the most liberal divorce laws in the developed world, and one of the highest divorce rates. We sentimentalize the family, but boast one of the highest rates of unwed births. We’re more pro-life than Europeans, but we tolerate a much more permissive abortion regime than countries like Germany or France. We wring our hands over stem cell research, but our fertility clinics are among the least regulated in the world.

In other words, we’re conservative right up until the moment that it costs us.

Douthat's recommendation is, of course, more social shaming and punishment for moral transgressions. That's always his answer and that attitude plainly reveals his fundamental viewpoint: We are sinners and must be punished. This is a strangely un-Christian attitude. Jesus died for others' sins so they would not suffer. Douthat's Catholicism has a system of repentance and punishment for dealing with sins. Yet that's not enough for him. He wants his entire society to be as obsessed as he with sin and guilt and fear. He wants every facet of society to reinforce everything he believes, like all fundamentalists. He wants his personal view to be vindicated and triumphed at all times, and he has managed to convince The New York Freaking Times to do this for him. It's like hiring Jonah Goldberg as the president of Harvard or Megan McArdle as chief of the Fed. It's utterly inexcusable and ought to be an intellectual scandal.

With “Funny People,” though, Apatow is offering a more realistic morality play. This time, doing the right thing has significant costs — but you have to do it anyway. This time, doing the wrong things for too long has significant consequences — and you have to live with them. It’s the first Apatow film in which love doesn’t conquer all. And it’s the first Apatow film in which you get punished for your sins.

In that sense, “Funny People” is the most conservative of all his movies. That’s probably what American audiences don’t like about it. But it’s what makes this film his best work yet.

Aptow grew up the unhappy child of divorce and made two movies about lonely people who long for families. Wanting a family and wanting to be a good spouse and parent is not solely a conservative desire, and it's vain and self-indulgent to declare that only your tribe is moral or has good values. Somehow Douthat manages to ignore those sins while looking for others.

God Kills Another Conservative

One of the signers of the Project for a New American Century letter, Peter Rodman, has died. They are as vile a bunch of villains as one could imagine, who worked tirelessly for years in the service of world domination and exploitation. Some of them have been fouling politics since Nixon's time. Their influence was/is deadly.

One down, 16 left to go. My money's on Rumsfeld. The world just isn't the same if you no longer can kill a hundred foreigners before breakfast.

Empathy and Evil

As I've said before, a major difference between conservatives and liberals is empathy. If you can imagine how other people feel, you can put yourself in their shoes. You can begin to try to understand them, and no matter how different they are or how much you disagree with them you can't hate them completely. You empathise, and empathy makes you brave enough to fight your fear of the Other and strong enough to conquer hate. Most conservatives can't begin to understand this. They think the lack of hate is moral confusion and that fear is vigilance. To be brave is an affront, and to understand is to be weak.

This lack of empathy is dangerous. If you don't think about the consequences of your actions and how they affect other people, there is nothing keeping you from doing whatever you want. You will quite deliberately choose to take actions that will harm other people. You manipulate energy markets or sign torture memos or order the bombing of ancient nations because you don't really care what happens to the people affected by your actions. Sometimes you are able to feel some empathy when something bad happens to a person you know, such as when a friend is shot. Then you can feel the shock of his family and friends and sympathy for his pain. But in general you don't care about anyone outside your own circle, be it as small as a family or as large as a nation.

And so choices are made, and ripples of reaction fan out across the surface of the world. And the result is evil. Evil actions that rip people apart, starve children, kill nations. But that's not what the soulless ones, the ones without empathy, say. Bad things aren't consequences of callous decisions. They're the will of God, they're Satan battling God and using man as a battlefield. There is an evil miasma stalking the land, ensnaring good people into doing bad things. Or they have inferior genes. Their culture is bad and their genes are bad so bad things happen to them. It's all their fault.

We get empathy from our parents; many of us are taught that other people have feelings too, that if you hit someone else it hurts them, just like being hit hurts you. If a child is shown understanding and respect he will like and accept himself, and will be much more likely to show understanding and respect--and empathy--for others.

It's our choices that matter. What we do every minute of our lives, how we treat the people around us, and how we look at the people beyond. Who we will treat as brothers, and whom we will choose to fear. Callous people make up excuses and reasons and even ideologies to explain why the don't care about others but the reason is always very simple: They can't.

Read Evil as the Absence of Empathy by Ernest Partridge.

Two, Four, Six, Eight, Who Do We Appreciate?

Glenn Greenwald:

To blithely justify unprovoked wars and the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent people, as Tom Friedman did and does, is bad enough. To dismiss matters such as government-sponsored torture and lawless detention camps with nothing more than an acknowledgment in passing that perhaps they deserve a "thumbs-down" is almost as bad. That the same people who do that are then surprised and even offended that the rest of the world finds them repellent and dangerous -- that they actually expect that the world should view them as honorable moral arbiters -- is probably the most revealing aspect of all. The casual embrace of widespread, unparalleled aggression and violence by the Tom Friedmans of the world is exceeded only by their complete inability to see themselves for what they are.

These defenders of war and torture have no idea how much they sicken us. Their ugly, blood-soaked cheerleading for war from the safe confines of their cafes, restaurants and luxury apartments. Their in-you-face truimphantism while our bombs blew apart baby girls and teenage boys, pregnant moms and innocent dads. The threats; traitors, Bush Deranged, kill the liberals. The servile excuses for torture, kidnapping, signing statements, Fallujah, the Patriot Act. They turn our stomach and make us sick to death of their callousness and vain-glorious hunger for death and more death. Suck On This, Faster, Please, Kill Them All and Let God Sort Them Out. Mottoes to live by in this wretched time.

You war-lovers and power-seekers, brown-nosers and enablers: You make us sick. We're not pretending. We're not acting indignant because we love to feel aggrieved. That's your job. You disgust us and we will never, ever let you forget it as long as you live.

It's all about the money.

Don't rightwing pundits ever get embarrassed? Is no idea too stupid or obvious to state? If I went to the Korean Rev. Moon's Washington Times or Australian Rupert Murdoch's New York Post, could I get them to pay me for articles decrying the menace of godless communism or evil Baltic anarchists? I can be shrill and stupid too if I'm paid for it.

Mary Maggie Gallagher complains that gay marriage will mean infidelity will invade marriage and force the separation of church and state. This situation already exists with straight marriage, but reality doesn't pay cash for wingnut stupidity. The Post does. And, horrors, if they want to destroy gay marriage, they'll have to pay to try. In fact, most of her complaints are simply about money. Churches might lose money if they want to be bigots and bigots will have to pay (to sue) to keep their bigotry.

The funny part--there's always a funny part, that's why I'm here--is that Gallagher's nemesis is also her salvation.

National Public Radio reported this week, "Two titanic legal principles are
crashing on the steps of the church, synagogue and mosque: equal treatment for
same-sex couples on the one hand, and the freedom to exercise religious beliefs
on the other."

If you tear down the laws separating church and state, you are also tearing down the laws separating mosque and state. In your hurry to impose your superstitions on others, you might make your greatest nightmare come true--letting Islam form the laws for the US. Of course that won't happen, but we're talking wingnut, not reality.

Irony of ironies: the Post's pop-up advertisement was for a "dumb test." Very convenient!

Added: Dammit, Roy beat me to it, and is funnier to boot.

Thomas Sowell is a brilliant Republican thinker.

"...I began reading not only the economics of Thomas Sowell (our greatest contemporary philosopher) but Milton Friedman, Paul Johnson, and Shelby Steele..." David Mamet

The brilliant Thomas Sowell says that the Republican Party can peel off 20% of black voters by changing unsuccessful tactics to successful ones. And what are his suggestions?

"A sober presentation of the facts — "straight talk," if you will — gives Senator McCain and Republicans their best shot at a larger share of the votes of blacks....

There is plenty to talk straight about, including all the things that the Democrats are committed to that work to the disadvantage of blacks, beginning with Democrats' adamant support of teachers' unions in their opposition to parental choice through vouchers.The teachers' unions are just one of the sacred-cow constituencies of the Democratic Party whose agendas are very harmful to blacks....

Black voters also need to be told about the tens of thousands of blacks who have been forced out of a number of liberal Democratic California counties by skyrocketing housing prices, brought on by Democratic environmentalists' severe restrictions on the building of homes or apartments."

And that's it. Teachers' unions, which are very weak to non-existant in the south, and the rise in property values in San Francisco, one of the most desired locations to live in the nation. Plus school vouchers, which parents fully realize would not pay for transportation to a charter school, which often don't like to take at-risk kids, who need more and expensive services. The brilliant Thomas Sowell actually can't come up with a single convincing reason in his little op-ed. Did he write this on the train on his way in to work?

The Logic of Repression

More and more I am seeing people point out the painful and painfully obvious fact--people do what they want to do. I would add, people also do what they need to do. Illogical actions are often based on emotion, not reason, and only understandable by that standard. (Illogical actions are also often perfectly logical as long as you know the true motivation of the actor, but that is another story.) Understand the emotion and you will be able to understand the action, and fight it if necessary.

Chris Floyd understands the irrational actions taking place. He points out that if our nation--its people and leaders--tolerate torture, it's not because they are being forced to.

They lie about [torture] because they want to torture people. That's the first thing you must understand: They want to do it. They enjoy the thought of it. They want to hear the details, they want to hear about the pain, about the broken spirits and the ruined minds. They literally, physically – perhaps even sexually – enjoy the idea of people getting beaten, tormented and waterboarded at their command. There's no question about this. Bush tortured animals when he was a child, and now he tortures human beings with the same kind of furtive, sniggering, naughty glee. And when someone catches him at it, he lies about it, just like a brattish child. And now the whole administration of the United States government operates on the degraded moral level of this profoundly stunted and twisted little wretch.

It's very hard for us to believe that we are a nation of sadists, that our president tortured animals as a boy and now shows a depraved indifference to human life. That we can callously watch millions of people suffer, and indifferently hear our administration petulently demand that they be grateful for our actions. So we refuse to believe the bad news about torture, rendition, disregard for justice and law, hypocracy and malevolence. We turn our backs on our victims rather than admit we don't care if anyone else is hurt.

How can ordinary people be so callous? Psychotherapist Alice Miller explains in her book Breaking Down the Wall of Silence that children who are mistreated by their parents grow up without empathy, for themselves or others.

Children who have been beaten, humiliated, and abused, and who find no witness to come to their aid often develop a grave syndrome in later life; they have no knowledge of their true feelings, fear them like the plague, and are therefore incapable of recognizing vital connections, Without realizing it-and without taking responsibility for it—they work out the horrors that they once experienced on innocent people. Like their parents before them, they regard their actions as “redemption” for others.

That is the logic of repression. I refuse to know what my parents did to me and to others. I want to forgive them and not to condemn them. I don’t want to question them. They are my parents, and therefore they are beyond blame.

The mistreatment of my own children, horrific wars against supposed enemies, the destruction of life wherever I see it growing, allow me to raise a monument to my parents and retain my blindness.

Children want and need their parents' approval and will do anything for it, even later as adults. If people acknowledge their parents couldn't love them, they are giving up hope on attaining that love, and most people are utterly incapable of doing that. So we become callous and hard to our own pains, to preserve the illusion of love, and of course callous and hard towards others. Deeply hidden anger at mistreatment isn't allowed, since it will burst that Leave It To Beaver fantasy. So the anger is directed towards others, and everything from child abuse to wars happens as a result.

Bush, who tortured small creatures as a child, doesn't hesitate to kill a million or more people in Iraq. They are merely numbers on a sheet of paper, easy to ignore as he strives to show he is strong and right and better than his dad. Killing Saddam was perfect because it showed his father who was the real winner and it also showed his father that he would do anything to avenge him. A plea for love, a release of pent-up rage, a way to retain the power that feeds his insecure ego--he had many reasons for going to war and then staying there. Iraq is indeed very, very complicated--for some.