Monday, November 8, 2010

Are we too meta?

Comedy Central on the Mall by Janet Malcolm | NYRBlog | The New York Review of Books:


If there is one thing that liberal Americans can legitimately pride themselves on it is their talent for creating irreverent signs. Who will forget, from the peace rallies of yesteryear, “WHEN CLINTON LIED NO ONE DIED” or “THE ONLY BUSH I TRUST IS MY OWN?” Here are a few examples from the Rally for Sanity and/or Fear:

WE HAVE NOTHING TO FEAR BUT FEAR ITSELF AND SPIDERS
MODERATION OR DEATH
JEW AGAINST INVOKING HITLER FOR POLITICAL POINTS
ATHEISTS FOR MASTURBATION
GAY MAYLASIAN MUSLIMS FOR SARAH PALIN
YOU KNOW WHO ELSE WAS A WHITE SOX FAN? HITLER
SUPPORT SEPARATION OF HEAD FROM ASS

On October 2, I’d attended the One Nation Working Together rally at the Lincoln Memorial, sponsored by, among others, the NAACP, the AFL-CIO, and the Sierra Club, and supported by groups that included the National Urban League, the National Baptist Convention, the Gay and Lesbian Task Force, and the Communist Party USA. The signs there had a different character:

GOOD JOBS NOW
STOP CORPORATE GREED
GAY, LESBIAN, BISEXUAL AND TRANSGENDER EQUALITY
I WANT SINGLE PAYER HEALTH CARE
GET OUT AND VOTE FOR DEMOCRATS
So why were we out in such numbers for the Stewart/Colbert False Equivalence rally, and all but unaware of the One Nation Working Together Rally? (I include myself in this generalization. I vaguely remember the rally happening, and even checking it out for a minute on C-SPAN, but I watched more of the Stewart rally.)

I suspect the dynamic at play here is the marketplace of ideas being so broken, our focus has shifted to presentation of the issues in some cases where it's actually far more important we address the actual issues themselves. Scary to think the polarizing divide may not be so much between liberals and conservatives as it is between ironic hipsters and reactionary propagandists. It's a First World Problem now, but the longer it goes on at this level of discourse, the more like a surreal Third World problem it's going to become.
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