Every so often I wonder how smart and intellectually curious people can even be [. . . . . . .]. You hear about a problem in the world. It sounds shocking and offensive to common sense. You get outraged. Then you look into it a little, or maybe a lot if you're so inclined, and you see that the problem is usually far more complicated than you first thought. Your initial reactions, based on scant information, weren't really correct or fair.Full article here.
. . . . . . .
Surely these people know better. Do they know better and not care about the truth? Or, do they not know better? Are they just so freaked out by anything that is unfamiliar to them, anything that unsettles the little cocoon they live in, that they have to label it, name it as a threat, sow distrust of it? . . . . Or are they so interested in getting political power, and/or in their hatred of [. . . . . .], that any handy tool to make [. . . . . .] seem both weak and frightening (a nice trick, if you think about it) will be put to use toward that end?
Thus Michael Tomasky, the American editor-at-large of Guardian America, editor-in-chief of Democracy, and a contributing editor to American Prospect. A hick from Morgantown, West Virginia, whose father was a United Mine Workers shop steward before going into law, Tomasky has done well in the Big Apple. Like so many possessed of a degree but no family tradition or depth of learning, he does not understand that "the truth" is very seldom evident and is always subject to partisan distortion.
I put in the blanks because they can be filled with the terms "liberal" and "conservative" interchangeably, depending on which blinkered point of view the author represents.
What is remarkable, however, is that Tomasky is oblivious to the fact that what he wrote can be said with equal validity - of him - by the very people whose intellect and good faith he questions.
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Morgantown has changed a lot since I grew up there and probably since Tomasky left as well. During the war years a combination of coke ovens at one end of town and a munitions factory across the river produced a really poisonous atmosphere for your lungs and sinuses.
ReplyDeleteWest Virginia was known however to possess the worst public school system in the nation after Mississippi's! The black schools were so much better than the white ones that the negro population there resisted integration. Overnight the black college became half-white.
Tomasky's musings above however were directed largely to what he perceives as the Republican Party's unprincipled and total opposition to anything which the present American administration proposes or does. By 'conservative' in this context, he means 'Republican'although I cannot see how this
corrupt bunch of corporate shills has much to do with the republic.
For Kagan read Bork, and so on down the line. Republican and Democrat are equally inaccurate designations, both factions are equally corrupt and neither has any interest in constructive, let alone principled opposition. My point is that Tomasky's simple-mindedness is typical of those who illustrate the adage that "a little learning is a dangerous thing". Truth is the first casualty of factionalism, and the more naked the competition for power and money, the deeper it gets buried.
ReplyDeleteI thought Bork would have been a fine addition to the Supremes. A lot of personal attitude in America stems from who you cut your teeth on as the Opposition. My Southern friends who have moved left consider me some kind of wingnut 'phobe.' My other southern acquaintance who have moved to the right identify me as a 'typical nawthern libral'.
ReplyDeleteFrom West Virginia to New York City is probably the biggest jump Tomasky could have made. My parents brought me up to respect people of any denomination if they deserved it, and to talk with and learn from whomever I could. We always tried to consider individual cases. Tomasky sounds like a Polish miner's family.