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Fuck your civility
There is, increasingly, a monotony, a deadening sameness to the repartee between right and left in the online world. The right says whatever insane thing pops into its hive mind. The left — and by “the left” I here mean people whose political leanings run anywhere from Bakunin’s to Barry Goldwater’s — the left objects. The right accuses the left of being shrill and uncivil. The archetype:
Right: “The government needs to listen to our phone conversations. How else will they be able to root out enemies of the state? And anyone who disagrees is a traitor. The fact is, that there are certain ethnic minorities who pose a serious threat to our beloved country, and locking them up in camps without due process or taking vigilante action to shoot them at the border is by no means anything but a sensible course of action. And any newspaper or broadcast journalists who cover this should be squelched.”
Left: “My goodness, your political opinions strongly resemble those held by a certain Central European political figure of the mid-Twentieth Century.”
Right: “GODWIN!”
The loathesome Josh Treviño provides an excellent recent example of this phenomenon, in a stunningly condescending rant over a couple of mild swipes at Jeff Goldstein, one of the most obnoxious, insulting, and uncivil writers on the net, yours truly excepted. Goldstein recently announced that he’s taking anti-anxiety medication. A couple left bloggers cracked wise. This is understandable: aside from being a non-stop source of abuse streamed at anyone who disagrees with him, Goldstein is notable for recently advocating the nuking of Iran, and for rather rabidly suggesting that Jill Carroll was somehow in league with her captors because they didn’t kill her.
Personally, I wish Goldstein luck with his medication. But Treviño’s outrage over the mild jokes about Goldstein being unbalanced is a good example of just how unbalanced the right has become.
Treviño, who blogs as “Tacitus,” is a former Bush speechwriter and vice president of public policy at Pacific Research Institute, a free market think tank best known for its advocacy of privatizing public education. (For “privatizing public education” read “pushing charter schools.” For “pushing charter schools” read “making sure African-American kids never go to college.”) Pacific Research also promotes the notion of Property Rights as trumping environmental protection, and publishes increasingly astounding lies about climate change:
The deepening controversy over climate change policy is a sure sign that the matter is not settling into a rough consensus, as is typically the case with large-scale public policy problems.
(For “deepening controversy,” read “damn, we’ve sawed off the limb we went out on.”)
Pacific Research is also in the forefront of the fight to promote the health and well-being of the private health care industry, and has been a leading voice in the Medicare reform debacle, now unfolding in the bank accounts of old folks throughout the United States.
What does all this mean? Treviño brings home a paycheck for helping to create conditions in which education is increasingly denied to the poor — a group whose ranks are swelling as “free-market” policies spread. He helps to make sure prescription drugs remain unaffordable to the aged or infirm. He works to make sure that people living near polluting industries stand a good chance of getting cancer, to facilitate the northward spread of tropical diseases. Look at Pacific Research’s climate policy: see the Ninth Ward of New Orleans, except far more widespread.
Treviño’s paycheck, in other words, comes with a body count. True, he doesn’t get his hands dirty. He does his work in a comfortable office, which is, in fact, just around the corner from mine. But he works to help kill people nonetheless. As Edward Herman put it in a slightly different context:
Doing terrible things in an organized and systematic way rests on “normalization.” This is the process whereby ugly, degrading, murderous, and unspeakable acts become routine and are accepted as “the way things are done.” There is usually a division of labor in doing and rationalizing the unthinkable, with the direct brutalizing and killing done by one set of individuals; others keeping the machinery of death (sanitation, food supply) in order; still others producing the implements of killing, or working on improving technology (a better crematory gas, a longer burning and more adhesive napalm, bomb fragments that penetrate flesh in hard-to-trace patterns). It is the function of defense intellectuals and other experts, and the mainstream media, to normalize the unthinkable for the general public. Normalization of the unthinkable comes easily when money, status, power, and jobs are at stake. Companies and workers can always be found to manufacture poison gases, napalm, or instruments of torture, and intellectuals will be dredged up to justify their production and use. The rationalizations are hoary with age: government knows best, ours is a strictly defensive effort, or, if it wasn’t me somebody else would do it.
Despite working around the corner from Treviño, I do not know him personally. He may be, as so many are, a different person offline than on. He may style himself a friendly, compassionate fellow merely looking for a good job, who has never connected his political beliefs with any sort of day-to-day reality. He would certainly not be alone in that. There are thousands of people on the right who are, as Arendt said of Eichmann, merely leaves in the whirlwind of time.
That last sentence provides Treviño an out, of course. By even mentioning the Nazis — no matter how increasingly useful a paralllel that regime may be — I have exempted myself from Treviño’s definition of reasoned discourse. And Treviño is a reasonable man, and abhors the incivility of those of us who point out the increasing body count his cohort is amassing. (Oddly, though people such as the apparently indefatiguable David Neiwert have amply documented rather shocking lists of “incivil” acts by the right, I am unaware of any chiding from Treviño aimed in that direction. Perhaps I’m mistaken.)
My point: it is not civil to discuss things quietly and collegially while people are dying because they can’t afford medicine. It is not civil to speak in even, chuckling sardonicism as one beleaguered wild place after another is paved for profit. It is not civil to calmly raise logical arguments against torture, against kidnapping, against using nuclear weapons on civilians to show our resolve.
Billy Golfus, the disability rights activist who made the film “When Billy Broke His Head,” heard some years ago that the über-civil staff at Utne Reader had chided Lucy Gwin, the militant editor of Mouth Magazine, for incivility in her refusal of an Alternative Press Award. Golfus’ letter to Utne is one of the best analyses of civility I have ever read. Golfus said, in part,
Lucy Gwin faxed me her protest about the Utne Reader awarding MOUTH something or other with a pat on the head. Your response that she was ‘alienating people’ was the Minnesota Nice Liberal cliche. We have to stand up and scream about some wrongs. c.f. Camus’ The Rebel. Remember that not-nice Nobel Prize winner?
Slavery is wrong. Period. Alienating people while protesting owning other human beings seems inevitable when there are people who believe in slavery.
OR you could be nice and say there are two sides to every argument.
Killing people in gas chambers and then hiding the evidence in crematoriums is hideous. Period. Alienating people who believe that racial cleansing is right seems inevitable.
OR you could be nice and say everyone has a right to their own point of view.
Taking an indigenous people’s land away and then locking them up on reservations is wrong. Period. (You see the pattern.)
The Citizen’s Alliance of the Nouveau Riche in Minneapolis - with their nice and genteel ways - kept working wages here 15 percent below the rest of the country for a quarter of a century until the truck strike of 1934 when labor finally won against management. They proved David could win against Goliath if he didn’t mind alienating people.
A lot of oppression comes dressed nicely, and shops at Lund’s.
I have joked that the civility trope is a self-defeating one for the right to adopt: no one can use civility as a weapon better than the left, for what is Political Correctness if not civility refined to a fetish? But the truth is this: it is easy to insist on civility from behind the neat stuccoed walls of the gated community. Whether it comes from right or left, a fetishized civility increasingly bespeaks a personal stake in the monstrous status quo. I prize humane discussion, and am happy to befriend people of good will with near complete disregard to their political opinions. As long as they do not show rabid hate, I am willing to presume the best of them.
But I have decided I no longer trust anyone who insists on others being civil. The bumper sticker from ten years ago said “If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention.” That needs updating. If you’re not outraged, then you’ve decided that the suffering that exists in the world is just fine with you, as long as you don’t feel it.
And if you’ve decided that, you don’t deserve civility. And if progressives call you on your shit in the strongest terms possible, that’s because we consider it the only ethical response.
[title blatantly swiped from Kevin at Slant Truth]
[Update: welcome to readers from Unscrewing the Inscutable. As I attempted to point out in comments to that post, Alon Levy inverted my intended point. I have no problem with people deciding to engage the Right calmly when they think it’s appropriate. I think it’s kind of sad, in fact, that I have to point that out. I’m reasonably certain there’s no other way to interpret that “humane discussion” thing a couple paragraphs up.]
Posted by: Chris Clarke
Note: A database glitch in 2008 ate a bunch of archived comments. Don't be offended if yours isn't here, or confused if the conversation seems disjointed. Thanks!
Agreed…the apathy is growing in this country. We should be outraged.
By: By Shawn on 2006 05 13
I had someone shout about Godwin’s Law to me not to long ago. A slashdot story about a company requiring RFID chip implants in its employees prompted someone to ask if there was any historical precedent for permanent marking of workers, and I responded “Well, there were those number tattoos in the Nazi slave labor camps…”
“Godwin’s Law!” was shouted at me.
In response I came up with the somewhat clumsy Jafafa’s Law: Anyone who tries through reflexive and thoughtless exclamation to inhibit the valid practice of comparing for the purpose of gaining perspective a behavior to known extremes is a fucking putz.
By: By craig on 2006 05 13
Well Chris, since you are angry and express your anger vociferously (not to mention doing so at one of those enemies i too cannot begin to overstate my despisal—PRI), in the best John Trudell tradition, i can fully trust you.
The left is tired of have been civil for decades, whilst those on the right abuse and undermine every conversation with rhetoric of violence and hatred. Why was a rap radio dj arrested for saying things that are much less harsh than Coulter or Phelps? Oh, he’s black and perceived as liberal.
Treviño’s peeps would argue that their precious free market would make all the correct and necessary adjustments so we wouldn’t have any problems at all. But if you understand Herman you realize that it is the very markets themselves that drive the process. Of course someone else will build the bombs and fly the planes and launch the rockets, because they desperately want the jobs, that the free market has minimized and marginalized for the sake of selfish profit. When you have guiding principles based on Randian objectivist libertarianism, you have principles based on selfishness as the greatest virtue. Calling them selfish is civil, and they are not. Calling them bigots and racists is more accurate but continues to understate their views. “Evil” i think pretty much covers it.
By: By spyder on 2006 05 13
The counterpart to this fake civility is the demand for “tolerance.” Rightwingers shrill on and on about denying others rights and then, when someone points out what they’re doing, they whine about the need for “tolerance” of their views.
And, good line about David Neiwert. He needs to be more widely read.
By: By Charles on 2006 05 13
I’m sure that David Neiwert is very widely-read. What I meant to say is, more people need to read what he says.
By: By Charles on 2006 05 14
Lewis Black was opening his show during the election with something like: “If you haven’t needed to scream ‘motherfucker’ at anytime over the past four years, I have nothing to say to you.”
By: By david on 2006 05 14
All this talk about nasty left-wing bloggers make me wonder if any of the folks supposedly offended by this have ever read “Free Republic” or LGF—which, remember, are *moderated*.
And the right-wingers are just as big on “political correctness” as the fussiest left-wing academic. Try “calling things by their right names”, like the anti-PC crowd says, and your’re in for a screaming, ranting tirade…
By: By lightning on 2006 05 14
Chris
Thank you for writing so strongly about what I have often thought. I have dealt with bureaucracy in the form of Worker’s Insurance. Their division of labour is set up to completely depersonalize and fragment a person to the point where they either go mad from the stress or drop out so they do not have to deal with it, or they end up pulling a Stockholm Syndrome thing where they believe the lies and think that their caseworker/doctor/insert useless profession here are their friend and they are doing them a favour when they actually do their job.
I only live with the person who has been affected by this organization. I am the designated bitch. I am constantly surprised by the people in my life who just look at me and say I should just “play the game” in order to get necessary treatments or cheques on time or deal with the threat of PI’s watching me and mine. What game would THAT be I wonder aloud. Why should my family be subject to assumptions about our honesty without recourse? Why is it that a giant insurance company with 20 million plus in its reserve fund should have the ability to deny compensation to a workers injury claim when it was originally set up to avoid workers ending up in poverty after an injury? Why does everyone seem to think this is like chess?
My outrage was forwarded to the government. The reply was go on welfare. Funny thing, that. I make too much to do that. And if that is my only option I would prefer to fall over dead. So I will work three jobs to try and keep my family afloat and hope to hell that I do not get sick or injured while doing so.
That my family has not offered to write letters and complain is unthinkable to me. Recently a distant relative was told her child would be taken by social services because her older child was out of control. If she gave the older one up she would have to surrender her youngest. I flipped. I told the people involved what to do, who to contact and where to go for help. It worked. Had it not, I would have found another route to go. I would have written whatever letters that needed to be written, gone to whatever politicians that needed to be contacted and blogged and contacted the media myself- with this person’s permission of course. That the same outrage is not shown in my case is a bit stunning. I have advocated for other relatives when needed. I have written countless letters over the last twenty years to help friends with student loans and insurance claims and court cases . When I ask for help there are polite coughs and a suggestion or two that if only the person who is injured got off their ass and worked through their pain or believed in god they would be able to get on with their life. Funny thing- neuropathy due to a nerve root entrapment that has scar tissue gluing it to the spinal column is not something that just spontaneously heals with happy thoughts.
Thank you for giving me a bit of resolve once again.
And whoever knew I was channelling Lewis Black the last few years???? LOL!!!
By: By impatientpatient on 2006 05 15
One other thing to mention is how much of modern discourse is done via the written word.
If I write an editorial, or blog post, or even a message board post, I expect that some responses may come a few days after my original statement.
A few days is plenty of time to cool off and respond to the content of even the most vitriolic argument.
If we’re talking face to face, then, yeah, civility is important. If I call you a fuckhead then that makes you want to call me one, and the whole argument degenerates into insults.
With writting, on the other hand, it’s quite easy to avoid this spiral into bickering. If somebody calls me a fuckhead I can wait a few hours to cool off before responding.
There’s no real reason to be polite, in other words.
By: By Christopher on 2006 05 15
I have always liked these lines from “Disappointed” by Morrissey:
Don’t talk to me about people who are “nice”
For I have spent my whole life in ruins
Because of people who are “nice”
Pretty much.
By: By Holly on 2006 05 15
Don’t talk to me about people who are “nice�
For I have spent my whole life in ruins
Because of people who are “nice�
Holy shit. If that just doesn’t hit home for me like nothing I have ever read before. No, I’m not just being whiny. (Chris knows what I mean.)
By: By craig on 2006 05 15
Can I just Bitch about the constant misuse of Godwin’s law by people who have not the faintest idea what Usenet is, let alone how to correctly apply Godwin?
All it says that the longer an online discussion continues, the greater the likelyhood of a nazi comparison becomes.
That’s it.
It’s not a get out of jail card, If a comparison to the Nazis is apt, it’s apt.
By: By Martin Wisse on 2006 05 18
I deleted an abusive comment made here because it was pointless and not nearly funny enough to redeem istelf.
By: By Chris Clarke on 2006 05 22
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