[Vision2020] Illustrating Ideological Rigidity

[Tom Hansen]

Courtesy of today's (February 1, 2009) Spokesman Review.

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Illustrating ideological rigidity
By Leonard Pitts Jr.

This one is for Doug.

He was one of maybe 2,000 readers who fired off e-mails in response to a 
recent column criticizing that paragon of political analysis, Rush Hudson 
Limbaugh III. I excoriated Limbaugh for saying of Barack Obama’s 
presidency, “I hope he fails.” As is generally the case when you exact a 
pound of flesh from Brother Limbaugh’s hide, his legions of listeners were 
vociferous and unstinting in his defense.

They claimed I misquoted him (the quote was cut and pasted directly from 
Limbaugh’s own Web site). They claimed Limbaugh was referring not to 
Obama’s presidency, but to his supposed desire to institute a socialist 
government (except that Limbaugh was, by his own admission, responding to 
a question about his hopes for Obama’s presidency).

Doug, however, made neither of those arguments. His e-mail said in its 
entirety:

“I see your (sic) Mr. Sensitive when it comes to someone saying something 
bad about your guy. But I had to go 8 years watching, reading, listening 
to you ravage George W. Bush. Just who has the Class here?”

His subject line: “you ravage Bush we ravage Obama.”

Read that one again: “you ravage Bush we ravage Obama.” Not the barest 
pretense of principle, nor the slightest attempt at making an argument. 
Just a child’s game. Tit for tat and tag, you’re it.

You will seldom see a plainer illustration of the mental and moral 
midgetry to which ideological rigidity has reduced all too many of our 
fellow Americans.

I plead guilty to the charge, by the way. I did, indeed, “ravage” Bush. He 
was, in my estimate, the worst president in memory, if not the worst ever. 
Not “ravaging” him would have amounted to journalistic malpractice. Let 
Obama turn trillion-dollar surpluses into trillion-dollar deficits, 
sacrifice lives and treasure in an ill-conceived war of choice, preside 
over a government whose ineptitude is exceeded only by its arrogance, and 
I’ll “ravage” him, too. You bring the feathers, I’ll bring the tar.

But then, I also “ravaged” Bill Clinton when his inability to keep his 
zipper closed precipitated a constitutional crisis. I called 
him “sluttish,” a “human oil slick,” “Gomer,” “unprincipled, formless, 
opportunistic,” “manipulative slime,” a “sad, sex-addled liar” and, my 
personal favorite, “President Hefner.”

I bet that will surprise Doug. He seems to buy the notion, propounded by 
the likes of Limbaugh and lapped up by millions of Dougs and Dougettes, 
that one’s first loyalty as an American is to party or ideology. So that 
you must defend your guy with mindless zeal even if he is President God-
awful and attack the other guy with mindless zeal even if he is so new to 
the office his business cards haven’t yet come back from the printer. 
Mindless zeal is the common denominator. What’s right, what’s wrong, 
what’s best for the country, these things don’t even enter the equation.

Yes, we all have our politics, our prisms, our pet narratives. Nothing 
wrong with that, nothing wrong with embracing an ideology that gives 
structure and order to your thinking. But for too many of us, ideology 
becomes identity, becomes an intellectual straitjacket, becomes an excuse 
not to think. Instead, they wallow in a lazy childishness such that 
questions involving the life and future of a great nation are treated like 
stickball or tag, games played with the mindless zeal of childhood, as if 
nothing of substance were at stake, and victory were its own reward.

That’s what you hear in Doug’s e-mail, an echo of childish voices 
chanting “nyah nyah nyah.” “You ravage Bush we ravage Obama.” Then what? 
You ravage the next guy and we ravage the guy after that? We don’t even 
know who those guys – or women – are yet. And you know what’s sad?

It doesn’t matter.

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Seeya round town, Moscow.

Tom Hansen
Moscow, Idaho
  
"For a lapsed Lutheran born-again Buddhist pan-Humanist Universalist 
Unitarian Wiccan Agnostic like myself there's really no reason ever to go 
to work."

- Roy Zimmerman


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