House of Eratosthenes

Some of the recurring things in this blog, which receive comment from me now and then, have to do with helping the people we call “liberals” to define what exactly they are. They themselves don’t know. They aren’t even entirely sure if “liberal” is a dirty word, although they seem to be somewhat united in the idea that it shouldn’t be one. Now that some of us see it as an insult, those who place themselves under said insult are split on whether to blame Rush Limbaugh, George H.W. Bush or Michael Dukakis.

As far as saying what one is, we have a problem. Liberals aren’t about “liberty.” They don’t want me to be able to smoke wherever I want, and they don’t want me to buy whatever kind of gun I want. If you don’t see this point, just start a business and all will become clear in time. It’s rather hard to assert someone’s trying to preserve your liberty, when they’re running for office promising to force you to fire some of your employees, or avoid hiring those employees, until the magical day you can afford to pay some new-and-improved minimum wage.

Nor are they for “equality.” When it comes to questions about how government should treat people with different skin colors, they seem to be more about “inequality.” They aren’t for “justice” because if they were, the first step would be to round up the illegal aliens breaking into this utopia the liberals have been trying to create. Liberals have been trying for two years to get the current President’s approval rating below 33%; they couldn’t do it until illegal aliens became a huge issue, and President Bush, in the eyes of many people like myself, came out on the side of the illegal aliens. It’s a losing issue for him, and anybody who wants him out of office can make it happen easily by simply pledging to do a better job of enforcing the law. But our liberals won’t do that, or allow anybody else to do that.

So lately, I’ve formed a revolutionary way of figuring out what a liberal is: It’s another recurring theme, in the blog you’re reading right now. The formation of reasoned inferences from solidly established matters of fact, and figuring out what to do with those inferences.

Liberals don’t think that’s a personal activity. They think this is all a matter of public policy. We have to vote on everything, save for that endless list of meaningless minutae we haven’t quite gotten around to putting on a ballot yet — but will someday. Opinions from facts? Liberals don’t know the difference between opinions and facts; nor do they care what it is.

It seems trade unions are to blame for this, which is something I don’t understand very well because I’ve never worked for a trade union. But to understand liberal decision-making, you have to take a look at trade-union decision-making. So let us peer into a hypothetical, where you and I belong to the same union.

Fact: You and I work for a company, me for one year, you for three years. In the latest round of negotiations our employer offered a week of vacation per year for people like me, and two weeks of vacation for people like you.

Opinion: This is unacceptable. Why is it unacceptable? Because 350 people voted the way I voted, that this was okay, and 650 people voted the way you voted, that it isn’t. Therefore, all 1,000 of us think it’s unacceptable. The word “union” is all about making decisions as a group. Personal opinion has nothing to do with anything. So the vote will be recorded and the ballots shredded, along with, perhaps, the tally of those ballots. Majority rule.

Thing To Do: Strike. At the last meeting, after all, 501 people voted your way on the strike measure, and 499 people voted that we can’t. Of course, of the 499, some 375 voted the way they did because they simply can’t afford a strike. So in effect, three-eights of us are being forced to change careers, or else endure poverty for an indefinite period of time — because 501 union members so say. But that’s okay, we’ll blame the employer. Because, see “opinion” above — it’s all their fault, 650 of us said so.

It helps to salve our consciences when we call all three of the above “facts”. So the employer is being “unfair.” That’s just a “fact.” To allow 650 people versus 350 people to “agree to disagree” about such a thing — unthinkable. And of course, to allow 501 people to strike and 499 people to go ahead and keep punching the clock, even if they can’t afford to do otherwise — equally unthinkable.

To what strange enchanged forest does the path of such twisted thinking lead? Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen found out earlier this month when he wrote about Stephen Colbert’s humorous monologue during the White House Press Corps dinner:

Colbert made jokes about Bush’s approval rating, which hovers in the middle 30s. He made jokes about Bush’s intelligence, mockingly comparing it to his own. “We’re not some brainiacs on nerd patrol,” he said. Boy, that’s funny.

Colbert took a swipe at Bush’s Iraq policy, at domestic eavesdropping, and he took a shot at the news corps for purportedly being nothing more than stenographers recording what the Bush White House said. He referred to the recent staff changes at the White House, chiding the media for supposedly repeating the cliche “rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic” when he would have put it differently: “This administration is not sinking. This administration is soaring. If anything, they are rearranging the deck chairs on the Hindenburg.” A mixed metaphor, and lame as can be.

Well, let’s all form our unique, personal, individual opinions about whether what happened next has more than a casual similarity to the union scenario. Bear in mind, as the union thugs make their “opinions” known to any scabs who might be tempted to cross the line, the idea isn’t quite so much to actually make a point, so much as to make the victim do what is desired. Offenders can have whatever opinions they wish to have, the mission-at-hand is to get their things-to-do in line with what was voted on at the last meeting…

Cohen saw fit to write a column about his ensuing e-mail traffic. He called this a “Digital Lynch Mob,” but I think it’s more fitting to call it a Digital Union Thug Drive-By:

Two weeks ago I wrote about Al Gore’s new movie on global warming. I liked the film. In response, I instantly got more than 1,000 e-mails, most of them praising Gore, some calling him the usual names and some concluding there was no such thing as global warming, if only because Gore said there was. I put the messages aside for a slow day, when I would answer them. Then I wrote about Stephen Colbert and his unfunny performance at the White House correspondents’ dinner.

Kapow! Within a day, I got more than 2,000 e-mails. A day later, I got 1,000 more. By the fourth day, the number had reached 3,499 — a figure that does not include the usual offers of nubile Russian women or loot from African dictators. The Colbert messages began with Patrick Manley (“You wouldn’t know funny if it slapped you in the face”) and ended with Ron (“Colbert ROCKS, you MURDER”) who was so proud of his thought that he copied countless others. Ron, you’re a genius.

Can we not leave labels like “conservative” and “liberal” at the door for just a couple of seconds, and agree that as Americans we should support the right of individual persons to decide on their own, between their own ears, whether some guy’s comedy routine was funny? I guess not. Like a scab, you can cross the line if you want, but then there are people who consider it their job to make sure you feel the consequences. Coercion, intimidation, until we all agree to what was decided at the meeting.

Ana Marie Cox, the former Wonkette, nails it in this piece:

This insistence on the hilarity of Colbert’s routine has a bullying quality, implying that jokes which adhere to the correct ideology are hilarious and failure to find humor in the party line is a kind of thought crime. By this logic, Cindy Sheehan should be hosting the Academy Awards.

In the past day or so, perhaps realizing they had lost the battle to argue Colbert’s stand-up into something that will be universally acknowledged as funny, the liberal commentariat has shifted tactics. Salon�s Joan Walsh, for instance, pretended to grant that humor was subjective: “Let’s even give Colbert’s critics that point. Clearly he didn’t entertain most of the folks at the dinner Saturday night.” But whose fault is that? Why, those who were not entertained, of course. The tepid response “tells us more about the audience than it does about Colbert.” Not laughing, it turns out, was part of the press corps� master plan, because “Colbert refused to play his dutiful, toothless part. He had to be marginalized. Voil�: �He wasn’t funny.�” Never has “marginalized” sounded so sinister. He�s lucky we didn�t kill him.

Others took a bolder approach: Colbert may not have been funny, but that doesn�t matter. He spoke “truthiness” to power, “you so don’t get it when you spin the idea that Colbert’s performance had anything to do with laughs,” HuffPo commentators proclaim: “This time, Colbert didn’t have to be funny. Because he was right.” Added one, “What he did was not comedy. It was a public service.” This, I believe, will come as news to both the people who paid him to perform and to Stephen Colbert.

This is the kind of thing that convinces me the mid-term elections this year are up-for-grabs, and it really doesn’t matter how low President Bush’s approval ratings get. I don’t think the polls, especially on him, serve as an accurate oracle by any means. What does it mean if you disapprove of President Bush? Does it mean you want the House of Representatives to be run by Nancy Pelosi? I don’t think so…I really don’t. You can phrase a poll question about George Bush all kinds of ways, and more than half of those ways will earn a “disapprove” mark from me, and many conservatives I know. Nobody I know wants a House Speaker Pelosi. Speaking for myself, I’d move mountains to avoid it.

But the “We Get To Vote On What You Think Is Funny” platform, as sure as it is to cost the Democrats the House takeover bid this November, really makes them feel good. So they’re going to trot it out again and again, and dammit they’ll keep on doing it until we figure out we need to go to a virtual union meeting before we consider ourselves licensed to laugh at something, or not to laugh. Liberals have this burning desire, it seems, to run something — somehow, if you don’t know the difference between a fact and an opinion, it seems this is something you must do — and our voters for the last six years haven’t been letting the liberals run anything. This passionate desire to tell other people what to do has got to go somewhere; liquid can’t compress. So now we have a new liberal movement. Comedy is now a public issue. Your grandkids may grow up in a world where you can’t say “I think xxx is funny and yyy is not funny and zzz is funny some of the time,” like you and I have always been able to do.

Well, this comedy-by-vote thing isn’t going away any time soon. Get ready for another round: Al Gore introduced Saturday Night Live this weekend. There is a theory that things are funny when they’re connected to reality. Well, the content of Gore’s skit is a purposeful disengagement of reality, a game of “Let’s Pretend” where he won that infamous contest in Florida six years ago, and was re-elected two years ago.

And Goddammit, it’s funny! Who the hell do you think you are, not laughing. Some kind of Bush apologist?

The month of May is at mid-point, and we’ve been collectively forced to laugh at something, twice now since the month began. I hope this keeps on happening, all the way through the end of October. Four times a month…no, make it six, or eight. Keep telling everybody what they’re supposed to find funny, liberals. Warm up those keyboards, digital-union-goons. There’s no difference between a fact and an opinion, after all, and that famous left-wing phrase “let’s just agree to disagree,” should never be uttered again. Never, never, not ever. Vive la Revolucion!

It’s just a “fact.”

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Laugh, DammitMonday, May 15th, 2006

Laugh, Dammit
Monday, May 15th, 2006