House of Eratosthenes

There is one thing that President Obama refers to as a silly distraction. But in reality, it represents a key part of the bigger thing conservatives must overcome to win this election battle.

The biggest thing was described by the “Big” sites’ creator, Andrew Breitbart, in his book, Righteous Indignation:

The left does not win its battles in debate…The left wins because it controls the narrative. The narrative is controlled by the media. The left is the media. Narrative is everything. [i]

Breitbart highlighted the “turning point” in the history of media control — the mainstream coverage of the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal. The “guys who idolized Woodward and Bernstein” had been transformed into “open partisan hacks,” rewriting the narrative with Clinton cast as the hero and Republicans the villains. Breitbart also noted that the “institutionalized conservative movement” became “conspicuously silent” because they had allowed the left to control the spin and “didn’t want to put themselves in harm’s way” [ii].

The “Democrat-Media Complex” (Breitbart’s term) control of the Obama screenplay has been obvious from day one, even when there was no narrative to shape. Instead of offering evidence to refute criticism of their star, the Alinsky-schooled Complex lazily lob potent word-missiles like “racist” or “birther.” Most Republican elites defensively duck and run for cover lest any of the labels stick. Conservatives hope that intelligent discussion of economic and policy issues will win election battles, but they fight within an arena defined and controlled by the leftist media, leaving the home court advantage to the left.

Refusing to play by Democrat-Media Complex rules, conservative writer Diana West bravely observed the relationship between two of Obama’s scandals: his socialism and the probable fraud of his identity documents. The assertions are related in that even though both are supported by facts and evidence, neither fits the narrative, and so both are ignored by the mainstream. And most of the conservative establishment has reacted the same way it did in the Clinton-Lewinsky affair: conspicuously silent and self-censoring. Author Roger Kimball noted the disturbing consensus that has rendered Obama’s nativity a topic “literally undiscussable.”
:
“Will the GOP stop playing Charlie Brown to the media’s Lucy? If the Republican Party doesn’t have the intestinal fortitude to fight back,” warned Breitbart [iv], it will be the people who have to step up and win back the big thing: control of the narrative. A narrative of truth.

A debate, a narrative. It’s a useful distinction to keep in mind. Brietbart, it seems, discovered the Architect/Medicator divide. Recycling and re-recycling a narrative is, after all, an excercise in self-medicating. The difference is one in trajectories; a real debate will make a somewhat linear motion. Things will be posited, and then there will be some event, after which the things will have been refuted or proven. A narrative, on the other hand, moves in a circular direction, taking great delight in “proving” the same things over and over again. One’s a thinking activity and the other one’s a feeling activity. Case in point, this conversation, thanks to the behavior one participant, is an exercise in recycling a narrative over & over again.

But how to tell the difference when you’re not actively participating in the debates/narratives? Perhaps the first red flag to be raised, is when you look around and see you’re living in mankind’s very first enlightened, egalitarian, “free” civilization toiling under a massive and growing list of “literally undiscussable” things.

Hat tip to Bird Dog at Maggies’ Farm.

Which is why the very first thing that must be broken — the foundation upon which all Medicator-approved “narratives” rest — is the equivalence between “liberal” and “smart.”

Facts intrude on The Narrative all the time. But since it’s canon #1 of the liberal faith that all your facts are belong to them, those narrative-breaking bits of data can’t be real facts. They’re fakes. Or they’re “straw men.” Or “hand-waving.” Or they’re superseded by some other, numinous meta-facts that only liberals can see.

We saw this in 2004. The media and the left (BIRM) were all convinced that John Kerry was the obvious choice for President. The American public returned George W. Bush to the White House. Instead of re-evaluating the data and reasoning that led to their erroneous conclusion — which is pretty much the definition of “intelligence” as normal people use it — the left replied, in the words of the UK’s Daily Mirror: How can 59054087 people be so DUMB?*

That’s the Progressive interpretation of the data. Faced with a choice between a) Progressives don’t know as much as they think they do; and b) a numerical majority of their fellow countrymen are drooling idiots, they go with a).

Which, as Morgan never tires of pointing out, means they should now be required to explain how a significant fraction of that 52% got so much smarter by the time the 2008 election rolled around.

That’s the most tedious part of the endless Zachriel circle-jerk: if liberal = smart, then by definition it’s pointless to argue with conservatives, since if we were smart enough to see and understand these numinous meta-facts we’d already agree with you.

Go read the graph.
Ok, read it… nope, I still disagree.
Go read it again. What parts are unclear?
This part here, that part there, that other part over there.
Go read it again.
Dude, I’ve READ it; I still disagree. Explain these unclear parts to me.
Go read it again; you’ll see why you’re wrong.

It’s as if there’s some gestalten moment where, simply by reading the same thing over and over and over again, you suddenly get it… and then you’re “smart,” and because you’re “smart,” everything else falls into place. It’s like a Zen koan.**

How did we ever get to the point where so many people believe that “intelligence” means “mindless sloganeering”?
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.
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*(http://politicalhumor.about.com/library/images/blbushdumbpeople.htm)

**Funny, though, isn’t it, that even though Zen masters have by their own definition achieved Total Enlightenment, you never see them spouting off on politics and macroeconomics?
- Severian | 04/24/2012 @ 07:54

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“Narrative is Everything”Tuesday, April 24th, 2012

“Narrative is Everything”
Tuesday, April 24th, 2012