House of Eratosthenes

I had to wait an additional four months for the elections to be over so I could collect on a friendly wager. I got a couple of cheeseburgers out of the deal from a Kerry-voter who was suffering from a bad case of False Consensus Effect and was sure that our current President would be a one-termer. He was sure it would be a landslide. “Nobody” — nobody he knew — would vote for President Bush.

What did I read to expand my horizons, and help to glean what was about to happen? Stuff like this; comments from people who voted for Al Gore in 2000, and had made up their mind by mid-summer 2004 that President Bush would get the nod for a second term. More than two or three; an impressive number, representing a silent but voting even-greater number.

I’m a Gore voter who’s long since moved through the center to the right after 9/11.

I suspect Bush will garner quite a few people who normally vote Democratic.

…having watched news clips of recent Al Gore speeches, I suspect that more than a few Gore voters feel a shiver go down their spines when they think of how close the Tennessee Nut Case came to serving as our commander in chief.

…we believe that the left, as epitomized by Gore, has gone off the deep end and can’t be trusted with the reins of power, especially during wartime.

Turning it around, could anyone possibly have voted for Bush, witnessed Gore’s subsequent meltdown and said, boy, I sure wish he were our president?

Exhibit B, courtesy of blogger Michael Lopez-Calderon, is his essay which he wrote in October 2001, “The Fall of My Leftist House of Mirrors.” It appeared some four years later in Front Page Magazine, which left the unfortunate impression, he indicates, that it took him all that time to come around. As you read his comments, you see he was instantly turned-off with disgust by the reaction of high-profile leftists to the attack itself, and his Journey To The Dark Side was mostly completed back then.

To write more would run the risk of putting words in his mouth, so I’ll let his overture speak for itself. You are strongly encouraged, here, to click it open and read the entire thing.

That crashing, piercing sound you hear is the fall of my Leftist House of Mirrors. A worldview that purported moral truths, cloaked itself in the language of arcane academia, venerated its doubtlessly dedicated, sincere intellectual stalwarts and activists � Noam Chomsky, Daniel Ellsberg, Benjamin Spock, Howard Zinn, Edward Said — and preyed upon alienated young idealists who like me were in search of a workable Utopia, proved a chimera of monumental proportions. That my Leftist House of Mirrors produced an illusion on such a massive scale is now evidenced by the reaction of the Left�s priestly class to the horrific Islamo-Fascist act of mass murder on September 11, 2001.

The Leftist response to that wickedness bordered on the anemic at best, collaboration with evil at worst. That what�s left of the Left would hesitate in condemning this monstrous act; that it would even countenance the rubbish of �chickens coming home to roost� or as Chomsky quipped, �a nasty response to U.S. nastiness around the world,� unequivocally betrays a hatred of the United States, democracy, indeed even Western civilization, that is as equal parts lethal as it is irrational.

It’s the oldest story in the world about philosophical blunders, and we all fall prey to it: An epiphany precedes an opinion, and he who holds the opinion thinks his opinion is the only one that can arise from any form of enlightenment — we are tempted to believe an epiphany can precede no other opinions. But if epiphanies were expected, there wouldn’t be anything epiphanic about them, would there?

This road is well-trod. You come to learn about pain and suffering in the world, you become liberal…you come to learn about other things, and you become what today we call “conservative.” Once there, few people ever go back again. What are those other things? Too many to mention here. The knowledge, for example, that there really doesn’t seem to be any ideology that embraces love, as liberalism is supposed to — it seems even the best-intentioned movements, subsist over the long term on a steady diet of resentment and jealousy. The knowledge of bad men doing evil things, determined to keep on doing them long after the bones of good men have crumbled into dust. The knowledge gained through life experience that when Capt. Jean-Luc Picard negotiates with the Tazmanian Devil, Taz always wins unless the exchange is scripted.

Essentially, that ill-will is contagious, and good-will far less so. Facts are facts, opinions are opinions, the two are not interchangable. Unfortunately, the nature of such ideas is that they cannot be convincingly explained to someone. If you don’t know them already, it takes a jolting life-experience for you to become aware of them. And of course, once that happens, you’ll never forget.

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Reformed LeftistsMonday, June 12th, 2006

Reformed Leftists
Monday, June 12th, 2006