No Country for Straw Men

[Ed Barrow]

History, the novelist Milan Kundera wrote, is but a thin thread stretched across the ocean of what is forgotten. This may explain why the further back you go into American history, the more consensus there tends to be about our presidents. If you wanted to come up with a revisionist view of George Washington, it would require a lot of work, since what most of us have at hand are a few images -- the first president at Valley Forge, crossing the Delaware, nobly stepping down for the good of the country.

But one of the many advantages of the modern age is the ready availability of the raw materials out of which we can construct our own convincing version of contemporary political reality. Pour a foundation out of imaginary concrete, erect joists and beams of speculation, place a thousand bricks of tendentious conclusions, and before you know it, the structure is impervious to any assault by facts. You will have made your own imagined Barack Obama, in whatever shape you like.

Pick a contentious issue, and there's an imagined Obama being fashioned. For example, in 2008, gun advocates were told that if the senator from Illinois were elected president, he would immediately send out his jackbooted bureaucratic thugs to begin confiscating weaponry. Upon his inauguration, sales of guns and ammunition soared, as Second Amendment fans stocked up for the inevitable bans. Yet nothing happened. Forget about taking away your hunting rifle -- Obama hasn't even followed up on his pledge to work to reinstate the assault-weapons ban that expired in 2004, and his press secretary Robert Gibbs dodges questions about the issue when they come up.

How can we explain this inaction? If you want to keep imagining the government crackdown is at hand, you listen to Sarah Palin, who earlier this month delivered a speech on the subject before the National Rifle Association. Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi hadn't yet torn the guns from the hands of the assembled believers, she said confidently, only because they hadn't yet figured out how to navigate the political consequences. "Don't doubt for a minute that if they thought they could get away with it they would ban guns and ban ammunition, and gut the Second Amendment." The alternative -- that Obama's concern about the gun issue is actually minimal, particularly compared to the other things on his plate -- can't be entertained. (One of the hallmarks of this mode of thought is that whatever is most important to you is also most important to your enemies.)

Ascribing the most nefarious of motives to our political opponents is standard fare, of course. But basing your political arguments not on what those opponents have done or have proposed to do but on what they "would" do, frees you from the need to keep a hold on even the slightest tether to reality. Who needs evidence of the other side's evil, when you can just imagine what lies in their hearts?


http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=no_country_for_strawmen

[snagglepuss]

1. I'd lay the blame squarely on M$M because the 4th estate is supposed

to counter political drivel with facts and expose lies and demagoguery. There's been lots of political demagogues like Plain and more will come, to expect her type to act in other way seems irrational.



However Kundera's comment about history is bang on.