TALKING BACK TO THE TALKBACKERS
DAVID
SOLWAY
David
Solway is the author of The Big Lie: On Terror, Antisemitism,
and Identity. His editorials appear regularly in FRONTPAGEMAG.COM
and Pajamas
Media. He
speaks about his latest book, Hear,
O Israel! (Mantua Books), at frontpage.com.
Reacting
to Glenn Beck’s interview with filmmaker Patrick Courrielche,
who broke the news about the National Endowment for the Arts
plumping for Obama and his major pieces of proposed legislation,
one talkbacker who goes by the sobriquet of Smokey expressed
his anger not at the NEA but at Glenn Beck. His formulation
left little to the imagination: “We should be encouraging
art that portrays Beck’s head exploding from internal
pressure.” Smokey cannot believe that “people watch
hours and hours of this gasbag.”
True,
Beck is no stranger to intemperate remarks, but he rarely errs
on the side of gross indecorum. He makes solid points, delivered
polemically and with spontaneous enthusiasm, and his books in
particular are backed up by extensive research and careful auditing.
The trouble is not with Glenn Beck but with the Smokeys of the
informatic domain.
For
some time now, I’ve been diligently scoping out the comments
and talkbacks to articles posted on various internet sites.
Some of these are intellectually provocative, well-informed,
logically sound, and historically erudite, and I have gained
enormously from them. But far too many stubbornly refuse to
connect or “dock” with the propositions, hypotheses,
or contentions being developed in the articles they are presumably
annotating, and indeed frequently steer perilously close to
gutter talk, if not actually wallowing in the verbal gutter.
And
I’ve found — no big surprise — that the great
majority of these crude and invidious remarks come from patently
left-leaning readers. Moreover, certain sites feature articles,
reports, and analyses of contemporary events that, in their
content and phrasing, differ little from the productions of
the most thoughtless and vitriolic commenters themselves! I
refer to proudly leftist newsletters like Counterpunch, which
describes its method as “muckraking with a radical attitude,”
or sites like the Soros-funded MoveOn.org. But the distemper
is pervasive and, as I say, is far more a phenomenon of the
left and even of the liberal-left than it is of the conservative-right.
Pat Buchanan is an anomaly; Alexander Cockburn is not.
Looking
at the more conservative sites, such as Pajamas Media
and FrontPage Magazine, it is obvious that most of
the commenters will be of kindred disposition and frame their
glosses in a reasonably civilized manner, approving, sometimes
disapproving, expanding, or correcting the postings. But often
the minority of commenters who take vigorous exception to the
articles in question will fall back on invective, vulgarity,
and execration in lieu of weighing facts and arguments or accessing
primary texts for confirmation before rendering judgment. And
even in those instances when an article’s reasoning is
firmly anchored and readily verifiable, it seems as if it had
never been written or had simply evaporated before the reader’s
grudging perusal.
And
there’s the rub. One of the things I find most disturbing
is the stubborn resistance to data that does not consort with
a prior and deeply held conviction, the unwillingness to reflect
upon one’s own prejudices, assumptions, and ideological
stances. I believe it was Jonathan Swift who said that “what
a man has not been reasoned into, he will not be reasoned out
of.” Was he right? One would like to believe that intellectual
curiosity can always be stimulated and that acquired knowledge
can have a salutary effect, despite so much evidence to the
contrary.
I have,
mirabile dictu, known people who are capable of changing
their minds, rethinking their political positions, accepting
fresh information, and revising their congenial opinions. Not
many, to be sure, but enough not to lose heart entirely. I myself
was frozen in standard left-wing groupthink for much of my adult
life, until 9/11 clarioned its wake-up call. I spent the next
five years trying to educate myself, reading everything I could
get my hands on from all sides of the political spectrum and
following world events with close attention. This led to the
painful awareness that I had been wrong about nearly everything
and eventuated in my book, The
Big Lie, which represented the “moment”
when I came of age and finally learned to take the world more
seriously than myself. The result, of course, is that I have
become something of a pariah in my own literary and political
community in Canada.
How
common is an experience of this nature? I know it has happened
to others — consider the salient examples of David Horowitz
(Radical Son) and Ron Radosh (Commies), among
others. In my own more modest case, in the course of an evolving
thesis I did my utmost to present the facts I uncovered over
years of dedicated research — and I mean real facts that
cannot be denied, like the actual articles of UN Resolution
242 [10] (accepted by Israel but formally rejected by the Palestinians
at the Tripoli conference on December 2-5, 1977) or the actual
substance of the 1949 Fourth Geneva Convention] or the actual
history of the Middle East gleaned from impeccable documentary
and archival sources, to cite only a few such items. Yet the
response I frequently got was: “Well, let’s agree
to disagree.” There was no recognition of what is.
And
this is among friends! When it comes to those who are anesthetized
by partisan desire and transfixed in a strict intellectual,
literary, or political posture — members of what Jeff
Barak calls “virtual communities of like-minded zealots”
— the response is usually ad hominem. Rather than enter
into rational debate or engage with presented arguments, such
people almost invariably resort to threat, expostulation, name-calling,
slander, and explicit profanity. Reactions of this kind are
clearly ubiquitous but, once again, I must say that they occur
disproportionately among those of a manifestly leftist and left-liberal
persuasion.
When
I published my conservative critique of Canadian poetry and
fiction, Director’s Cut, in 2003, I was appalled
to read the comments on diverse blogs and websites. Practically
none attempted to approach or to contest my arguments, but many
had a lot of pejorative things to say about my mental abilities
and some even targeted certain of my physical attributes —
without the slightest visual corroboration, be it said. Most
of these commenters, writers themselves, whom I either know
personally or know of via the grapevine, form part of the great
liberal constituency in this country which flatters itself as
progressive and enlightened.
It
was no different after The Big Lie came out in 2007.
I suddenly found myself being dissed right and left (well, mainly
left), pricked with derogatory nicknames, and snidely repudiated
by people I had once respected, including onetime friends and
acquaintances of a distinctly leftist stamp. Again, few of my
detractors were willing to meet the book on equal terms, to
sift the testimony I had amassed to establish a case, to consider
my deductions, to counter my conclusions with attested facts
of their own, or even to absorb the authentic data and historical
events laid out in its pages. There was nothing that resembled
a conversation. It was far easier merely to denounce my attitudes
as archaic, bilious, ineptly grounded, or — the ultimate
put-down — as neoconservative. This raving fusillade was
supposed to pass for judicious and legitimate disputation.
Cognitive
paralysis is a staple human failing and none of us is immune
to it. But one can always hope that a saving skepticism regarding
one’s own motives and inevitable myopia may kick in at
some point and compel one to reexamine one’s condign prejudices
and emotional investments. I’m sure it was tough for Horowitz
and Radosh, or reputable bloggers like Charles Winecoff at Big
Hollywood and Jeremiah Duboff at Jeremayakovka
— and others in a similar ideological bind — to
reconceive half a lifetime of thought and practice, to admit
mistakes, and to proceed in a different direction. It’s
also deeply humiliating to acknowledge that one’s political
allegiances and commitments over the course of many years were
fueled by myth, make-believe, and magical thinking.
One
can move both ways, of course, from left to center-right as
did David Horowitz, or from right to liberal-left, as did Andrew
Sullivan. The difference in the current political arena, however,
is decisive. The conservative generally finds himself out of
favor, whether in the media, the academy, or the political administration;
the liberal is the recipient of special dispensation and sympathetic
treatment, especially as he gravitates further to the left.
There is no incentive to “go conservative” —
it is a question of conscience and entails pretty severe risks.
But there is every temptation to profit from embarking on the
opposing trajectory, which also guarantees the pleasures of
what Czeslaw Milosz, drawing from the Arabic, characterized
as ketman, the being “at one with others, in order not
to be alone.” Which makes one wonder — without impugning
any particular individual — on which side of the divide
one is more likely to find those evanescent qualities of political
integrity and personal rectitude.
Although
most conservative thinkers I am aware of tend to argue their
case with precision, a respect for history, and, for the most
part, a disciplined graciousness, the distressing truth is that
the protocols of debate are honored more in the breach than
in the observance. Of course, there are hortatory nutbars and
slouching troglodytes on the political right — as Jeff
Barak notes above — but in today’s ideological world
the incidence of rancor, malice, and spite is appreciably higher
on the hard left and the liberal-left. This is so across the
board, from President Obama and his apparatchiks and disciples
seeking to discredit their opponents] as a mischief-making rabble,
an “angry mob,” “Neanderthals,” “astroturfers,”
“Brown Shirts,” the “Brooks Brothers brigades,”
and other choice epithets, to the ordinary run of leftist talkbackers
on traffic-driving sites like Fark, many of whose comments decency
forbids reproducing. Where there’s Smokey, there’s
fire.
In
the same way, conservative sites are often prey to sophisticated
leftist hackers, who prefer unsavory means of competition to
appropriate modes of objection or rebuttal. As of this writing,
the latest victim of such illicit tactics is the watchdog organization
HonestReporting.com, which is robustly pro-Israel.
CEO Joe Hyams reports a “massive upsurge” in cyber
attacks, over 740 in the last few months alone. There is no
mystery from which quarter these attacks emanate. They plainly
belong on the same continuum of misbegotten leftist riposte.
I have
no statistics at my disposal. Nevertheless, the affective residue
of the last several years in which I have been involved in the
“political realm,” as writer, reader, and concerned
citizen, have made it fairly clear to me that civil discourse
and common decency are not conspicuous properties of the literary
and political left. These traits are more likely to be found
on the conservative-right — which is to say, among those
who profess the tenets of classical liberalism — with
its tradition of individual responsibility, cordial encounter,
political accountability, and epistemic grist. This is by no
means a hard-and-fast rule, but it is, despite the exceptions,
a demonstrable tendency. Republican Congressman Joe Wilson’s
famous outburst during Obama’s health care speech at a
joint session of Congress on September 9, 2009, was palpably
churlish, but we might recall in context the heckling leveled
at George Bush, not by a single representative who happened
to lose his temper, but by a contingent of primed, irascible
Democrats.
It
appears there is not much we can do about the leftist penchant
for vituperation, impropriety, and — to use Humpty Dumpty’s
favorite word — “impenetrability.” Pajamas
Media, too, among the many excellent discussions that embellish
the trailer segments, has its share of pugnacious commenters
for whom the Marquess of Queensbury’s boxing code, as
applied to the discursive ring, do not always seem to apply.
This is unfortunate. Certainly, though pugilistic strategies
may be employed and blows exchanged, none should be below the
belt. It would be nice if we could do better and allow the norms
of chivalry to govern our forensics.
