I made the mistake yesterday of tangling with the right wing on Facebook. A post exulted in Obamas approval ratings being in the toilet, and respondents piled on, calling the President Liar in Chief, wondering if he was incompetent, stupid, a liar, or all of the above, and excoriating liberal socialists in general. I was offended, and commented--acidly, Ill admit--on the inelegance of their prose. The battle was on. My daughter warned me to tread lightly, but I was in the thick of it now. These right-wingers really do believe that Barack Obama is a socialist. They really do think that Welfare recipients (zombies, one called them) are lazy freeloaders, and that the Affordable Care Act is stripping us of freedoms. (Which freedoms? I cant even guess.) One fevered description of America under Barack Obama would have applied, quite perfectly, to Soviet Russia in, say, the 1930s. I thought I could at least clear up the misconception of socialism by reminding them of Eugene V. Debs, Lloyd George, John Reed and others who were the genuine article, but this didnt work, somewhat to my surprise. Today I feel as though I fell into the trap that Daniel Webster avoids, barely, in the wonderful Stephen Vincent Benet story, The Devil and Daniel Webster. Arguing the farmer Jabez Stones case against the Devil in front of a ghost-jury of pirates, cutthroat renegades, and bloody despots, Daniel gets angrier and angrier, pounding the table, yelling--until he realizes that this is what they and the Devil want. They want him to engage them on their terms, to give vent to rage and unreason and rhetorical excess: to be like them. They win then, and for all my attempts at restraint yesterday, I obliged the right-wingers. I engaged them on their terms, and they won.
Posted on: Sun, 10 Nov 2013 14:08:01 +0000
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