Everyone Look at the Ignorant People!

I just happened upon a clip from Chris Matthews coverage of the supporter gatherings prior to the Vice Presidential debate.  It is not enormously significant, but it is a delicious bit of video, which I have an irresistible urge to comment upon.  The roughly one-minute clip begins with Matthews interviewing a random Obama supporter.  Just as he asks her about her health care situation, an old woman interjects from off camera by shrieking the word “communist!” in a voice that would have made it notably fitting if she had followed up with, “burn him!”

Everyone in frame reacts to the shout, but the woman being interviewed shakes it off and takes a few seconds to explain that she and her husband had recently lost health insurance for the first time in their lives.  Chris Matthews lets her finish her answer, but the speed with which he departs when she reaches the end of her sentence suggests an almost Pavlovian response to the shrill voice at the edge of the crowd.  He lowers the microphone immediately and says, “Okay let’s go over to this lady,” whereupon he seeks out the person who yelled communist, in order to ask her what she meant by it.

What follows is a stunningly awkward exchange in which Matthews asks the woman exceptionally unchallenging questions, essentially just repetitions of “what do you mean?” and she repeatedly fails to answer them, instead chiding the professional journalist and commentator to “study it out, just study it out,” derisively referring to him as “buddy,” and asserting that she knows what she means.  It would be painful to watch if I had any inkling that the woman had sufficient self-awareness to be embarrassed by it.  It would be hilarious if it wasn’t such a tragic commentary on the state of political discourse.  Watch it if you like:

Obviously, our culture and systems of information need to be reformed enough to precipitate a breaking point whereby nobody can remain so self-satisfied in their own ignorance as this woman showed herself to be.  Her willingness to gather at a political rally and shout her views on national television suggests that she is firmly committed to them, but even in the space of a minute, her complete inability to explain or defend those views paints the image of someone who has absolutely no idea what she’s talking about, but also doesn’t care that she’s not informed and doesn’t think she has to be.

I watch this woman wag her head at Chris Matthews and pause at length before shooting back, “You don’t know?” when asked what she means by “communist,” and I see someone who believes that in the face of any challenge to their worldview, a self-righteous attitude eliminates the need for facts and rationality, every time.  It is indicative of a sociopathic mindset that takes confidence and strength to trump all else, and that mindset seems like it is breeding extensively in the modern population.  That in turn is indicative of a serious cultural failure in America, though unfortunately one that is near impossible to overturn.

Far less difficult to attain is the personal breaking point that this clip seems to point to, though I must admit that I don’t know which side of it I ought to come down on.  I must admit that in watching the clip, the thought almost immediately crossed my mind that maybe this woman was some sort of amateur satirist aiming to portray the Republican opposition as deluded and irrational, and even that maybe she had been planted there by some group on the left.  I entertain those thoughts because, as with most conspiracy theories, it’s simply easier to believe than the frightful reality, which in this case would be that America is long on individuals who form firm, aggressive opinions on the basis of the extracts of ether and bullshit.

I know that my skepticism about public ignorance is unsustainable.  Indeed, I know that it can be harmful, because it’s a sort of ignorance in itself.  Fundamental to my personal philosophy is the idea that you can’t hope to effectively solve a problem if you deliberately avoid recognizing the reality and extent of that problem.  Public ignorance is the problem at the root of all other problems, because it is that which allows people to avoid reality, and thus deny solutions.

The problem here is that I don’t know whether I should be pushing myself towards the breaking point of taking public ignorance for granted, or if instead I should find a way to keep from assuming that conspiracies are afoot while still giving individuals the benefit of the doubt as regards their level of information.  In other words, one might say that witnessing ignorance of the proportions on display in this clip challenges me to avoid two negative breaking points, which threaten to make me either overly cynical about either human stupidity or overly cynical about political manipulations.

I’d venture to guess that not a lot of people have carefully-reasoned assessments of their fellow men, so this is a personal breaking point that others may have to contend with as well, but being personal, it’s of secondary importance.  What this video clip has brought to mind that could be addressed on a large scale right now is a question for the media about how to handle firm opinions voiced by the public.

I honestly can’t decide whether to praise or criticize Chris Matthews’ response to the political heckler.  Part of me wants to criticize just because I used to get a lot of enjoyment out of focusing my ire for the news media against Matthews, who, despite being a bright guy, was terrible at his job back when I considered MSNBC a news organization.  Now that his job is “partisan” rather than “journalist,” he doesn’t seem so bad.  Okay, it also helps that I don’t have a TV.  But in any event, even if Matthews remains professionally an idiot, the woman he had his brief exchange with is an idiot in much larger terms, and to an unquantifiably greater extent.

The relevant question, then, is, “Did Matthews have good enough reason to focus the attentions of the microphone and camera on this woman’s dimwittedly vociferous views?”  On the one hand, by giving her a voice once she’d asked for it, and contributing no commentary of his own, Matthews allowed the woman to provide her own refutation of her talking points.  The exchange conveyed the impression that extremist views are based on no information, which of course they often are.  That’s a good fact to put on display when the opportunity arises.

On the other hand, we have to remember the shamelessness with which the old woman held her ideas in absence of evidence or personal understanding.  Such shamelessness probably isn’t much affected by having a mirror held up to its own ignorance, and that fact threatens to let this incident stand as encouragement for other people like her.  As I said, the greatest breaking point involved here is also all but unattainable: the creation of a culture that prevents the embrace of ignorance.  For the foreseeable future, lack of information and presence of strong opinions will continue to go hand-in-hand among a sizable portion of the American public.  It will take generations of concerted effort to change that fact.  But that doesn’t mean that opinionated idiots will always be activists.

I estimate that much less comprehensive cultural changes could prevent people who hold uninformed opinions from being so vocal and so public with those opinions.  And one thing that probably doesn’t help is giving voice to those opinions, in all their self-righteous vacuity, on national television.  Viewers at home whose perspective on American politics don’t go much farther than “he’s a communist!” won’t be shamed or enlightened by their impromptu spokesperson’s self-defeated, just as she wasn’t shamed or enlightened by it.  To the contrary, the presence on the airwaves of uninformed declarations and accusations provides more fodder for lazy people to find something to parrot as they make the leap from uninformed citizen to armchair activist.

The opinions that are screeched from the sidelines are the ones that most need to be debunked once they’re present, but they’re also the ones that most need to be disallowed from taking the field.  Overall political discourse is cheapened not only by their ignorance but also by their lack of decorum.  As regards ethics, I think I am so committed a deontologist that I have internalized Kant’s categorical imperative.  When I see things like this video clip and start wondering what ought to have been done in the situation I find myself universalizing the act I witnessed and looking for its effect on the moral system.

In this case, what would the effect be if journalists always turned their attention to the loudest and most abrasive commenter on the scene as Matthews seems to have done?  He even turned his attention away from the woman who was contributing relevant anecdotes to the public understanding, in order to give the shrill, ancient cold warrior a chance to explain her unexplainable views.  I fear that the current state of journalism is not far from embracing the loudest participant in any debate, because the hypothetical result is that all of American politics becomes a shouting match, and that is seemingly not far from the situation that we already face.

In light of that threat of a still more corrupted political and journalistic landscape, I’m tempted to say that although the woman’s response was rather satisfying, the better thing to do in that situation and all similar situations is to keep the person who’s shouting epithets off of our television screens.  But I’d be interested to know what readers think of the effects of either encouraging or discouraging uninformed speech.

Carl Paladino is a Goddamn Sociopath

When Buffalo-area businessman Carl Paladino ran for the New York State governorship in 2010, his supporters put up campaign signs that explained the motivation for their choice of candidate with the slogan “I’m mad as hell too, Carl!”  After hearing the man speak a few times, and seeing the constant evidence of passionate, irredeemable instability in his eyes whenever he appeared on television, I considered printing off a series of satirical reproductions of those signs, which adopted the same color scheme and design but changed the slogan to the more straightforward “I’m crazy as hell too, Carl!”

Last April, for no apparent reason, I began receiving mass e-mails from the former gubernatorial candidate and perennial conservative activist.  I have no idea how I got onto his list of contacts.  I’ve never communicated with the man, and I never expressed interest in his campaign.  I can only assume that my e-mail address was passed to him by a third party, and despite my distaste for Paladino’s politics and personal behavior, I wasn’t about to protest that connection, however casual and tenuous.  The man is certainly a financially and socially powerful presence in my region, and it’s good to both have access to such a person and be able to basically keep tabs on his activities.

In keeping tabs on Paladino by reading the e-mails that he’s directing to fellow Republics, sometimes en masse and sometimes individually while copying to his entire contact list, I’ve had ample opportunity to confirm previous suspicions beyond a shadow of a doubt.  Carl Paladino is a goddamn sociopath.  His formal communications paint the picture of a man who is utterly incapable of seeing another person’s point of view, incapable of empathy, having no impulse control and no sense of self-restraint.  The tone of every one of his letters is so cocksure and combative as to suggest no genuine motivation other than a personal display of red-faced plumage.

In a recent letter to New York State Senator Tom Libous, Paladino starts out:

“I heard you are angry with the grassroots/tea party taxpayers and I over our comments about your alleged criminal and otherwise pathetic behavior as a Senator.  Tom, we don’t care.”

He then demands that the Senator resign unless he comes over to Paladino’s way of thinking.  Evidently, Paladino’s means of trying to convince the senator to accept his demands include describing Libous as “an incorrigible, arrogant, greedy and deceitful person comfortably in bed with the unions and other special interests.”  Later he refers to Libous as “Tommy boy” before calling him “a little conniving sneak.”

By way of reiterating his self-important demands, Paladino later says “You're a grown man. You should acknowledge and apologize for your bad actions. That's what men do. They don't cry and whine.”

To date the densest example of Paladino’s unrestrained aggression is a message that he directed at long-ago US Senator Alfonse D’Amato.  The message announces that it was sent via Paladino’s iPhone, which leads me to wonder whether some momentary spark set him off as he went about his daily business, compelling him to deliver this colorful vituperation in sight of absolutely everyone he knows:

“Al, keep your nose out of WNY politics or I will expose your underbelly. You are a spineless fraud and you're going down with Skelos. Did you have fun at Andrews $50k party?  You are such a low life parasite.  It's all about money and you could care less about the people and republican principals.  What are you going to do when I tell the people that you were the prime mover of Andrew's gay marriage bill so he could pound his chest as the most powerful governor the state has ever known and you could have access as a lobby for the big buck clients you extort.”

This sort of language and the completely shameless way in which Paladino uses it makes me wonder about people like him, who have consolidated wealth and power over the course of a long career in business.  Is tact a skill that Paladino has never had to utilize in his life?  Is he actually used to getting his own way simply by forcefully demanding it and trash-talking his opposition?  Is that the way goals are achieved in the world of business development, or is it just true of Paladino’s own private world?

In government, even a person identified as a political firebrand doesn’t approach a fraction of the divisiveness or resistance to compromise showcased in Paladino’s writings.  And this is true even in the current political climate where divisiveness and non-compromise is the order of the day, especially among Republicans.  To Paladino, anyone on his side of the aisle who strays in the least measure from his vision for the party is a target for being branded, in his terminology, a RINO (Republican In Name Only).  And woe unto he who is marked by Paladino’s scarlet letters, for Carl Paladino speaks for the “grassroots/tea party” base of the Republican Party, and without them, as he threatens to Senator Libous, “your career as an elected official will end this year.”

Indeed, Paladino’s messages are full of intimations of a kind of political insight that extends far beyond the observational and into the prophetic.  “The Albany establishment is on its way out,” he writes without a trace of uncertainty.  “In a few years it will be gone.”  The man is so blindly assured of his viewpoints on everything that he has apparently convinced himself that he can tell the future.

But in view of the rest of his remarks in a number of letters, I’d say that that’s not just an outgrowth of his unquestioning convictions.  Rather, it’s part and parcel of a severe messianic complex.  His letters are permeated with unrestrained anger, but they are also paradoxically peppered with slightly religious language.  Apart from painting himself as the sole arbiter of judgment as to one’s true allegiance to the Republican Party, which, incidentally, he formally joined only seven years ago, he also takes up the mantle of a priestly dispenser of political absolution.

What is it that Paladino says men do instead of “crying and whining?”  “They atone and ask for forgiveness.”  Only then will the angry prophet, in his power as private representative of an entire constituency, allow a Republican’s political career to proceed.  Helpfully, the savior of true Republicanism tells Senator Libous exactly what he needs to do for penance:

“…you must tell the grassroots/tea party taxpayers in writing that you have had an epiphany, ask them to forgive your past transgressions and promise that you will advocate for and defend Conservative Republican interests…”

Notice that to accept Paladino’s demands is not to capitulate, nor to agree, but rather to have an epiphany.  Such language suggests that there are never two ways of looking at an issue, never legitimate alternatives in the service of the public.  It suggests access on Paladino’s part to some absolute political Truth, which the “RINOs” that dominate state government are sinfully resisting.

There is a frightfully evangelizing quality to all of this, a “recant or be damned” mentality, which is fascinating to me as someone with a background in religious studies.  The impulse to drive a wedge between Republicans deemed either orthodox or imposters appears not unlike the evangelical assertion that Catholics, for instance, are false Christians.  Similarly, his appeal to the true-Republican imperative as an explanation for everything that is wrong with New York State reminds me of the tendency of certain evangelicals to assert the nation’s rejection of traditional Christian values as an explanation of everything from 9/11 to the Aurora theater shooting.

The picture that Paladino paints is one in which the state of New York is headed towards nothing less than a localized apocalypse.  And it is entirely the fault of those who fail to adopt the very specific messianic message of the Paladino-party line.  “If the brainpower and time wasted on theatrics, illusion and game-playing were invested in real responsible government,” he writes to Libous, “New York would still be a great place to live and raise a family.”  As it stands, the state is not such a place.  And it’s not enough for Carl Paladino to suggest that he would do things differently in order to promote better outcomes.  No, no; in absence of the embrace of his guiding wisdom, the entire state, as he writes in the first sentence of an open letter accompanying the one addressed to Libous, “continues down a slippery slope into the abyss.”

Now, lest I be accused of quoting him out of context, Paladino does not explicitly say that that abyss looms because of the rejection of his governorship.  In fact, in response to an e-mail from Albany County Republican Committee Chairman Donald A. Clarey, requesting removal from Paladino’s mailing list after his “pathetic screed” against Libous, Paladino tells the Chairman, “I have no ego to fulfill, sir.”  Of course, I find that laughable, and I don’t think it unfair to conclude that Paladino truly perceives himself as the sole salvation of the New York State Republican Party and the state itself.  Though he never says such a thing outright, he does invest himself with the power to set an unquestionable agenda for the entire conservative wing of New York politics.

The final ultimatum and source of absolution that he presents to Senator Libous is this:

“Endorse our slate of Republican primary candidates for the Senate, Assembly and US Senate and House of Representatives and withdraw any prior endorsements of their opponents.”

Taking all of this together, I’d say I’m actually impressed with Paladino’s ability to delicately blend, in his political activism, the typically-American culture of evangelical Christianity and aspects of his Italian Catholic background.  After all, at the same time that he cries doom for the forsaken state of New York lest it repent of its evil ways and be born again, he also demands strict adherence to a hierarchy with himself in the role of pope.

Again, I’m not asserting these things baselessly.  I’m extrapolating from his own sociopathic commentary.  By presuming to speak for the entire grassroots base of the New York conservative movement, separating tea partiers and RINOs like sheep and goats, and making unilateral demands of duly elected officials, it seems clear that he is aiming to position himself as a solitary guiding force behind the entire Republican state government, even in the wake of a sound electoral defeat.  He even makes this fairly chilling remark in his message to Chairman Clarey: “Running for office was only the beginning statement for me.”

On the other hand, I’m not sure whether Paladino is jostling for the position of Republican pontiff or conservative Christ.  The messianic language that he relies on is pretty strong.  Still addressing Clarey, he says, “If I had tried to do something, the likes of you wouldn’t stop me.”  Unless Carl Paladino actually has been sent by God to save the Republican Party from itself, in light of comments like that I worry that the non-fulfillment of his goals is the only thing dividing Paladino the property developer from Paladino the super-villain.

Is my analysis here overly rhetorical?  Doesn’t it take a pretty seriously unstable person to say, essentially, “I am a greater force than so puny an individual as you can reckon with”?  Even if I’m just half-right about that, it isn’t the craziest ranting one finds in a Carl Paladino letter.  The really unsettling stuff is the goddamn conspiracy theories.

To hear Paladino tell it, nothing that is done against him, or even just against his preferences, is done individually or on the basis of innocent motives.  Everything is a coordinated attack.  When Clarey wrote back to basically say, “you’re an irrelevant loon; stop e-mailing me,” Paladino’s verbose reply included the paranoid statement, “If the best that Libous can do is to send a washed up politician like you after me it illustrates just how weakened and insecure he is.”

To his credit, if Paladino believes that every private e-mail communication of Republican officials is directed from on high, it goes a long way toward explaining why he believes that there’s a position of puppet master for which he is a viable candidate.

If such a position existed and Paladino occupied it, he would evidently deliver the New York State Republican government from a culture in which absolutely everything is done for reasons other than those stated.  He likes to go on in pretty much all of his messages about oil drilling in the Marcellus Shale, a process which very well might threaten the drinking water of residents of Western New York and Pennsylvania.  His readers are tacitly encouraged to take it for granted that Paladino’s advocacy comes sans any ulterior motives whatsoever, while simultaneously rejecting every public claim on the part of his opponents.  In his open letter regarding Tom Libous he says of the state Senator:

“He has the power to bring 25,000 – $75,000/year jobs to his area of the state by permitting the drilling of the Marcellus Shale but instead he argues environmental concerns to mask the good old boy two-step where the defer decision until the drillers figure out how to bring Mr. Green to the tables of Al D’Amato and the other parasitic lobbyists so they can line the campaign bank accounts of the establishment boys and play their gay marriage chips.”

Leave aside for the moment the weird inclusion of gay marriage in this narrative.  (We’ll come back to it in a moment.)  That aside, you see the situation?  The prospect of methane spewing from people’s home taps is just a distraction, and the ongoing citizen protests against extracting natural gas through hydraulic fracturing are, I suppose, a smokescreen masterminded by lifelong Republican Alfonse D’Amato who has personal control of environmental impact studies and can reverse their results once the proper sum of money is delivered to his office.  Or something like that.  I don’t know, I’m confused.

But what’s important is that Carl Paladino knows beyond a shadow of a doubt that there are no environmental threats connected to the Marcellus Shale drilling proposals, and if he was in charge and impact studies showed clean projections, those claims would be trustworthy.  After all, no lobbying organizations or political operatives stand to benefit financially from the drilling going forward.  Right?

 If that’s the kind of high profile conspiracy that operates among those on Carl Paladino’s side of the aisle (though in name only, mind you), then you can imagine what kind of political sorcery is operating among Democrats and liberals.  Labor unions are especially guilty, and especially capable of the most elaborate public misrepresentations of their beliefs, attitudes, motivations, and activities.  Going back to the letter addressed to Tom Libous, we find Paladino saying:

“The pension reform and union contract deals were toothless sellouts to the unions, who play-acted for a week afterward that they were so outraged with Andrew Cuomo…”

Get it?  Even if it looks like a political agreement was a compromise that was actually disadvantageous to the progressive faction, it was really exactly what the progressives wanted.  How do we know?  Well, because it wasn’t the way Carl Paladino would have done it, I guess.  Carl Paladino knows how to get everything that the Republican base wants out of every situation.  Carl Paladino knows how compromise works.  According to his reply to Donald Clarey, “As long as the Republicans control 1/3 of the vote in Albany they can veto anything.  That’s where the bargaining comes in, Tit for tat.”

That’s where bargaining comes in.  You know, in not bargaining, even when you’re in the minority.  Or is that called “stonewalling the democratic process”?  I can never remember these things when I’ve been sucked down the rabbit hole of Carl Paladino’s furious insanity.  The man represents the absolute worst of today’s Republican praise for tribalist non-cooperation, if only because his allegiance to it is inflated by a conspiracy-theory mindset that regards any compromise whatsoever as a deliberate and complete giveaway to the opposing side of the issue.

Oh, and just wait until you see how endemic that RINO betrayal is, according to Paladino.  To date, the fucking craziest thing that he has sent me is a message bearing the subject line “FW: Al D’Amato, the predator.”  It’s such an exquisite work of paranoia and self-indulgence that I can only do it justice by copying most of it directly, with interspersed paraphrases and commentary.  The mini-essay starts as an explanation of the context for the tirade against D’Amato that was quoted near the beginning of this post.  He writes:

“Al D’Amato, in concert with his surrogates Dean Skelos and George Maziarz were approached last year by Andrew Cuomo and his minions to make a deal.  Cuomo wanted to show everyone in the State that he could do anything with the complicit New York State Republican led Senate… including getting legislative approval for the extreme left issue of gay marriage.  Getting that law passed would allow Cuomo to… payback the gay community for their 2010 unwarranted but effective bashing of my candidacy.”

Right off the bat, Paladino takes the ambitious step of making the conspiracy equally about him as an individual and the issues that he thinks no ordinary person could support, since he doesn’t support them.  Could it be that Paladino’s political opponents just have different opinions about what’s best for the state?  Not a chance!  They are evil masterminds who wish to instill chaos upon the state of New York because they have the power to do so, and Carl Paladino has not yet saved us.

I must say, though, if you identify gay marriage as an “extreme left issue,” it’s pretty bold to describe gay opposition to your candidacy as unwarranted.  For those who don’t remember, one of the things that helped to sink Paladino’s gubernatorial campaign was his having delivered a speech in which he chastised Andrew Cuomo for having marched in a gay pride parade, and described teaching acceptance of homosexuality as “brainwashing.”

But now that Paladino can identify homosexuals as a convenient scapegoat for his loss of the election, it has made it easy for him to place them in a diagram of the elaborate behind-the-scenes power structures controlling state politics.  Think I’m being hyperbolic?  Keep reading.

“In return D’Amato, the prime mover of the effort, would get access to Cuomo on initiatives that he needed for his lobbying clients who pay big bucks.”

I hope you’ll agree that this is already getting a little convoluted.  Now it wasn’t just the gay community attacking the Paladino campaign out of sheer ill-will (Paladino never entertains the notion that it had to do with policy in the first place).  Rather, the gay community acted at the masterminding behest of Alfonse D’Amato for some unspecified reason.

And here we leap to the Marcellus shale issue again:

“Anyone who thinks that the holdup of the Marcellus shale drilling permit has anything to do with the merits being argued in public is a fool drinking cool-aid.  It’s all about Mr. Green showing up at the doors of the likes of D’Amato the lobbyist.”

It cannot be stressed enough:  Policy differences never have anything to do with policy.  In Carl Paladino’s mind, there is only one legitimate opinion on any topic, and every alternative is invented to make money.  Christ, obviously I feel that the influence of money in politics needs to be vastly diminished, but I also believe that lobbyists contribute money because they actually want certain policies, not, as Paladino seems to imply, because they simply wish to toss a monkey wrench into the workings of democracy and trade cash in the process.  Lobbyists or no lobbyists, the workings of democracy consist of multiple opinions, and that appears to be something that Carl Paladino cannot accept.

“Knowing that Skelos and Maziarz… were spineless and could not vote for the bill, the cabal picked 4 republican senators… and promised  they would each get $500,000 in contributions from the gay community and future favors from the cabal including campaign support.”

I really like Paladino’s choice of the word “cabal.”  It truly emphasizes the paranoia.  I also like how he impugns the integrity of Skelos and Maziarz for fucking agreeing with Paladino’s position on the gay marriage issue.  It implies that Carl Paladino lives in a one hundred percent trust-free world in which no one on Earth ever acts according to their personal principles or stated motives.  Also, I didn’t realize that the entire gay community was a lobbying organization.  No wonder they were able to single-handedly sink Paladino’s campaign for governor.  It’s a good thing they had Alfonse D’Amato to direct their actions for them.

“Freshman Senator Grisanti from Buffalo intended to do the right for his constituents when he got in office.   Cuomo, Maziarz, Skelos and D’Amato brought heavy pressure on him to sell out and at the last minute he threw his integrity under the bus, broke his promises to the people who donated to his campaign and voted for the law.”

I hope readers will recall Grisanti’s surprise vote in favor of gay marriage, which saved gay marriage from defeat in New York State.  Well, now, thanks to Carl Paladino, those same readers know what the real reason for his change of heart was.  It wasn’t for his stated reasons, that he could find no legal reason to deny other people rights that he himself had.  Nor does it have anything to do with the capability of human beings to change their opinions sometimes.  Carl Paladino wouldn’t know anything about that.  He’s probably never changed an opinion in his life, even when he changed political parties.  Hell, he seems not to understand that other opinions exist.

To hear Paladino tell it, Grisanti’s vote was actually the result of a nefarious plot by Governor Cuomo and an aging lobbyist to do pass an initiative that they didn’t believe in, for no other reason than because they thought it would go against the public will, with the help of a series of bribes bankrolled by a sprawling, well-organized secret society of fabulously wealthy homosexuals. Oh, and they only got away with it because they all first conspired to keep Carl Paladino out of office, which had nothing to do with Paladino being vehemently anti-gay, as well as a goddamn sociopath.

Paladino concludes:

“I believe that if Mark came out and told the truth about what happened to him and revealed the hypocrisy of the cabal’s complicity the people of his district would be forgiving, but that will not happen because the cabal continues to stroke and intimidate him with false hope.”

Wait.  Grisanti hasn’t come out and told the truth about this?  Then how the hell do you know the truth about it, Carl?  Is it because you have a prophetic access to all truth at all times, or is it perhaps because you’re just making shit up with your diseased mind?

Little doubt he believes the former, which sort of explains the religious overtones of his final comments.  You see, Senator Grisanti, salvation awaits you.  If you repent you will be forgiven, and you must repent, for the promises of those who reject the Republican messiah are empty promises, and the hope they offer is false hope.  There is only one political Truth in New York State, and it is yelling “fuck you” at its opponents as loudly as it can.

Horses, Lambs, Children, and Conflicting Ethics

In the March issue of The Atlantic, Darcy Courteau writes about the consequences that have been faced by the horse market in the years since the last slaughterhouse that produced horse meat in the United States was forced to close. I remember that story well, as I felt at the time that I was at odds with what I perceived as a widely shared instance irrationality in American culture. It seemed absurd to me that the Department of Agriculture should place a value judgment upon the production of horse meat, which differed from that applied to all other livestock.

I disagreed in no uncertain terms with that bit of interference with free enterprise. I disagreed with it on rational grounds despite being a vegetarian and a person highly concerned with animal rights. I simply don’t see how the overwhelming public support for the removal of horse meat and only horse meat from the American market could have stood up to any measure of introspection. It relies on a false distinction between one type of animal and all others.

Being a vegetarian and an animal rights advocate, I want to see that society avoids the mistreatment and slaughter of all animals, not just the ones that I like. How I feel about the creatures is irrelevant; right and wrong are never contingent upon personal attitudes. It may be contingent upon the objective nature of different things, but this doesn’t seem to apply to the situation of horses and other livestock. I don’t see how anyone could realistically argue that horses possess personalities that, for instance, cows or lamb lack, or that horses are better able to experience pain, discomfort, or fear.

Unless one earnestly believes that horses are intrinsically different from other animals, which belief they would have to hold in absence of real evidence, I can only assume that their impulse to suppress the slaughter of horses while allowing it for other animals is on the basis of the personal relationships people sometimes have with horses.

But that doesn’t really make a difference when we’re talking about just the concept of slaughtering them for meat. It’s not as though opponents of horse meat had personal relationships with this or that particular horse. Some people have personal relationships with particular rabbits, or snakes. It’s not unheard of for someone to keep a pig as a house pet, or to feel affection for a cow that is kept solely for dairy production. Rarely is any of this used as grounds to argue that the entirety of society ought to disallow the killing of or production of meat from any animals of a certain species.

If one recoils with horror at the very thought of horse meat, but never bats an eye when filling his shopping cart with pork and beef, he is wedging an artificial dividing line into the application of his principles. Such selective defense can only be irrational. And if one is concerned with consistency of his own beliefs or ethics, instances like that ought to lead to one of three outcomes: a change in attitude leading to universal application of the principle, even if potentially inconvenient; abandonment of that principle; or production of a satisfactory account of why the dividing line is not artificial.

If a person utterly opposes the production of horse meat but neither opposes the slaughter of all other creatures nor truly believes that the mental lives of horses are significantly and objectively different from those of all other creatures, then that person is trying to hold two contrary views at once: that killing a sentient, autonomous being that’s called a horse is wrong, and that killing a sentient, autonomous being that’s not called a horse is okay.

Cognitive dissonance is the enemy of breaking points. When you give yourself license to hold views that are in opposition to one another, you strip yourself of the crucial motivation for intellectual or moral growth. Breaking points arise of conflict, and sometimes it is a conflict between two opposing ideas that you yourself maintain. A person who is concerned with rational consistency will keep an eye out for such conflicting views, and his breaking point will entail a sudden realization that either one of his ideas is wrong, or he doesn’t actually know why each of them is right.

In the case of the ranching of horses and the slaughter of them for meat, the tension between views goes well beyond the simple difference in perception of horses and other animals. Cognitive dissonance is easy when you’re operating on pure intuition. When those intuitions are directly challenged by pragmatic concerns, it’s much more difficult to make glib pronouncements that a certain action is simply wrong. Courteau writes of the fallout from the closure of the last US horse meat producers:

“In states across the country, reported cases of equine abuse, neglect, and abandonment skyrocketed. And the kill buyers of yesteryear aggregated into rarer but still more haunting boogeymen, purchasing for the abattoirs of Canada, or, worse, Mexico, where horses at some slaughterhouses are reportedly subject to torturous conditions.”

Consequentialism makes for complex ethical calculations, and if one wishes not only to release the United States from the stigma its citizenry attaches to the slaughter of horses, but to actually reduce the suffering experienced by American horses, then such a person’s intuition that it was good to force closure of the slaughterhouses is probably in error. But that error and the larger error of deliberate cognitive dissonance are both based on the same mistake of thinking that your knee-jerk intuition is sufficient grounds for all moral judgments.

When one really starts to analyze the consequences of people’s intuitive moral pronouncements, we see that cognitive dissonance is quite easy to come by once all the nuance of principle and pragmatism is taken into account. In other words, what a person thinks is wrong often fails to align perfectly with why he thinks it is wrong. We cannot permanently avoid the moral burden of having to occasionally choose the lesser of two evils. Unfortunately, this doesn’t seem to occur to many people who have non-inquisitive, black-and-white views of morality.

The other night, I was watching the documentary Sweetgrass, and the depictions of some of the operations at the sheep farm brought to mind these same questions of ethical complexities. The opening scenes of the film largely focus on the beginning of lives for sheep on that farm, and I was somewhat shocked by the dismissive treatment by the ranchers of both newborn lambs and nursing mothers. But if watches with a measure of objectivity, one quickly comes to realize that given such high volume of sheep, the farmers are doing what they can to promote survival of the highest number possible.

Some years ago, I had a good friend who was a devout, even zealous Buddhist. He was exceptionally sensitive to implications of animal mistreatment, and aggressively, immediately judgmental of perceived wrongdoing. It occurred to me while watching Sweetgrass that he certainly would have found the farmers’ behavior to be unforgivable, but that any alternative behavior that would have resulted in the survival of fewer sheep would have elicited just as much disdain from him. While their rationalizations were grounded in Buddhism instead of Christianity, this friend’s social and political views were decidedly conservative, and probably didn’t differ very much from those of his Christian parents.

His moral judgments, like those of many conservatives, and indeed like those of many people of any political leaning, were severely averse to nuance. I recall discussing abortion with him on one occasion and using the word “complex” to describe the breadth and seriousness of the associated ethical questions. That evoked fiery indignation from him, and he said, “No. You can kill or you can not kill. It’s actually really simple.”

And it would be simple if that’s all it came down to, if there weren’t any genuine questions about what qualifies as killing, if there weren’t any other ways of being responsible for another creature’s suffering. What my friend believed seemed simple on the surface, but at a deeper level of analysis it becomes clear that he was keeping it simple by ignoring the hard questions.

No doubt he would have agreed that his moral concern was with decreasing the suffering of sentient beings, a utilitarian concern. That view means it is reprehensible to do anything that promotes or permits the death of, say, sheep or horses. But it must also make it reprehensible to do anything that promotes or permits the hunger or severe discomfort of the same creatures.

In the case of the sheep in Sweetgrass, keeping all of the lambs alive meant separating them from their mothers immediately upon birth, forcibly compelling ewes to nurse lambs to which they had no connection, and hastily handling the creatures as if they were inanimate objects. The alternative would have been to handle them more delicately, more compassionately, but chances are that in light of the enormous numbers of sheep that needed to be handled by just a few farmers, that would have resulted in some of the lambs being neglected, and thus starving or being killed by competing sheep.

Both alternatives may well be similarly unethical, but it’s unhelpful to simply reject whichever alternative is current simply on the basis of its perceived wrongness. The choice of one wrong action is, in cases like this, the direct consequence of the rejection of another.

It may strike some people as hideously dehumanizing to draw such a parallel, but the pragmatic circumstances surrounding the abortion debate can be elucidated by thinking of the entire human race as a correlate to a herd of livestock. As population increase, the rate of survival within that population, or at least the average utility available to each individual, naturally decreases. Mandating the birth of more young is tantamount to mandating the provision of more suffering. A person who opposes either abortion or the neglect of newborn lambs or the slaughter horses doesn’t have to accept that fact as a justification of the contrary position, but he does have to acknowledge the consequences of what he’s advocating.

In fact, I find that most people refuse to do this. They are, instead, happy to embrace cognitive dissonance, presumably because it is easier to live in a fantasy world in which right actions never have unintended consequences than it is to willfully struggle with moral dilemmas. That perception, however irrational, may help an individual to remain admirably committed to his own ethical obligations, but it also results in unfair judgments predicated upon others.

It’s not rational to demand that a creature with little access to resources must both birth its child and feed it. The acceptance of cognitive dissonance results in dissonant demands and no-win situations. That is the cognitive dissonance of, for instance, anyone who repudiates abortion without compromise, but also rejects the provision welfare. Essentially, the two views in concert pronounce that it’s wrong both to terminate a pregnancy and to have a child while poor.

Again, a rational person whose views are at odds with one another must apply the relevant principle, abandon it, or explain how they can be reconciled. In the given case, if a person claims the principle of defending the lives of innocents, he must apply that principle by providing material support to unsupported children. If that is too inconvenient, he must rethink his stance on abortion, or else explain why it’s worth defending an unborn child but not one who has truly entered the world.

It’s not easy to decide upon coherent ethical theories as to what constitutes right and wrong, but even once you have, it’s not easy to determine how to apply those theories. If you want children to have both a chance at life and at least basic comfort once they’ve begun that life, you’ll eventually have to confront a situation in which those desires stand in opposition. If want the lambs to avoid both starvation and mistreatment, you’ll be horrified, when you look closely enough, to realize that it sometimes takes one to avoid the other. You can save the horses from the abattoir, but you may thus doom them stable that does them even greater harm.

There is a certain sense in which my Buddhist friend’s pronouncement is still correct. It’s very simple: you can either kill or not kill. But the operative word there is “you.” The individual often has privileges that are absent to society at large. You can choose to carry your own unintended pregnancy to term, but if you can then feed that child without fail, you’d better thank God that you never really had to face the choice between depriving a child of life and subjecting it to exquisite hardship. And you can’t conflate either situation with the broader hypothetical in which the nation is inundated with a million additional young lives that must be supported and defended.

If you raise horses and you’re uncomfortable with them being either slaughtered or abused and underfed, you can do as Ms. Courteau’s father had always done and refuse to sell them to kill buyers. But when such sales are no longer an option and the reduced demand causes the prices of horses to fall, lowering your revenue to the point where it is no longer possible to take adequate care of the horses you have, the dual ideals of defending all life and defending against all suffering are no longer sustainable.

This has been the situation of horse farming in the United States for the past four or five years. I remember it being mentioned by some as a possible consequence at the time that the last slaughterhouse dealing in horse meat was closing. But mostly I remember objecting to the irrationality of it all. I remember this very well, but somehow I missed the fact that the Congress resumed funding for these slaughterhouses in November, which may result in some reopening this year.

I won’t be happy to see domestic horses go back to slaughter. Indeed, I hope that someday in the far-distant future they all close again, but that they do so then right along with those that deal in every species of animal, and that it be on the basis of the universal application of moral principles, not on the basis of an absurd double-standard.

But despite the fancifulness of that hope, I’m not naïve about the implications. I know that many animals will suffer and die from lack of care during any possible transition away from their slaughter and consumption. But if I could be alive when that time comes, I would say that that is the unhappy consequence of doing right in a way that is more crucial to our future moral standing. It is a great tragedy of the social aspect of moral existence that we sometimes have to prioritize our values against one another. But our collective morality gains not a bit from pretending that there is no such problem.

The nuanced demands and consequences of collective ethics are discomforting, in that they may require us to accept things that don’t feel right to us. Intuition is a powerful tool in making moral judgments, but it can only lead us so far. If it guides a situation towards less obvious but more serious harms, we’ve probably made the awfully mistake of eschewing rationality in order to appease the short-sighted demands of immediate perception. Only reason, and not intuition, is capable of handling nuance and recognizing indefensible cognitive dissonances.

Rationality is a skill that must be learned for the sake of coherent, far-reaching moral behavior. It draws the dividing line between those who think they are doing the right thing and truly are, even if they appear not to be.

Courteau writes of the reversal of the double-standard regarding horse meat, “Many pet lovers are furious, but PETA actually supports the reversal, arguing that the suffering of unwanted horses increased after the demise of the kill plants.” If PETA, which is often so prone to over-the-top displays of self-righteous, black-and-white morality, can learn the value of nuance and circumstance, anyone can.