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.

Horror and Conservatism

Even if you’ve never heard of Arch Oboler, you may know the plot of one of his many radio plays if you’re familiar with Bill Cosby’s stand-up comedy. Cosby made the Lights Out episode “Chicken Heart” famous to generations who had never really listened to fiction on radio. I understand that as a consequence some people believe that Cosby made up the story. Either way, many of those who know about it now remember “Chicken Heart” as an example of how something absurd can be frightening to children or exciting to those who experience it in suitable surroundings. Few seem to remember it as twenty-minute rebuke of pacifism framed as a science fiction horror story.

It is not for nothing that the subject of the experiment that drives Oboler’s story was a chicken heart and not, for instance, the kidney of a bear or the stomach of a lion. The story’s protagonist is a scientist filling the role of the unheeded prophet, insisting that the chicken heart, which grows with every pulse and consumes everything around it, must be destroyed with firepower and brute force. But everyone who is in a position to combat the thing insists upon searching for a more delicate solution, refusing to declare war upon the thing until it is too large and too powerful to be stopped.

This sort of conservative metaphor is typical of Arch Oboler’s horror plays. Also typically, they were the some of the best examples of horror on radio. His story titled “Neanderthal Man” conveys the same ideas as “Chicken Heart,” but with an even broader focus and more didactic presentation. Three characters slip into a time that predates civilization and find themselves confronted by an ancestor of human beings. The two men argue about how to deal with the threat. One has a gun and wants to shoot the Neanderthal dead at the first opportunity, while the other abhors guns and wants to try to communicate with it and reason with it. The latter is killed by the pre-human creature, and as he lies dying he acknowledges that it was foolish to think that one could reason with an uncivilized enemy.

Lights Out has another episode, titled “The Dream,” which stars Boris Karloff as a man who is compelled to kill by a vision of a spectral woman, who continues to haunt him throughout his arrest, trial, and conviction, prompting him to insist that he die as a consequence of his crime. The entire episode is clearly devoted to arguing in favor of a broad application of the death penalty. The theme is not just conservative, but boldly conservative, with Karloff’s character making it very clear that his death is necessary not because it will dissuade other murders, or give peace to his soul, but just because the social convention ought to be that if you take a life, you ought to give your own. And between Karloff’s exquisite voice acting and Oboler’s excellent horror sensibilities, it is a frightening tale just on its surface.

“Revolt of the Worms” is a marvelously effective horror story, and I read it as a self-righteous defense of the bourgeoisie. The metaphor is less obvious than some of his others, but it seems to be on some level an attempt to instill fear in the wealthy, educated, or successful about the possibility of being attacked and overrun by those who have been empowered by the efforts of that higher class. The stories theme is one that I am especially likely to take issue with. It is also one of my very favorite radio horror stories.

Also among my favorites is “The Thing on the Fourbile Board,” an episode of Quiet, Please, which was written and directed by Wyllis Cooper, who actually created Lights Out before passing it off to Oboler. “The Thing on the Fourbile Board” is generally a favorite horror tale for anyone who is familiar with old time radio. Spoiler alert in case anyone is interested in listening to it: It tells the story of an invisible creature uncovered from deep in the earth by an oil drilling operation. The character that we initially see as the protagonist tells the story in retrospect, culminating in a climactic confrontation with the creature, wherein he dumps paint on it to make it visible. Advancing to the present, we learn that he took pity on the monster, and actually married it, resolving to take care of it by feeding it a steady supply of human victims.

What’s interesting about the creature in this story is that it is a neat little package of sexual transgressions. It has the face of a little girl, but the body of a spider, and when the narrator introduces it to the audience he says that she likes to be called Mike. By being married to and presumably sleeping with it, the narrator is dipping a finger into the trifecta of bestiality, pedophilia, and homosexuality. Add to that the fact that the first evidence of the creature is a severed finger bearing a ring and the perceived transgressions seemingly expand to include adultery or divorce. No doubt there is also meaning in the fact that the creature is ordinarily invisible, and that we are initially led to trust the narrator. The implication is clearly that these discomforting elements of society and the human psyche were buried and invisible unless brought into focus, but that they were there, and that your own neighbor might be a practitioner of bestiality, a pedophile, and adulterer, or – no doubt frightening in 1948 – a homosexual. So as I see it, put simply, one of the best horror stories ever written for radio is about the conservative values of mistrust and a blanket terror of social taboos.

I am an extraordinarily analytical consumer of fiction. Even when it comes to horror, I want the story to mean something, even though I recognize that that may not be typical of horror. So I give a close reading to the story and its themes whenever I can, to such an extent that most others would quickly grow bored and frustrated with me. In my necessarily solitary viewing I have tended to get the impression that the horror stories that are not only the most fun to analyze are quite conservative in their message, and that the same are often the most frightening.

Of course, that correlation is only natural. What is typically most frightening to us is the unfamiliar, and the outcome of current social change is always unfamiliar, as well as being the usual enemy of conservative thinking. So thoughtful horror tends to uphold existing taboos, painting social mores as either that which is being threatened or that which will defend the protagonists against the veiled evil that is stalking them. For my generation, there is no more obvious example of this than the rules of slasher films. By and large, nothing is more dangerous to the killer’s potential victims than being a sexually active adolescent. Drug use will also tend to get you in trouble.

Yet thinking much farther back than that, many familiar horror archetypes used in classic films and reused through the decades represent the dangers of failing to respect existing social boundaries. The once-commonplace mad scientist tended to be someone who brought about destruction and his own violent downfall because he tampered in areas that were seen as God’s domain. There is also no shortage of stories in which the thing that begins the horror is a transgression against traditional religion by way of experimenting with the occult.

Vampires are avowedly godless creatures, as well as being sexually provocative and often tempting women to adultery. As the archetype developed it came to more frequently represent homosexuality at the same time that homosexuality in American culture was becoming more visible while still being far from mainstream acceptance. The Lost Boys remains perhaps the most famous example of vampirism/wizardry as gay/AIDS metaphor, if you watch it closely.

From the same era, the film Fright Night contains several scenes that transparently depict the vampire as a sexual predator. He pursues an underage boy and girl to a nightclub in one scene and engages in a sexual dance with the girl, hypnotizing her with his eyes so that she goes to him of her own accord before breaking away and falling to her knees while crying in what could just as well be a show of shame as fear. Later he similarly draws in a young adolescent boy, softly reassuring him that he’ll be happy as a vampire before embracing him beneath the cover of his cape and calling to mind the often repeated image of the vampire bite as sexual penetration. The victim then becomes transformed into someone who dresses differently and takes pleasure in destruction and crime.

The monster in Fright Night is thus a man who corrupts the youth, which would not necessarily be conservative were it not for certain other indicators. The first thing that arouses suspicion about the antagonist is that when he moves into the neighborhood, he is unmarried and lives with another man. Pederasty aside, the aspects of homosexuality and sexual promiscuity in the character are evidently not incidental, but part of what is supposed to make him psychologically threatening. Also of note is the fact that one of the protagonists is a much older, solitary man who develops a bizarrely close relationship with the main protagonist, another young, male teenager. This suggests to me the flawed message that an older, desexualized, presumably more conservative male character is implicitly more trustworthy than the one who is viscerally alluring.

Werewolves, of course, are a way of presenting the more broadly-conceived threat of unrestrained impulses. This also does not specifically need to be conservative, although the more conservative person will be more likely to utilize that archetype, by virtue of attaching a greater sense of value to sexual and social stability, to civilization as directly opposed to nature, and to property rights.

That latter consideration calls to mind the observation that certain films do not utilize archetypes that have any inherent socio-political meaning, but still deliver a conservative message. The Changeling, for instance, is an exceptionally well-executed haunted house film, and ultimately turns out to be one long statement about the importance of inheritance rights.

The original Saw I take to be liberal film, on some level. The killer’s motivation is to see that his victims glimpse the starkest possible reality of their own vices, which somewhat plays into my earlier essay about the role of horror and the possible link between liberalism and appreciation of the genre. However, Jigsaw evidently isn’t interested in getting those who play his games to recognize unpleasant truths out in the rest of society; he only makes them confront their own flaws. That makes it seem like he’s horrifically advancing the old conservative talking point of “personal responsibility,” demanding that these people overcome their shortcomings by sheer force of will.

Of course, one can never assume that a writer agrees with the views of his characters, so it could just as well be that Jigsaw is meant to represent the horror of overzealous commitment to enforcing the personal responsibility of others. However, the scene featuring the woman who survived one of his earlier games suggests otherwise, in that she herself insists that Jigsaw helped her to overcome her drug addiction. Though nobody in their right mind would approve of his methods, it may be that the audience is meant to come away from the film thinking highly of the idea behind them, which is evidently that social supports don’t work and that those who can’t fix their problems on their own deserve to be consumed by them.

Of course, a sense of justification pervades an awful lot of horror. The audience is frequently offered the suggestion that the victims somehow deserve their fate. Though the awfulness of their deaths is beyond the pale, it is often suggested that the protagonists have done something wrong and that the events of the film constitute a trial by fire for them. This plays into what may be at once the subtlest and most significant conservative horror trope: a sense of cosmic leveling.

This too is natural. It’s hard to write or expect an audience to relate to something that’s so bleak as to deliver a gruesome death to an educated, down-on-her luck, virginal charity volunteer. We want to believe that there’s at least something that causes another person’s death or pain to make a little bit of sense. Nobody wants bad things to happen to good people for no reason, but in my estimation one difference between liberals and conservatives is that liberals lament that that such things do happen, and conservatives steadfastly believe that they don’t. From a certain staunchly conservative point of view, if you’re poor, it’s probably because you didn’t work hard enough; if you’re sad, it’s probably because you don’t go to church; if you get hacked up by the campus psycho killer, it’s probably because you had sex out of wedlock.

In this sense, even horror films with didactic liberal messages, like Cannibal Holocaust, have a conservative philosophical bent, insofar as they identify completely internal causes for many of the terrors that people are forced to face. I would expect a more distinctly liberal horror film to allow terrible things to happen to its characters without excessively rationalizing them. I have great respect for films that are bold enough to allow bad things to happen to good people, because that it what happens in reality. Indeed, that is the worst of what happens in reality, and representing and bringing people face-to-face with that should be the highest aspiration of horror.

Still, I absolutely love some horror stories that have distinctly conservative themes. In addition to just being scary or generally well-structured, they often put on display the kernel of truth that lies behind some conservative thinking. And that in itself can be quite scary.

Child-Haters Versus Women-Haters

I spent entirely too much time yesterday afternoon following and participating in a debate about abortion, infanticide, and Canadian law at the Ethics Alarms blog. Though I might better have spent that time doing something more significant to my survival, it was a highly stimulating bit of discussion. I took on the task of trying to convince the blog’s author, Jack Marshall, that in the case of a 19 year-old Canadian girl who gave birth to her child in secret and then strangled it, the judge probably didn’t let her off with a three year suspended sentence because she simply considers infants to be a lower form of life.

Beyond the intellectual challenge of trying to dismantle the flawed logic and straw men involved in Marshall’s slander of Judge Joanne Veit, I found the dialogue to be worthwhile because it truly helped me to see the disparate sides of the abortion debate with greater clarity. I have often found that there is a certain middle ground in that debate, which is almost never explored. Broadly speaking, I am a pro-choice individual. But there appears to be a segment of the pro-choice crowd which believes that abortions are okay, full stop. That is not my perspective at all. Rather, I feel that abortions are sometimes the least of several evils. That is a perspective that anti-abortion individuals don’t seem to understand, and it is apparently one that is not widely represented. That makes it easy for people like Jack Marshall to characterize abortion-defenders as baby-killers who attach no value to the lives of innocents.

What I learned from today’s debate is that Marshall really, honestly believes in that characterization. He is truly of the opinion that Canadian society in general, and increasingly America as well, judges fetuses and infants as being less important than the mere convenience and whim of adult women. And it’s actually kind of comforting to know that. You see, I was afraid that the subject of abortion was peopled with activists who maintain wholly inconsistent worldviews. And while that still may be true to a certain extent, the fervor and ill-will surrounding so much of the discussion is probably derived from a tendency of virtually every party involved to mischaracterize one another’s views.

What I also learned about Marshall is that he genuinely believes he is defending the unborn against the onslaught of a society that is succumbing to the sort of utter degradation that leads it to consider newborns to be disposable, valueless, and devoid of rights. He allows for no nuance in the views of his opponents. That deepens my confidence that he is wrong, but it also aids in my understanding of why he’s wrong. It’s not, as some might suppose, that he simply thinks his moral outrage trumps a woman’s right to choose what to do with her own body. Rather, he thinks he is defending children against women and social trends who have no moral compass whatsoever and are content to enter into abortion lightly, without reflection. I know that there are some women of whom that is true, but it is far from the norm, and what I recognize is that it is wrong to assume the authority to pronounce on what is right or wrong without having any awareness of the context surrounding specific decisions.

Ascribing highly extreme points of view to one’s political opponents makes one appear more extreme by contrast. I presume that this is happening on both sides of the debate. Pro-lifers think of pro-choice people as advocating abortion wherever there is the slightest motive for it, and that makes resistance to abortion not a personal point of view, but a moral imperative. It’s probably easy for anti-abortion activists to convince themselves that they’re fighting a group of people who, if not for the resistance, would go door to door performing abortions, even on women who aren’t sure they want them. Their own positions are probably ramped up in response. After all, if your opponent’s position has no nuance, why would yours? Meanwhile, pro-choice people think of their opponents as tyrants jockeying for control over all women’s reproductive systems. If that’s their goal, then evidently it’s not enough to defend abortion; activists believe they have to insist upon it.

I’m tired of seeing this debate framed as a contest between people who hate children and people who hate women. It’s portrayed that way because each side insists on the most evocative, rhetorical descriptions of the other. Not content to portray rivals as rivals, we feel the need to portray them as villains. We need more nuance in our understanding of the political motivations of others, but in order to achieve it, we first need more nuance in our approach to debate and political engagement. As it is, we only go on sustaining the possibly illusory perception that the two camps in any contest have wildly inconsistent views, that the definitions of “good” and “evil” are reversed on the other side.

Call me naïve, but despite all the partisanship and political rancor I’ve witnessed in my young life, I think we generally share a basic concept of right and wrong. Where we differ is in the application of it. It’s a matter of degree. By and large, conservatives don’t hate women any more than liberals hate children. We just put greater emphasis on one or the other depending upon our perception of the challenges at hand, the tendencies of the dominant society, the social position of our opponents’ views. Conservatives are categorically wrong when they paint abortion as an instance of the devaluing of nascent life, but liberals are similarly in error if they do not acknowledge the sincere good intentions of their reasonable conservative opponents.

We must take care to point out that sympathy for the emotional strain and desperation of mothers who lack support does not come at the expense of an overall respect for life. There’s room for defense of both children and child-bearers. The existing dialogue doesn’t give much hope for this, but when it comes right down to it, isn’t that what we all want? Despite how differently we rank our priorities, don’t most of us ultimately want to do right by every kind of person? We must. That's simply got to be the way it is.