January 11, 2006

LIBERAL LAND: WHERE CHILDHOOD NEVER ENDS

“…As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man
There are only four things certain since Social Progress began.
That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,
And the burnt Fool's bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire…”
--Rudyard Kipling

        Horsefeathers spent an enjoyable few hours yesterday and today, watching the real ‘Entertainment Network’—C-Span, where the Senate’s Judiciary Committee, a veritable ship of burnt fools, questioned Supreme Court nominee, Judge Samuel Alito. We marveled at his ability to refrain from laughing aloud during the endless speechifying lectures, disguised as questions, from those paragons of virtue, Joe Biden and Ted Kennedy. Perhaps the glasses of liquid he occasionally sipped contained shots of Gentleman Jack, but we suspect the good Judge possesses great reservoirs of self- restraint. Senator Kennedy was especially choice, as he displayed his concern for the helpless, by deploring “Strip search Sam” for a ruling that allowed cops to search a 10 yr. old child of drug dealers. Gee whiz, you might have thought the Judge had endorsed sexual abuse of girls. Oh, sorry, that’s exactly what the moral exemplar from Massachusetts was hoping you’d think. Mary Jo Kopechne could not be reached for comment.
        As our Senators rambled on in high dudgeon about one thing or another, suggesting that Judge Alito was a primitive menace, a greater danger to our freedom than al Qaeda, we couldn’t help but speculate about the origins of their grandiose self regard, moral pomposity and imperviousness to counterargument based on fact. In one respect they seemed quite genuine: they truly believed, not only in the malevolence of the Bush administration but in their own virtue. They really do not, in the modern cant phrase, have “problems of self-esteem”. Their self love is wondrous to behold. The term “narcissism” carries unfortunate clinical overtones, but it remains the best term to describe a completely absorbing self love usually seen only in very young children. Like children, these oafs instantly blotted out of conscious memory their previous humiliation at the hands of Justice Roberts and began repeating the same with Justice Alito. It’s quite wonderful how this self love, a love that never dies, can convince a Joe Biden that the world admires the logorrheic torrent of words he expels, while grinning and straining. Like a child at potty training, he assumes that all who watch and listen must share the evident pride he takes in his verbal discharges. At one point, Mr. Biden may have set a world record for willful incoherence when he consumed 14 minutes of non stop talking to finally emit a question. At the end of his performance, he looked around, proud as a peacock, utterly unaware of what a clownish fool he was making of himself.
        Biden and Kennedy on C-Span, were just the most egregious representatives of the High Church of Liberalism in its contemporary form. They are true believers who dwell in Liberal Land, a place where adults can shed the strains of adulthood. It is a realm of grandiose self-absorption, quite normal in childhood, but increasingly difficult to sustain as reality inflicts its inevitable blows on our high infantile self-regard. Dwelling in Liberal Land means you can assume you’re remarkably intelligent, with great “potential”, regardless of whether you actually know anything. It is a land where utter ignorance of the greatest cultural achievement of modernity—science—is standard, and need not make you feel uneducated or unintelligent. After all, you absorbed the PoMo liturgy in which all inequalities of accomplishment and knowledge are caused by Patriarchal oppression, and for which proper therapeutic empathy is the cure. Words are sacred objects, worthy of veneration. Liberal Land is a realm in which noble sentiments trump deeds and non-verbal accomplishments are scorned and devalued. It is a land in which feminized boys and masculinized girls are praised for their tolerance and for transcending gender differences. Liberal land is a realm in which “narratological truth” trumps mere facts. Liberal Land is where Larry Summers's defense of the scientific method requires him to undergo forced re-education and wimpishly abase himself before the Gods of Liberal cant. It’s a realm in which aggression is definitely not part of human nature, just a consequence of the dehumanizing effects of Patriarchal capitalism.
        In Liberal Land, childhood is sentimentalized, and no social program is too costly if it’s “for the future of our children”, the very children who are being raised by nannys and tutors to be good little P.C. conformists. It’s not possible to sway its inhabitants with logic, fact or rational argumentation. It’s as futile as trying to reason with a small child having a temper tantrum. Liberal Land is a utopian therapeutic realm, where human nature can be transcended and no one need fight over anything, because words can “work it out”. Samuel Johnson answered Boswell’s claim that Bishop Berkeley’s assertion of the non-existence of matter could not be refuted, by kicking at a rock and asserting “I refute it thus”. He surely didn’t anticipate Post-modernism, or the poet Richard Wilbur who wrote: “ Kick at the rock Sam Johnson, break your bones/ But cloudy, cloudy is the stuff of stones”. That makes a clever poetic line, one with ‘narratological’ profundity, perfect for our PoMo aesthetes, but once again, reality asserts itself: those broken bones hurt, and you’d better get to a doctor, rather than a wordsmith intellectual for relief.
        Liberalism has been regressively transformed over the years from a muscular, realistic philosophy into a dreamy set of utopian beliefs and childhood wishes. It has become the philosophy of arrested development. How did this happen? The answer can be discerned in such bastions of Liberal Land as Park Slope in Brooklyn or the Upper West Side of Manhattan.There we find a large proportion of the adult population is the product of elite wordsmith educations: the arts, media, therapeutic professions. These are baby boomers who were told over and over that they were the brightest, most idealistic generation in human history. Despite the passage of the years, they still affect a pose of perpetual adolescence. They think of themselves as exceptionally intelligent, while actually being poorly educated in the sciences and superficially educated in the humanities. They are conformist in their thinking, and have been so ever since they learned to please their teachers and be very good little boys and girls who made their parents proud by becoming good test takers who scored high on their verbal SAT’s. They absorbed the post-modern tenets of their professors, and learned that morality is relative, aggression is a product of social frustration, and criminality requires empathy for the criminal who is a victim of a harsh childhood and capitalist dehumanization. They learned to live well, with little effort, as their parents indulged the dear little proto-metrosexuals with credit cards and tutors. The hypocrisy of their lifestyles never fazed them: while living like the upper 1/10 of 1% of the population—being chauffered to private school so as not to have to ride the subways, being tutored so as not to have to compete on a level playing field with their less affluent peers, they learned to condemn the ‘unfairness’ of capitalism. While differences of achievement were attributed to unfairness and discrimination, requiring that tests be changed, made more culturally sensitive, grades be raised and affirmative discrim—woops—action instituted, other differences, such as sexual preferences—were entirely inborn and innate.
        Liberalism is ideally suited for this constituency, a constituency of those working in the wordsmith professions---media, advertising, the arts, and above all the psychotherapeutic professions. The truth of Hopkins’s “The child is father to the man” is nowhere better illustrated than in these adults and now in their children. Among the latter one can discern the next generation of Bidens, Schumers , Kennedys and Durbins.
        Close observation of these worthies is instructive. Apart from their buffoonish behavior, they offer an overwhelming impression of physical and emotional softness. They are blubbery, full of lip biting displays of feeling for whatever group is victim of the moment. They appear soft and mushy as a freshly baked donut. They are well fed, cosseted men, whom it’s easy to picture in a dress gazing into a mirror while applying mascara. They are the leaders for a generation of sexually ambiguous, politically correct wordsmiths.
        Horsefeathers recently had a conversation with a moderately retarded man who explained that he had voted for Kerry because “Bush is so stupid, such an idiot”. Ordinarily this is a person who is quite aware of his limitations, but he was raised in the true and only faith—Upper West Side Liberalism. To question the belief that Bush is an idiot is like questioning the assumption that Liberals are highly intelligent and caring people. It’s just not possible. Welcome to Liberal Land.