CSotD: They just don’t get it, do they?
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As Wiley Miller's Non Sequitur enters its 21st year of non-feigned outrage, he brings to a head something that has been roiling in the back of my skull for a couple of weeks now.
People do, indeed, flood to the purveyors of feigned outrage, which, I would note, is not a partisan commodity. There is feigned outrage coming from both sides, though please don't think I'm falling into the "on this hand, but then again on that hand" trap.
The bulk of feigned outrage is generated by control freaks and — despite the feigned outrage over a rule that tax dollars should not be wasted by purchasing junk food for school lunch programs — the desire for mass control is mostly clustered on one side of the spectrum.
The question in my mind is, at what level does it stop being feigned?
That is, let's assume that Roger Ailes and his ilk are consciously and purposefully lying. Do they hire insightful liars to assist them, or do they start right out with the dupes and pawns? Because I'm convinced that neither Keith Olbermann nor Glenn Beck are insincere. Their outrage is not feigned.
To use another example, Haldeman and Ehrlichman knew exactly what they were doing, but Donald Segretti was apparently as pitiable in life as he was in the movie. The question is, where do you place Dean and Magruder?
And where do you place all the people who believe Watergate itself was nothing more than feigned outrage?
It's a matter of demanding easy answers.
Demonic possession, for example, may be an absurd explanation for horrifying behavior, but it's better than no explanation at all, and it's better than an answer you'd need a degree in neuroscience to understand.
But the main thing is, demonic possession, coupled with intelligent design, guardian angels and a Jesus who guides the hands of wide receivers, is part of a unified cosmology where all the parts fit.
This is an appropriate day to say that, considering what we're all about to do to God's perfectly ordered universe tomorrow.
In the unified cosmos of the Greeks and the Church Fathers, the time it takes for the Earth to go around the Sun could be expressed in whole days, and, of course, for thousands of years it was, despite the fact that the climate kept slowly changing relative to the calendar.
In the real world, there is no logical connection between the Earth's rotation and the length and speed of its orbit, and there's no secular reason that you should be able to use one to measure the other and expect it to come out as a whole number.
Despite this clear evidence that God did not create a perfectly coordinated universe in which everything fits, people want to believe in clear, easily understood explanations, and preferably ones that reinforce what they want the world to be like anyway. Just add the extra day and shut up.
Especially, people want heroes and villains. God and Satan. Batman and the Joker. Taylor Swift and Kanye West. Whatever.
They want a world in which Hitler and his closest Nazi cohorts seized power, not one in which the German people elected him. A world in which most Germans plotted to assassinate him, and 90 percent of the people in occupied France were active in the underground.
A simple world in which everything makes sense and you don't have to sort through the inconsistencies and the inexplicable and in which somebody is just about to fix it all just the way it ought to be, if only the bad people would stop messing things up.
Fact is, we probably don't need Leap Year.
After all, if people can't remember that, a decade ago, the people who are ripping the president up one side and down the other today were insisting that nobody should criticize the president in the middle of the war on terror, they're not likely, 250 years from now, to realize that the Fourth of July used to come in the middle of summer.
Which is an example of sarcasm, and brings us back to the topic of cartooning.
I have come to the conclusion that some people just can't grasp sarcasm, and I am becoming convinced that it is linked to a need for cosmic order.
That is, that there are people who need what they see to be what it is, and who can't grasp the indirection involved in some styles of cartooning. A cartoon that depicts one thing but means something else is going to blow past them.
It is not a matter of intelligence, though it is a matter of how your mind works. But it's like being color blind. If a person can't distinguish blue from green, it's not because they're stupid and you can't argue them into being able to tell one from another.
Since they test for that when you get your drivers license in most states, I think most color blind people know that they are color blind. If they don't, however, screaming "What kind of an idiot can't tell blue from green?" is not likely to advance the conversation.
But they don't test for sarcasm-blindness, and most people who are blind to sarcasm don't realize it.
I do know one conservative (a friend of the blog, as it happens) who has realized that he just doesn't get sarcasm. And, like someone who realizes that he is color blind, he's learned when to shrug and admit that he doesn't get it. Knowing this has not turned him into a liberal, but it has certainly made him more pleasant company.
But the world is full of sarcasm-blind people, as Tom Toles discovered in 2006 when he did a cartoon criticizing the Bush administration, and in particular Donald Rumsfeld, for having a callous attitude towards the young men and women they were throwing into combat.
This was the era of unarmored vehicles that could not withstand IEDs, and, when asked by a soldier why they didn't have adequate armor, Rumsfeld famously answered, "It isn't a matter of money. It isn't a matter on the part of the army of desire. It's a matter of production and capability of doing it. As you know, ah, you go to war with the army you have—not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time."
Specifically, Toles was criticizing Rumsfeld for his response, when it was charged that the Army needed more men and equipment, and that current levels were unsustainable and made the war too hard on those serving, that the existing troops were "battle-hardened."
For those who "get" sarcasm, the cartoon was clearly pleading the case of the soldiers, clearly calling for more troops, more equipment and more support for the troops. (Or withdrawal, but the die had been cast.)
But there was a roar of horror from the sarcasm-blind, who saw only that he had drawn a funny-looking picture of a disabled veteran. In their eyes, any cartoon that depicted a wounded soldier and didn't show someone weeping and consoling him was disrespectful, inappropriate and unpatriotic.
Were the flames fanned by cynics who got the point but wanted the controversy? Maybe.
But it doesn't matter. There were many, many people who looked at the cartoon and absolutely could not see the compassion for wounded soldiers that lay behind the dry sarcasm with which Toles skewered Rumsfeld's callous remarks.
And it was not just Barney and Homer down at Moe's bar. The Joint Chiefs of Staff, who normally do not participate in partisan pissing contests, wrote a group letter to the Washington Post protesting the cartoon as "callous" and "beyond tastless," and accusing Toles of "making light of (the wounded's) tremendous physical sacrifices."
The Joint Chiefs are not stupid people, nor are they ignorant. My bet is that, if you went to dinner with any of them, you would have a very pleasant evening of charming, intelligent conversation.
But they clearly don't get sarcasm, or they'd have praised Toles for highlighting those sacrifices.
And, as difficult as it is to wean people away from their "feigned outrage," it doesn't help to scream "It's not blue, you moron! It's green!"
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