CSotD: The village idiot goes global
Skip to comments
Joe Martin doesn't do political cartoons, but today's Willie 'n Ethel pretty much sums up the current situation and does it better than the "on the one hand, on the other" political cartoonists who simply repeat the same tired "Congress sucks" blame-sharing cartoons.
We are media prisoners of the moronically "even-handed" approach to coverage ably depicted in Jen Sorensen's latest piece.
I've given up on the Sunday talking head shows. I don't need to watch people read press releases out loud, nor do I want to watch people talk over each other and ignore salient arguments in favor of rebutting things that have not been said or knocking down straw men.
Repeating a stupid argument in a louder voice does not change it into intelligent analysis.
Tom Tomorrow is harsh, accurate and preaching to the choir.
A friend asked yesterday if we really do have more crazy people than in the past and why so many people seem to have no grasp of reality.
I said that, yes, I think we do have more crazy people, at least in the sense that ignorant and delusional people have a greater voice than they did before.
Some of it is the unavoidable result of otherwise good things: People once kept their mentally disabled family members hidden away.
This was, to a very great extent, unfair. I started dating a girl in high school and part of meeting her family was discovering that she had a little brother with Downs Syndrome who stayed home all day, as did her mother, who was something of a wraith as a result.
It was completely unnecessary. Guys like Freddie today are part of mainstream society, hold jobs, have their own apartments and live limited but relatively normal lives, as well they should.
On the other hand, there are people who — thanks not only to a lessening of prejudice but an increasing ability to medicate people not matched by an ability to monitor their dosage or compliance — are walking the street holding some seriously delusional beliefs about how the world works.
They don't need to be locked up, but they need to be kept in context. There is such a thing as the Village Idiot, and as long as you have a village to watch out for him and keep him safe and happy, it works.
That's not a medieval concept. When my kids were young, we'd go to a local cafe/bookstore where the owner, bless his heart, gave Stan a job busing tables. Stan had been a teacher in a past life, and I don't know where he went off the rails, but he was well beyond eccentric.
In the middle of busing tables, Stan would get a notion and suddenly we'd have a speech in the middle of the cafe on some random topic, often a celebration of some sort that he'd decided to proclaim.
Stan would go around town collecting free stuff from businesses, like buttons and balloons and other small giveaways, the sorts of things tossed from floats during parades, and, in celebration of his celebration, he'd go around to the tables with kids and give them these little presents.
Parents new to the place would recoil in horror, but the kids absolutely loved Stan.
Sometimes the proprietor would steer Stan back into the kitchen to chill out, but the regulars were okay with Stan. He was safe and sheltered and not just "tolerated" but welcome there.
Thank god Stan didn't have access to the Internet. Thank god Stan lived in a time before the Discovery Channel, Learning Channel and other cable channels began running programs intended to feed and exploit lunatic delusions.
I am not joking in the least when I say that. I loved Stan, too.
We have entire communication companies whose profit margins are based on exploiting the village idiots.
And, while the Internet is a wonderful way for otherwise-isolated left-handed piccolo players to find each other and compare strategies, it also allows the creation of entire conclaves of idiots, freed of the constraints — or, to use another phrase, "the friendly confines" — of their villages.
Q-freaking-ED.
This is not to say that the Tea Party and the rest of the fringe is entirely, or even mainly, made up of paranoid, delusional madmen.
If only it were that clear.
But the gullible and half-educated are equally encouraged by these same factors, and if the cable channels simply exploit them for rating points and sales of expandable garden hoses, there are more sinister forces happy to rope them in, and I'm not sure how long Godwin's Law is going to hold back the historical parallels.
If people believe that Nostradamus predicted the future or that space aliens built the pyramids, it's not all that harmful, at least in any immediate sense.
But believing that LBJ and the FBI conspired to kill Kennedy crosses the line into paranoia, at which point people become willing to go beyond simply believing delusional legends but becoming willing to swallow the kinds of Big Lies that do seriously and purposefully undermine civil society.
The first time I heard that Obama was born in Kenya, I was — and I'm not making this up — at an American Legion hall and I thought the fellow was a lunatic. I did not realize the number of willing dupes who were buying this absurd, racist conspiracy theory.
And I'm not paranoid enough to think it was started as part of a vast right-wing conspiracy.
But, however it started, I'm not foolish enough to think that it is the sincere belief of every right-wing political operative who has exploited it since.
This blogger has put together a blog entry on the topic of how many really gullible, really ignorant people are out there, and while I think she over-reaches a bit, there is no doubt in my mind that we would have a more peaceful and united country if more people knew that it is the legislative branch, not the executive branch, that sets spending levels, and that the deficit has been falling, not rising, under the current administration.
There is also no doubt in my mind that hoping for people to stop being ignorant is, in itself, delusional.
Here: Before you cast the first stone, see how you do on the test my class was required to take in 1967, in order to get credit in New York State for high school history/economics.
Mike Peterson has posted his "Comic Strip of the Day" column every day since 2010. His opinions are his own, but we welcome comments either agreeing or in opposition.
Comments 5
Comments are closed.