Modern Life Is War

The mental largesse of whatever bizarre conservative base it is that loves to curl up in the cavernous womb of illogic—they really don’t disappoint. Via the Washington Monthly, we see Mark Steyn of the National Review throw out this comedic gem:

Re Senator Obama’s ostentatiously exotic pronunciation of Pakistan, one thing I like about Sarah Palin is the way she says “Eye-raq”.

Oh stop it, you’re killing me! (Actually, the punchline in his subject line is a lil’ knee slapper—”The Hunched Pak of Notre Stan.” Tee hee.)

Here’s the part of this whole election thing that’s got my panties in such a twist.  At what point did this obscenely bloated population of the conservative base stop loving brains and start loving stupid?  And why is the rest of the party idly watching themselves be cannibalized?

I pissed my friend off last night saying that after the debate, sweet little songbird that she is.  Let me be clear–I am not implying that conservatism itself is stupid; there are a number of conservative thinkers who always have my attention and respect, even when I’ve never agreed with a single conclusion they’ve drawn.  I like them because they each value discussion and have enough humility to accept they’re not on any hotline to god.

True stupidity is not ignorance–who’s asking for omnipotent wisdom around here?  No, true stupidity is willful ignorance. True stupidity is a deliberate choice to remain provincial, an explicit refusal of our best attempts at rational argument in favor of whatever unfounded abstraction one believes to be true despite all evidence to the contrary.  It is a denial that you, or your culture, or your country, or your language, or whatever it is you hold most dear, are not the axis around which the world spins. True stupidity is embodied most perfectly by Mark Steyn’s little jab at the soft “a.”

The disdain for this soft “a” is the cornerstone of anti-intellectualism.  Hey, nobody has to tell me how difficult Arabic vowels can be; I grew up trying to imitate my Lebanese mother’s “Halas!” in sad, painfully Anglo vain. It’s the effort that counts. I imagine that Sarah Palin does the best that she can to pronounce Iraq, she certainly made a clear effort to correctly pronounce Ahmadinejad, and while I find it a little bizarre that she has yet to bat an eyelash through repeated butcherings of “nuclear,” I appreciate that she takes an earnest crack at it. That’s all you can ask of anybody.

Unless, that is, you’re instead asking them to dumb it down, and stigmatize making that effort with the threat of being branding as “superior.”  Maybe some of you have noticed by now, but it’s not really Palin herself who disgusts me–just the absolute fucking rubes who support her.  Doesn’t anybody have any goddamn dignity around here anymore?

Intentionally mispronouncing a word, and by extension mocking its correct pronunciation, is pure, undilluted, nauseating, deeply shameful stupidity. You don’t have to be a crowned member of the “intellectual elite” to figure out why one would purposefully mangle an unfamiliar word or name; it’s an aggressive display of contempt. And beneath that contempt, of course, is cowardice.  Someone who feels threatened by what he does not understand, so fearful of the “other,” that he must devalue it to coddle his own ego.

How deliciously ironic it is to assert that someone who makes an effort to learn the correct pronunciation of a word is “elite,” when it’s clearly Steyn who believes he’s above condescending to any language or culture which by nature of not being ‘American’ signals its inferiority.  It’s all barbarism when held to the way we say and do things here in the holy land (by that I mean the US, just in case you were imagining Jerusalem or Mecca or some other place where everybody is scary and brown and they’ve never even tasted a slice of meatloaf).

Who was the elitist again?

I’m not sure when it became such a virtue to embrace stupidity and to shun those who work to better themselves, but it’s been really shocking to watch. It is not skepticism eroding the base of the GOP, it’s a deliberate embrace of misinformation, a conscious choice to privilege the literal inversion of all attempts at quantifiable truth. I wonder if the value of education and expanding one’s mind will eventually devolve into classrooms full of mouth-breathing throwbacks to prehistory whose every arbitrary, unfounded whim or paranoid pang of fear is all the rationality they need to start their own little knuckle-dragging crusade. The greatest minds of the coming generation might communicate with as much regard for a logical argument as we see coming from your average Palin superfan:

There IS no tomorrow if they don’t win today. I don’t know that Obama is NOT a Muslim. I have read everything about him but I still don’t know…I, myself, wonder if he didn’t benefit from affirmative action to get into Harvard.

Oh, do go on. I, too, am starting to feel suspicious. It’s just a rumor I heard, but I’ve read everything about him, and I still just don’t know for sure that McCain is not NOT a bloodthirsty wolf wearing a humansuit and secretly plotting the destruction of all things good and Christian in this world! I, myself, wonder if he and Palin didn’t meet for the first time on one of her fancy hunting trips!

If you’ll notice, the rubes hate Parker because she’s graduated from grade 7 math and understands that ~O(bama) does not imply P(alin).  Pause for a second and imagine a world in which the near 300 comments reaming Kathleen Parker for not worshipping at the populist altar of Sarah Palin are the apex of intellectual discourse. That is the world people like Steyn are helping to create.  Chilling, isn’t it? Thank god it’s just the internet. For now.