I’ve been thinking about how much of the traffic I see on coming from my fellow liberalish types consists of posts, memes, etc that say THIS IS FASCISM!!! and the like. It’s a bit perplexing because (a) they’re correct, just a decade late, and (b) they seem to think that endlessly pointing out the plainly obvious accomplishes anything constructive. I love you all etc, but I have bad news: it doesn’t. And it gets worse: endlessly repeating the infantile gesture of naming something also serves to call that name into question. Kinda like the boy who cried wolf, but update it with some serious media theory and insights about cognition.
There’s a reason that, a decade ago, I started to routinely ask “Is it acceptable in polite society to describe the GOP as ‘fascist’ yet?” Note that I didn’t ask whether the GOP were fascist (they plainly were). Instead, the question was about polite society and its norms. And liberals are still struggling with that obstacle — struggling, to be blunt, like a bunch of churlish tweens. On the one hand, they get to feel the bad-boy frisson of transgression: calling people mean names!!! On the other hand, they’re doing that transgressive-y stuff instead of something that involves more concrete risks and impacts — say, organizing durable coalitions with others from different socio-political-cultural-economic strata.
Anyway, I was thinking about this this morning and remembered one of my fave things, from, Cervantes’s introduction to Don Quixote, Volume 2:
There was in Cordova another madman who used to balance a piece of marble or other such stone—and not a light one either — on his head, and when he came across an unsuspecting dog, he went up to it and let the stone fall straight down onto it. The dog would be inordinately vexed and would go barking and yelping for three blocks. It happened that among the dogs onto which he discharged his load was one belonging to a hatmaker, whose owner loved him very much. He dropped his stone, it hit the dog’s head, the dog raised a fuss, the owner saw and heard what was going on, took a yardstick and ran out to the madman and didn’t leave a whole bone in his body. With every thwack he said: “You dog of a thief! My pointer? Didn’t you see, you cruel creature, that my dog is a pointer?” And he repeated the word POINTER many times, and sent the madman away beaten up. The madman learned a lesson from this, and he didn’t go to the plaza for more than a month, but finally returned with his usual game and with a heavier weight. He would go up to a dog, and after examining it carefully, he wouldn’t let the stone fall, saying: “This is a pointer, watch out!” So, every dog he saw, whether they were Great Danes or lapdogs, he said they were pointers, and never let the stone fall again.
The analogy isn’t perfect, but I’ll leave it to my compadres on the left who devote their lives to demanding that kind of perfectionism. And, as it happens, the same intro has an excellent analogy for the left’s fetish, endlessly ferreting out and quibbling over details without ever acknowledging the implied demand for perfection:
In Seville there dwelled a madman who came up with the most amusing nonsense and hobby that any madman ever dreamed up. And it was that he fashioned a tube with a sharp end, and would catch a dog in the street, or anywhere else, and with his foot he would hold down one of the dog’s back legs, and he would lift the other leg with his hand, and would fit the tube as well as he could into the place where, when he blew into it, he made the dog as round as a ball. Keeping it in this position, he would give it a couple of little slaps on its belly and would let it go…