Well, the article does call itself a "rant," so there's that to factor in first off.
Using this as a kind of kernel for his argument:
I’m a leftist who carried a gun, in a culture where what passes for the left is terrified of guns. So people pay attention to me. In audience after audience, I have noted that people pay attention to me. They are engaged before I even speak, because they know that I can kill, and that gives me an immediacy… not because I am different than them, but because I am so very much the same. I laugh at good jokes. I rock babies. I take an interest in the weather.
This is more than morbid fascination.
We are a culture insulated from our own basis. It is a condition of metropolitan modernity, more so even of post-modernity.
He seems to be saying that America's big problem is that ideas are alienated from realities -- that leftists don't know to what degree truth comes from the barrel of a gun (and, by extension, that rightists don't know to what degree that gun-taught truths tend to backfire).
I think this creeps into the same ground I've been treading in that "tabloid soul" thread -- based on the idea that liberals are these kind of alienated airheads, isolated from the "earthy" basis it takes to Get Things Done:
Soldiers don’t listen to liberals, and neither do the majority of people. They intuit the detachment of them, their other-worldly abstraction, their desire to have their cake and eat it too. When people are frightened or angry, they may be confused about the source of their fear and anger, but they know they want to be with someone who will fight. Liberals have never learned this.
And
Politics doesn’t happen in clean, well-lighted places. It happens in the sand and mud. It happens in the rivulets of blood coursing into the edges of an Iraqi hospital floor.
So, this dude seems to be saying that soldiers tend to do, but not think about it (until they have to -- because of trauma or court martial or whatever), while liberals tend to think but not do (because they're in postmodern ivory towers and don't like to fight for what they believe in).
It's an exaggerated and not entirely accurate critique, but there's enough there to sting.
So he's arguing that there has to be a recognition that we're in different rooms in the same imperialist house -- that both The Soldier and The Liberal need a healthy dose of Context.
Which I can't argue with. |
