{"id":147,"date":"2004-01-06T02:19:27","date_gmt":"2004-01-06T07:19:27","guid":{"rendered":"\/?p=147"},"modified":"2010-07-19T12:26:43","modified_gmt":"2010-07-19T17:26:43","slug":"narcissism-and-the-american-left","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=147","title":{"rendered":"Narcissism and the American Left"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>John Perry Barlow, referring to the 2004 elections, <a href='http:\/\/barlow.typepad.com\/barlowfriendz\/2003\/12\/safire_takes_a_.html'>writes<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>We can&#8217;t afford to lose this one, folks. If we do, we&#8217;ll have to set our watches back 60 years. If they even let us have watches in the camps, that is.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>&#8220;If they even let us have watches in the camps.&#8221; This is a perfect example<br \/>\nof a kind of left-wing rhetorical posturing that makes me want to go out and<br \/>\nvote for conservatives I normally loathe.  In this it has exactly the opposite<br \/>\neffect from what John Perry Barlow intends.<\/p>\n<p>Barlow wants to leave us with an if-this-goes-on image of a Bush-dominated<br \/>\nfuture in which Barlow and his friends are hauled off to concentration camps<br \/>\nby mirrorshaded thugs, crushing dissent as though the U.S. were pre-liberation<br \/>\nIraq or something.<\/p>\n<p>I would love to be able to echo Charles Babbage and say that I am<br \/>\nnot able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that<br \/>\ncould provoke such a statement.  Unfortunately, I&#8217;m afraid I find it<br \/>\nall too comprehensible, and not in a way that&#8217;s very flattering to<br \/>\nJohn Perry Barlow or others like him.  It&#8217;s a form of posturing by<br \/>\nanticipatory martyrdom, simultaneously demonizing Barlow&#8217;s enemies and<br \/>\ninflating his own importance.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Oh, look at <em>me!<\/em>&#8221; it says.  &#8220;I&#8217;m a brave speaker of truth<br \/>\nto power, so brave that I&#8217;m going to say bad things about Republicans<br \/>\ndespite the fact that they will certainly throw me in the gulags as<br \/>\nsoon as they think they can get away with it.&#8221;  I&#8217;ve been around long<br \/>\nenough to know that this is a line lefties of Barlow&#8217;s and my age<br \/>\noriginally learned in order to pick up women back in those halcyon<br \/>\nradical-chic days of forty years ago.  It gets a bit old after your<br \/>\nthird decade of waiting for the Man to bust your door down.<\/p>\n<p>Let&#8217;s get real.  Even supposing Bush were really the concretization<br \/>\nof all those 1960s nightmares, an evil bastard backed by a cabal of<br \/>\ngoose-stepping minions, from their point of view throwing John Perry<br \/>\nBarlow in the Lubyanka would be a <em>ridiculous<\/em> thing to do.<br \/>\nRemember how conservatives think: from their point of view, Barlow is<br \/>\njust another aging hippie burnout given to occasional quasi-coherent<br \/>\nrants about that Internet thing.  In their model of reality, all<br \/>\nthey&#8217;d be doing by giving him the Solzhenitzyn treatment is conferring<br \/>\nan importance on him that he doesn&#8217;t possess.<\/p>\n<p>I have somewhat more respect for Barlow myself, enough that it<br \/>\nsurvived the fact that the last time I was actually face-to-face with<br \/>\nhim he was obnoxiously drunk and patronizing.  He&#8217;s an erratic but<br \/>\noccasionally brilliant polemicist.  But trying to imagine anybody in<br \/>\nthe inner circle of Skull &amp; Bones (or whatever the left-wingers&#8217; hate<br \/>\nfocus is this week) taking him seriously enough to bother bagging and<br \/>\ntagging him just makes me laugh.<\/p>\n<p>And if I can&#8217;t believe John Perry Barlow is enough of a threat to<br \/>\nget gulaged by the mythical Bush stormtroopers, how seriously am I<br \/>\nsupposed to take the-Man&#8217;s-coming-for-us posturing from the rank and<br \/>\nfile of the Bush-haters?  Yeah, sure, the black marias are coming for<br \/>\nall of you, all you twentysomething unemployed sysadmins and riot grrls<br \/>\nand latte makers with your piercings and your Green Party T-shirts.<br \/>\nAs if.<\/p>\n<p>There are lots of objective reasons this scenario is silly.  One of<br \/>\nmany is that our institutions won&#8217;t support it.  I know the police in<br \/>\nmy town; they wouldn&#8217;t obey orders to throw Dean voters in jail.  I<br \/>\njust got through reading a book about the force structure of today&#8217;s<br \/>\nU.S. infantry, and I can tell you that even if the second Bush<br \/>\nadministration were to complete the trashing of the <em>posse<br \/>\ncomitatus<\/em> laws that Clinton began and withdraw every damn grunt<br \/>\nfrom overseas, <em>there aren&#8217;t enough troops<\/em>.  Even assuming<br \/>\n100% of them signed up to be concentration-camp guards, <em>there<br \/>\nwouldn&#8217;t be enough of them to man the camps.<\/em> And the trends are all<br \/>\ntowards a smaller, more skill-intensive military, so in the future<br \/>\nassembling enough goons for a darkess-at-noon scenario will be<br \/>\nharder rather than easier.<\/p>\n<p>Then, of course, there&#8217;s the fact that Attorney-General Ashcroft is<br \/>\nnot pushing for federalized gun control and a ban on civilian<br \/>\nfirearms.  Which is the first damn thing any right-wing cabal (or any<br \/>\nleft-wing one, for that matter) would do if they were contemplating<br \/>\nreally serious dissent-crushing.  Again, the trend is in the other<br \/>\ndirection &mdash; the assault-weapon ban is going to lapse, and the<br \/>\nBush crowd is going to let it happen.  Much of the American left<br \/>\nfools itself that civilian firearms don&#8217;t matter in the political<br \/>\npower equation, but conservatives know better.<\/p>\n<p>For that matter, I am certain &mdash; because I&#8217;ve discussed<br \/>\nrelated topics with him &mdash; that John Perry Barlow himself knows<br \/>\nbetter.  Which makes his willingness to posture about the Man coming<br \/>\nto throw us in concentration camps less forgiveable than it would be<br \/>\nin someone who&#8217;s a complete moron on the subject, like (say) Michael<br \/>\nMoore.<\/p>\n<p>But what really repels me about the kind of posturing I&#8217;m nailing<br \/>\nJohn Perry Barlow for isn&#8217;t the objective silliness of it, it&#8217;s the<br \/>\nfact that it represents a kind of triumph of paranoid self-absorption<br \/>\nas a political style.  People in the (mainly left-wing) anti-Bush<br \/>\ncrowd snort with derision when they hear hard-right propaganda about<br \/>\nhow the Zionist Occupation Government is going to come after all true<br \/>\nAmerican white men with those black helicopters; why do they tolerate<br \/>\nrhetoric that is just as narcissistic coming from their own?<\/p>\n<p>Idiots.  They make me want to go vote for somebody like Pat Buchanan<br \/>\njust out of spite.  Fortunately, I&#8217;m not a spiteful person, and have so<br \/>\nfar resisted this temptation.<\/p>\n<p>And I don&#8217;t think it&#8217;s just me that sees people like John Perry<br \/>\nBarlow actually dealing themselves out of the future when they make<br \/>\nremarks like this.  Narcissistic politics is not a luxury we can<br \/>\nafford any more.  It was OK during our holiday from history,<br \/>\n1992-2001, between the fall of the Soviet Union and 9\/11, but we&#8217;re in<br \/>\nserious times now.  Our nation, and our civilization, are under<br \/>\ncontinuing threat by terrorists who have demonstrated both the will<br \/>\nand the ability to commit atrocities against Americans, and who loudly<br \/>\ntrumpet their intention to keep killing us.<\/p>\n<p>We need people like John Perry Barlow to be <em>in<\/em> the debate<br \/>\nabout how to cope with this.  That means we need people like John Perry<br \/>\nBarlow not to trivialize and disqualify themselves with silly<br \/>\nposturing.  Please get real, people.  George Bush has flaws I could<br \/>\nlist from here to Sunday, but pretending that you&#8217;re all doomed<br \/>\nvictims if he&#8217;s re-elected is pathological.<\/p>\n<p>And deep down, you know better, too. The last two years have given<br \/>\nus not just relatively smart people like John Perry Barlow but legions<br \/>\nof mindless show-biz glitterati making a particularly ironic spectacle<br \/>\nof themselves &mdash; protesting the crushing of dissent in front of<br \/>\n<em>huge<\/em> audiences.  Thereby demonstrating their own lack of<br \/>\ncontact with reality in a way that can only help the very opponents they<br \/>\nthink of as a sinister cabal.  With enemies this visibly stupid and<br \/>\nfeckless, who needs friends?  They&#8217;ll drive the big middle of the<br \/>\nelectorate right into Republican arms.<\/p>\n<p>Let&#8217;s state the consequences very simply: Every time somebody like<br \/>\nJohn Perry Barlow goes on in public about how the camps are waiting<br \/>\nfor us all, Karl Rove laughs and, quite rightly, figures his guy Bush<br \/>\nis more of a lock this November.  And you know what?  He&#8217;s right.<br \/>\nBecause if I hear much more of this crap, even <em>I<\/em> am going to<br \/>\nvote Republican for the first time in more than a quarter-century.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>John Perry Barlow, referring to the 2004 elections, writes: We can&#8217;t afford to lose this one, folks. If we do, we&#8217;ll have to set our watches back 60 years. If they even let us have watches in the camps, that is. &#8220;If they even let us have watches in the camps.&#8221; This is a perfect&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=147\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Narcissism and the American Left<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-147","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-software","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/147","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=147"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/147\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2382,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/147\/revisions\/2382"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=147"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=147"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=147"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}