Orc logic
Sometimes I wish we bloggers on the Left would just ignore those on the Right. There’s no gain in it. A moment or two of easy feelings of moral and intellectual superiority bracketed by a lot of frustration, anger, and utter dismay that people of such low standards and stunted emotional growth command a hearing and boast large, loyal followings.
We know what they are, and there’s no arguing with them.
It’s not just their illogic, their mean-spiritedness, their placing of anything that looks like a fact out of bounds. Not just their many and varied hypocrisies and their ability to change opinions at the drop of a hat—or a nod from Karl Rove—totally contradicting what they were ready to go to the wall for only last week if that’s what serves the Agenda this week.
And it’s not just that they really don’t represent anything in themselves. They are no more responsible for the “ideas” they spout than a secretary running the Xerox machine is responsible for what’s in the latest memo from the boss.
It’s not just all that.
It is their bloody evil-mindedness.
They think like the squabbling orcs in The Two Towers who start a conversation cursing the elf warrior they’ve imagined has left the paralyzed Frodo to be eaten by Shelob—“regular elvish trick”—and finish it laughing about the time they left a paralyzed comrade to be eaten by Shelob.
“D’you remember old Ufthak? We lost him for days. Then we found him in a corner; hanging up he was, but he was wide awake and glaring. How we laughed! She’d forgotten him, maybe, but we didn’t touch him—no good interfering with Her…”
Orc-like they hate in their enemies what they love in themselves. Or, in other words, what they hate most is catching sight of themselves in mirrors of their own devising that they have fumblingly held up to their own faces.
The orcs are at it with Cindy Sheehan, hating her for making them confront the reflections of their own chickenhawkery and political hackishness.
She’s using her son’s death for political ends! Regular elvish trick! How dare anybody use something like a war to advance their own political cause!
How can you argue with such intellectual perversity? Much better, I often think, to pay them no mind and stick to attacking and arguing with their leaders who are at least out in the open and caught on the public record making stupid, perverse, and evil arguments for their losing War.
Leaders like Sen. George Allen who says that the President should meet with Cindy Sheehan and in answer to her questions tell her that her son died a hero.
Well, she knows her son’s a hero, you fatuous windbag! She’s already proud of her son! She was proud of him and thought he was a hero while he was alive! She wants to know why he isn’t alive. She wants to know why the President feels it was necessary for her son to become a dead hero instead of leaving him alone to go on being a live hero to her. And the Freedom, Democracy, War on Terror bullshit will not answer her, because she’s heard it and she knows it to be lies! What she wants is for the President to admit he lied, or at least that he goofed. She doesn’t want to hear him continue to lie, hear him promise to continue to screw-up and kill other mothers’ sons and daughters!
She doesn’t want an empty-hearted sermon, Senator. She wants an honest answer.
Which she knows Bush can’t give.
So I’d rather focus on the likes of George Allen, and George Bush, and Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, Donald Rumsfeld, Condi Rice. I’d rather focus on the real writers in the real media, and forget about people who think that calling themselves Hindrocket makes them sound macho and cool.
But it’s like saying a virus is a virus and will be a virus no matter what, so we should just ignore it and leave it alone to be a virus. Can’t do it. We hold the vaccine. We can put up the signs that say This House is Quarantined Until Reason and Sanity are Restored.
(Plus, if we all gave it up we’d lose out on the pleasure of reading Roy Edroso’s summarizations of their latest madhattery. For instance, here’s Roy catching the Right Wing Intellectual types’ new strategy for regaining public support for their war: “When I want your opinion, I’ll tell it to you!”)
The main trope in the attacks on Cindy Sheehan is the image of her dead hero son hanging his head in shame over what she’s doing.
(Our Pepper pinches her nose and holds up a good example by the tail.)
Forget the illogic of invoking the old “so and so is turning over in his grave” cliche in this case. The behavior meant to be shamed would not be necessary if that so and so was alive to condemn it. If Casey Sheehan was alive to scold his mother for camping out in Crawford she would not be camping out in Crawford.
Forget also the childishness of it, the way talking about Casey Sheehan as if he was alive saves them from having to face the fact of his death, of Death itself. Soldiers don’t die, they just take up residency in Vallhalla. We don’t have to mourn them. We don’t have to question why they died. They’re happy there! They want to be there! O Death where is thy sting, and mommy, leave the light on, please?
And forget the narcissism of it, the way they are admiring and congratulating themselves by imagining that Sheehan would be automatically on their side, the way they are feeling tough and brave by identifying with a dead hero, the way they refuse to imagine the ghost of Casey Sheehan turning to those among them young enough to serve and demanding to know, “Why weren’t you there with me? Why didn’t you have my back?”
Forget all that and look at the orckish evil mindedness of their assuming that a son would turn on his mother because of her political opinions.
You see the mirror they’re holding up? Loyalty to the right political idea—to their idea—trumps all, family loyalty and a son’s love for his mother included.
What’s reflected in that mirror are people who have no respect for anything, not a dead solider, not a mother’s grief, certainly not truth, not even themselves, no respect for anything but an idea.
The idea being that George Bush does no wrong.
Orcs terrified of the Nazgul aren’t any more slavish to the Eye.
(Cross-posted at my place.)
August 10th, 2005 at 3:08 pm
Excellent post, Lance…
August 10th, 2005 at 6:26 pm
There is only one answer: “Your son believed in something so much that he put himself in harms way to defend it, and to defend all of us. He died….”
War is a dirty, ugly business. We are getting our hands dirty. If you think the Republicans and the neo-cons are evil orcs, try reading what the Jihadis say about what they want to do to us. And the rest of the world. And be sure to read what the friendly, ordinary Kurds and Shia and even many Sunni have to say about what Saddam Hussein did and what the “insurgents” are doing and trying to do, v.s. what the US troops are doing.
Unfortunately, life is not a fairy tale. There are much worse things than orcs.
August 10th, 2005 at 7:29 pm
>> War is a dirty, ugly business. We are getting our hands dirty.
Try putting the cart and the horse in the proper order, BDW. What you plainly think of as gritty Semper-Fi doggedness is the same miserable slave-logic that kept ‘em crawling into the Maxim guns at Ypres.
Our hands are dirty because of a miserable, craven lie, agreed upon and enacted by a cabal of unelected decisionmakers who stood in no way accountable for their untruths. Casey Sheehan was the one who, completely through no fault of his own, was bestowed that responsibility. Our leaders cannot possibly bring themselves to admit the extent of their mendacity, because to do so would by that very admission call into question every other decision they made and continue to make.
Their lie is so thoroughly discredited that no one — not even the most uncritical of the president’s supporters — continues to try to insist on its truth. Instead they substitute other, less unpalatable (if no more provable) assertions — we’re better off without Saddam, democracy is on the wing, et cynical cetera. I won’t accept lies from my government, Bruce. The fact that you are willing to do so does you no credit.
Your insistence that every American soldier who dies in Iraq does so because he must believe as fervently as does the President’s sanctum in the lie they swore to is, quite simply and literally, absurd — an infantile fantasy. Grow up.
August 10th, 2005 at 7:36 pm
Bitter much, neddie?
August 10th, 2005 at 8:47 pm
>> Bitter much, neddie?
Wow. Reaction’s Flower. Impressive.
August 11th, 2005 at 1:15 am
Good read.
August 11th, 2005 at 6:40 am
And orc troll. How novel.
August 11th, 2005 at 8:24 am
Five or six years ago I thought human civilization was on the brink of evolving to the “next level”, whatever the hell that might have meant. I admit it, the New Age had germinated its’ conceptual seed in my easily impressible mind and humankind was going to jump six levels upwards and we all were going to be so much wiser, smarter, healthier, More at peace, more compassionate, more in touch with the Devine etc. etc.
Y2K and the Crackhead and Co. stealing the election shot a big hole in that illusory dirigible. Hello! Reality check. But now in these dark Mordor times, now the metaphor to use as a reference to the wingnuts thinking and behavior are the repulsive creatures from Tolkeins’ fantasy. Orks. This works. This works very well. They are vile, repulsive creatures, the wingnuts. BDW–Infantile fantasy? You’re right this isn’t an infantile fantasy, it’s a fucking nightmare. No joke, it is a nightmare. War is more than “dirty business”. “War is hell” Remember? And because it is hell we want to do everything in our power to avoid it. It’s the action of last resort. Consider that we could get as good at resolving our differences without war as we have gotten at fighting them. Maybe better. BDW, Take it from a Viet Nam war vet, you don’t want to learn how to fight wars. You don’t have to. You do want to learn how to fight hate and the twisted evil mindset that brings us to the point of believing that we want to destroy each other. You want to jump to the next evolutionary rung (even if it is a metaphor). You want to become a powerful and capable “Holy man- Shaman-Bodhisattva”, a Gandalf. You want to be Gandhi or Nelson Mandela.
All the time we (at least some of us) were thinking the world was becoming a better place, the orks were gathering in the dark places, nurturing their resentments and their hate, listening to their Saruman (Limbaugh), Grima Wormtongue (Karl Rove), Gollum (the crackhead himself) and Sauron (the ghost of Ronald Reagan). And now they have the upper hand. That sucks. BDW, please tell me that you speak from experience when you say that war is a dirty business. Please tell me that you’re not another chickenhawk. But you know what? If you’re a troll, get off my planet, you’re stinking it up you creep.
August 11th, 2005 at 6:00 pm
My One Nit is that it would be nice if you folks could at least make a difference between the NeoConClownCarCrew and Actual Republicans. One of the easiest ways to tell the difference is that the NeoConClownCarCrew is all prissy about RINO ( Republican In Name Only) since, well gosh, golly, gee whiz, some of us actually served in the military, actually advocated for an actual and unequivocal declaration of war, so that the ‘war clauses’ in contracts would kick in, and that would also allow for War Bond drives that would raise the funding to meet the needs of the ’so called war’.
Some of us recall that BOTH the Pentagon and MACV had put the need for an unequivocal declaration of war to LBJ after Tet ‘68 - and so were a bit of a nit picking collection of sticklers about this point. But YOUR FRIENDS in the NeoConClownCarCrew kept trying to make the excuse that we have not actually declared war since Reagan Got Divorced, and some how that was Suppose to be ‘an actual answer’.
I can appreciate that understanding the actual differences of those of us who are Actual Conservatives from the FrootBatBrigade, is, well, challenging. So if calling them Orcs will help differenciate the details, all the better.
Second Minor Nit. People Really SHOULD be more sensitive to the VoCHA ( Victims of ChickenHawk Angst ) as they are very, very, very emotionally traumatized by the fact that others have actually served in the military, and they really wanted to this time, but could not find an open slot on their day planner. Folks should be much more sensitive to that level of emotional trauma, since, well, it is sooooo traumatic for them.
So maybe it is time for americans to start working out if we are Actually Any MORE at war than we had been when congress had offered Clinton the authorization to use what ever force was required to deal with Iraq. If We ARE, then based upon what actual legal detail. Or is it really the tragedy that the current administration has been able to create more dead, maimed, and wounded GI’s - and the VoCHA are still not sure how to cope with that realpolitik….
The real challenge now is how to get a real dialog going about what the actual national security issues should be - and what the means of resolving them really should look like. Do we really need to blow billions on star wars lite and HOPE that majikally that talisman would have ‘prevented’ the use of suicide dive bombers?
Do Americans really need to keep sending american GI’s into Iraq so that the ‘terrorists’ do not have to raise the cab fair to bomb targets in Europe or America??? They can do their media marvelling in their ‘own back yard’. If the Iraqi Army actually closes the border, and hence oblige the americans to officially abandon the ‘fly paper’ theory, will that really make america ’safer’???
Or has that been the structural flaw in all of this all along.