Rhetorical fRight and our political discourse
June 16, 2009
It is a constant source of astonishment and irritation to me that with a Democratic Party majority in both houses of Congress under a Democratic Party executive branch, our universe of political discourse still is dominated by fear of extremists who constitute the Republic Party base. I am proposing a neologism to describe this phenomenon: “fRight” (shorthand for fear of the right).
The influence of fRight is pervasive. It echoes through the halls of Congress, dominates the broadcast media, and infects the print media. This despite the fact that the political position of these right wing extremists is weaker than it has been in a generation.
Recently, this phenomenon has been observable in the deference given to the monomaniacal remarks of former Vice President Cheney, deference that invests such remarks with a credibility that they do not deserve. Similarly, one sees it when the glorification of the buffoonish Sarah Palin by the right, who desperately invest her with a charisma that is no more than a chimera, is accepted by the left, when it treats her with a seriousness that she neither has demonstrated nor has earned.
In particular, the cowardly apologies of individuals as disparate as David Letterman (vis-à-vis Palin) and Leon Panetta (vis-à-vis Cheney) are no more than craven collapses to pressure, either genuine or imagined, from right wing extremism.
In addition, while the use of such obfuscating sophists as Newt Gingrich and Tom DeLay as “analysts” by the FOX News Network is their business as usual, the similar use of them and their ilk by the other news networks is fRight incarnate. Furthermore, the giving a platform to such erstwhile luminaries as Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck is distressingly fRightful.
It is a rare commentator, for example, Ed Schultz on MSNBC, who has the nerve to expose this pandemic pusillanimity.
Nonetheless, the paradox is that the politically moribund status of the extremist right has not lessened its hold on the political discourse that colors so much of what we read and see (in newsprint, on the news airwaves, and on the world-wide web).
I do not know whether our commentators and “pundits” are so intellectually limited that they do not realize that they are victims of this linguistic disease or they are so blinded by the fRight itself that they believe that the phantasmagoric bête noires of the right are substantial and actual entities.
The result of all this is a societal myopia that keeps us from examining issues in a cogent, coherent, and dispassionate way. Hence, our information sources have become little more than institutionalized cadres of the blind leading the blind. [The same could be said of our legislators and the educational system that does not immunize us against this.]
It is time to cease being embarrassed by clear-sighted truth-telling. When the emperor has no clothes on, one must not shrink from saying so.
Bravo Ed Schultz and Donny Deutsch: The Letterman-Palin controversy requiescat in pace
June 12, 2009
As I was about to sound off about the silliness of the Letterman-Palin brouhaha, I was watching “The Ed Show” on MSNBC. His first guest today (June 12) was Donny Deutsch. Mr. Deutsch’s comments were like a breath of fresh air in a murk of myopic persiflage. The question is not whether Letterman’s joke about Palin’s daughter was or was not in bad taste, but whether Palin herself is far more guilty of exploiting her own children than any late night talk show comedian/host. Palin has no one to blame for putting her children (and their liaisons) into the limelight but herself. Her crocodile tears over the alleged line overstepping by Letterman are the rankest pretense: they are a mask for another pallid attempt on her part to make herself a credible political candidate. Donny Deutsch ripped that mask off effectively, exposing Palin’s poverty when it comes to issues that matter and her hypocrisy when it comes to issues that are trivial. Her continued crusade against Letterman will do no more than diminish her stature even further, revealing her inarticulateness, her linguistic and cultural illiteracy, and her willingness to exploit the details of her private life in whatever way seems to be advantageous to herself without forcing her to discuss substantive issues with cogency and coherence.
As far as Letterman’s joke is concerned, if anyone is owed an apology, it is Alex Rodriguez.
Sotomayor and Cultural Bias in Standardized Testing
June 12, 2009
Sonia Sotomayor’s comment about the cultural bias of standardized testing raises a specter that needs to be eradicated. Nowadays, when someone calls a standardized test culturally biased, it is taken as a pejorative remark. In actuality, it should be taken as no more than a neutral description of the way that things are and cannot help being.
If someone says to me, “Standardized tests are biased,” my response is, “Of course; so what?” By that I mean that it is right and proper that American standardized tests be permeated by assumptions rooted in dominant American culture. No one would complain about tests in France that they are biased toward dominant French culture, or tests in India that they are biased toward dominant Indian culture, or tests in any country that they are biased toward the dominant culture of that country. The tests are standardizable precisely because there is a standard, whether it be standard English or a standard body of basic historico-cultural knowledge.
If someone scores lower on a standardized test because he or she lacks the fundamentals of that standard historico-cultural knowledge, the fault is not the test’s. Rather, the fault is the educational system’s because it has not maintained its standards in a way that effectively inculcates such knowledge.
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our tests, but in our educators, that we are knowledge-deficient.
