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.
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