Jumping the Fence to Cuddle Corporations

Years ago, when I first moved to Miami, there was an incident at the Metrozoo in which a tiger killed a zookeeper who had entered its enclosure in order to drop off more food  (“Purina tiger chow”?).  The enclosure encompassed two separate “tiger areas” and apparently the zookeeper thought the tiger was in the other part of the enclosure and that the gate connecting the two areas had been sealed.  He thought it was safe.  Unfortunately for him he was wrong, and the tiger attacked, killed and mostly ate him.

This was a media sensation for about a week, and I remember listening to a radio interview with Metrozoo’s head zookeeper, who was asked if the tiger would be “put down.”  I loved the zookeeper’s indignant response:  “Hell no the tiger isn’t gonna be ‘put down’!  The tiger was just being a tiger!  He was doing what tigers do!”

I remember thinking that this was exactly right.  We pay our money and go to the zoo to see large, dangerous animals close up.  When somebody screws up and that large, dangerous animal kills someone . . . well, that’s why we pay our money to look at them.  Because we know that they can.

The Logic of Ethos

A few years ago I was in Charlotte attending a seminar necessary to keep my professional education credits current.  It was entitled Persuasive Negotiating or something similar.  The man presenting the seminar relied upon Aristotle’s three categories of persuasion:  Ethos, Pathos and Logos.  Loosely translated, these mean “credibility,” “passion,” and “logic.”  Of all these, ethos is regarded as the most important – one cannot be persuasive unless one is credible.

Now, this may seem to make sense but – if you think about – it really, really doesn’t.  Technically, if someone who obviously doesn’t believe what he is saying nevertheless lays out an utterly logical, convincing argument, then I can still agree with the argument even as I completely disregard the speaker’s credibility.  (Until they finally got the joke, I think this is why Conservatives used to tune in and watch Steven Colbert.)  The speech will persuade me even if I personally think the speaker is a tool.

In fact, the idea that anyone should be persuaded on the basis of anything other than Logos has always kind of offended me.  But apparently I am in the minority on this one.  Logos is considered the weakest of the three persuasive types.

In any event, when the man running the seminar asked us if we could think of an example of Ethos being used to persuasive effect I raised my hand:

“Well, isn’t that used in basically every political campaign these days?” I asked.  “How many times have we heard a politician running for office say something like:  ‘You may not agree with me, but at least you know where I stand’?”

“Yes,” he said, “that’s a perfect example.”

“Yeah, but it’s really, really dumb,” I complained.

“It’s not dumb,” he protested, “it’s –”

“No, it’s dumb,” I insisted.  “Think about it.  When someone makes that argument what they are really saying is ‘That other guy, my opponent, he might kind of agree with you.  But I really, really don’t agree with you.  I absolutely hate what you stand for.  Vote for me.’  And yet . . . people do.  This is considered a winning campaign approach.  That’s dumb.”

The man decided he didn’t like me.

Gladstone on Crack

If you're not already familiar with Cracked.com then I really recommend you check it out. It is a very, very funny place that has articles like "The Five Smallest Animals That Can Kill You Horribly," or "The Seven Stupidest Reasons People Ever Went to War." I have wasted hours bouncing from article to article, laughing uproariously and picking up extremely interesting and outre factoids.

Anyway, one of the writers there, Gladstone, has a new article up titled "Three Types of Wall Street Protesters Hurting Their Own Cause." Like me, Gladstone is obviously a supporter of the Occupy Movement and, like me, he is worried that it may be sabotaging itself.

As Gladstone explains it, he lives in NYC and has had the opportunity to go to the Occupy Wall Street movement and listen to these people: "Unfortunately, what [] I hear is a lot of people talking about 'fuckin' Corporate America, man' and that's just about it. That is not the refrain of a successful protest." Gladstone then goes on to explain that this is why Martin Luther King, Jr. gave a speech in which he said "I have a dream . . . " and not one in which he said "I have . . . had it up to here with these crackedy ass crackers."

I also particularly liked Gladstone's tiger-at-the-zoo-that-mauls-your-family-to-death analogy. You should definitely click on the link and check it out.

Toward a Liberal Understanding of "Tolerance"

Elsewhere I had someone take me to task for mocking Mitt Romney’s “magic underpants.”  I was told that asking questions about the Mormons’ magic underpants is the equivalent of calling a Muslim “raghead.”

I didn’t respond to this attack for two reasons.  First, there simply is no way – for what should be obvious reasons - that this analogy holds up, so the entire argument-by-analogy just makes no sense and needn’t be respected.  Second, I think that I’ve gotten fairly good at detecting trolls.  My sense is that the person complaining was hoping to draw me into a conversation in which he could use my inherent tolerance of others who aren’t exactly like me – which some right-wingers seem to think is a liberal “exploit” to be used against us – to force me to apologize for the fact he had caught me mocking Romney and the Mormon religion.

So I didn’t respond to this troll’s specious attack, but it did get me thinking . . . and I suppose that is always a good thing.

And what it got me thinking is this:  my understanding of how tolerance and respect works is way more fun than Conservatives’ understanding of how tolerance and respect works.

As I understand it, Conservatives believe that anyone who is truly tolerant must treat all ideas – no matter how batshit insane or evil – as equally worthy of contemplation.  They believe truly tolerant people must respect all ideas, even if the tolerant people disagree with those ideas.  And they believe that anyone who professes a belief in tolerance must be willing to tolerate all things – including intolerance from others. 

Which means that if you express disapproval of a Klansman because he is a Klansman then Conservatives will tell you that you’re not being “tolerant” and smirk at how you’ve been hoisted on your own liberal petard.  If you complain about old Southern white voters hating black people, then you are not being “tolerant” of old Southern white voters' racist hatred.  And if you complain about the elected town clerk not obeying the law by refusing to issue marriage licenses to gay people then you are not being tolerant of that town clerk’s personal religion – the one keeping a bunch of other people from exercising their own rights.

This, of course, is insane, which is why Conservatives like defining “tolerance” this way.  If “tolerance” means that all things are worthy of respect then it also means nothing is properly the subject of attack and that means we can’t really attack them.  The Conservatives’ understanding of “tolerance” seems like a drag.

So let me tell you about my understanding of tolerance and respect:  everything is equally mockable, so long as you can make it funny.  Funny absolves all.  I’ve heard comedians make jokes about The Holocaust and they were hilarious.  The Holocaust wasn’t, of course, but the jokes were. 

Lenny Bruce used to do a phenomenal bit with a black guy that completely skewered the idea of racism while holding up his character – the racist – as the hero.  George Carlin had a bit where he made a very funny joke about a true story of rape just to prove the point that he could make a joke out of a true story of rape.

Nobody (in their right mind) thinks that Bruce approved racism or that Carlin approved rape, or that either one of these geniuses thought the fact these things existed was funny – their point was that while these things were the last thing from funny, they existed in the world and could still be made fun of. 

And this is kind of what my own idea of tolerance springs out of.  I don’t think all things should be spared mockery because all things are equally worthy of respect; I think instead that, if you squint just right, all things are worthy of being mocked and thus are equally targets of disrespect.

 

And I have to say that my understanding of “tolerance” works out way better than the Conservatives’ idea.  Because if you understand “tolerance” to mean that nothing is sacred, then nothing is sacred and you have the freedom to attack things that aren’t sacred and that, at the same time, also happen to really, really suck.

Like the Klan.  Or the Religious Right.

I’m intolerant of intolerance, motherfuckers!

And with that off of my chest, I’m gonna go eat some freshly-made pasta, drink a bottle of wine, and ponder the Epimenides Paradox.

They had BETTER Nominate Romney

. . . because I don’t think they’d actually be able to bear any of their “Romney-alternative” candidates.

Lord knows I’m not the first person to have looked at Romney’s polling among the Republican faithful only to conclude that the GOP really, really, really doesn’t want to nominate a French-speaking, (former?) pro-choice, (former?) gay rights supporting, (former?) Reagan-distancing, (former?) tax-raising, (forever!) Godfather of Health Care Reform, magic-underpants wearing Mormon named Willard to be their candidate for President of the United States.

I mean, Willard started this race the ostensible front-runner, and yet his polling never, ever has been able to break out of the 23 – 25% range with Republicans.  They’re just not that into him.  And so numerous candidates have been presented as the Willard alternative, and after each one has flamed out an equally or even more ludicrous candidate has then assumed the anti-Willard pole position.  The Republicans are quite obviously desperate to find someone – anyone – other than Willard to put up against Obama next November, but none will do.

And with Herman Cain they are now scraping the very bottom of the barrel.

My Second Favorite Plutocrat

Sorry, Bruce . . . . You're cool and all but you still lose out to Warren Buffett because you're also, y'know, fictional.

By artist Anjin Anhut.

(h/t Matthew Yglesias)

The 53% IS The 99%

It is not true that suffering ennobles the character; happiness does that sometimes, but suffering, for the most part, makes men petty and vindictive.

                       

                            --W. Somerset Maugham

One thing that the Occupy Movement has done magnificently is draw attention to the fact that the vast, vast majority of Americans have been ill-served by the top-oriented, trickle-down economic and political policies to which our country has pledged its allegiance for the past 30 years.  And no group within OWS has done that more eloquently, more movingly, than We Are the 99%. 

If you click on that link and go to their tumblr you’ll read testimonial after testimonial from average people who have been left scrambling to fend for themselves as a result of these policies.  Testimonials from people who discovered when the final debt bubble burst that, in 21^st century America, working hard and playing by the rules is no longer enough to ensure one’s survival.  Forget about the aphorism that says “a society’s greatness is measured by how it treats the least of its members,” these people are coming to grips with the fact that America’s top-oriented, trickle-down approach often doesn’t set a place at the table for even average Americans.

I suppose that the apologists for the current system recognize how compelling these stories are because one of them, Erick son of Erick, recently started a competing tumblr: We Are the 53%.  Its name derives from the fact that, in America, only 53 percent of the population earns even the minimum amount necessary to subject them to federal income taxes.  So these people are what passes for the lucky ones in today’s America.

The site itself contains testimonials from people describing how hard they’ve personally had to work, sometimes describing how poor they still are, and yet how little sympathy they have for anybody with the temerity to point out that 21^st century America is a grossly unfair place to live.

Many of these testimonials are truly maddening – not in a These people make me so angry I can’t see straight kind of a way, but in an I can’t understand why you are fighting to preserve a system that clearly doesn’t care about you kind of way.

More below the fold.