Priviledged whiners

June's been a busy month at work, but here's a good Glenn Greenwald column about how the priviledged whine...

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Friday June 12, 2009 09:13 EDT
Tribalistic self-absorption
(updated below - Update II)

The most predominant mentality in right-wing discourse finds expression in this form: "I am part of/was born into Group X, and Group X -- my group -- is better than all others yet treated so very unfairly." This claim persists -- indeed, is often intensified -- even when Group X is clearly the strongest, most privileged and most favored group. So intense is their need for self-victimization -- so inebriating is their self-absorption and so lacking are they in any capacity for empathy -- that, for all the noise and rhetoric, the arguments they make virtually always have this tribalistic self-absorption at its core.

Last week, Charles Krauthammer accused President Obama of treating every country in the world so well -- except for one, the one for which Krauthammer bears great love and affection and with which he was taught from childhood to identify:

President Obama repeatedly insists that American foreign policy be conducted with modesty and humility. Above all, there will be no more "dictating" to other countries. . . . An admirable sentiment. It applies to everyone -- Iran, Russia, Cuba, Syria, even Venezuela. Except Israel. Israel is ordered to freeze all settlement activity.

The U.S. transfers tens of billions of dollars to Israel -- more than any other country in the world. We demand that no country in the Middle East have nuclear weapons -- except Israel. We fuel Israel's wars with weapons transfers, ensure it is the most militarily powerful country in its region, and loyally protect it from U.N. sanctions using our veto power. It's virtually impossible to imagine one country that is more favorably treated by another than the various forms of largesse Israel receives from the U.S. But no matter. In Krauthammer's eyes, the opposite is true: the U.S. treats every country fairly except Israel. That's the country that, to him, is singled out for unfavorable treatment by the U.S. Israel is the victim of unfair treatment at the hands of Obama.

Identically, in his column today, Krauthammer attacks Obama for daring in his Cairo speech to suggest that the U.S. has done bad things in the past and has contributed to the hostilities between the U.S. and the Muslim world. As a result of Obama's statement of the obvious -- that the U.S. also bears responsibility for the enmity that exists -- Obama stands accused in Krauthammer's column of "a disturbing ambivalence about his own country." To Krauthammer, Obama's sins include "transcultural evenhandedness," "moral equivalencies and self-flagellating apologetics" and "creating false equivalencies."

Here again we find the same adolescent self-absorption: the group into which I was born and was instructed from childhood to believe is the best -- America -- is, objectively, superior. It is so much better than everyone and everything else that even to suggest that we have flaws comparable to others is to engage in "false moral equivalencies." To do anything other than emphatically proclaim my group's objective superiority is to treat my group unfairly [leave to the side the irony that the same people who want to suppress torture photos because they don't want to inflame anti-American sentiment apparently want the U.S. President to announce to the Muslim world that we are superior to them, have no serious flaws, have made no meaningful mistakes, and that everything is their fault -- that sort of pompous self-glorification won't inflame anti-American sentiment at all].

And then, finally, we have Jonah Goldberg actually anointing himself as the leading opponent of affirmative action on the ground that it unfairly penalizes and victimizes his group and allows achievement for reasons other than merit. This is someone who might be the single most compelling poster child for the ability of white males to advance in America for reasons having to do with everything except merit. His entire career is attributable to his mom. He was almost 30 years old and was working as the "Vice President" of her tiny company -- with no political or writing background -- when he leveraged his mom's sleazy involvement in the Lewinsky sex scandal and her contacts with the right-wing noise machine into a job with National Review, to which he has clung ever since. So much of the right-wing pundit class -- which also complains endlessly about the unfairness of affirmative action in undermining "merit-based" achievement -- similarly owe their entire careers to their moms and dads.

Yet this is the person -- Lucianne's nepotistic creation -- who is now prancing around as the Standard-Bearer of merit-based accomplishment and speaking out on behalf of fellow white males and Republicans who are treated so unfairly by our society and our media. Yet again, it amounts to nothing more than: my group -- the one I was born into and trained to love -- is being victimized and treated so badly. These claims of self-victimization persist even when their group historically occupied and continues to occupy positions of power and influence far disproportionate to their actual numbers. As Atrios put it on Twitter: so delusional and self-absorbed is the whole debate over Sonia Sotomayor's nomination and related affirmative action grievances that it amounts to nothing more than: "if only I had grown up a female Puerto Rican in a Bronx [public housing project], think of all the opportunities I would have had."

For all the mockery over empathy, look at what happens to right-wing figures in those rare cases when they become personally affected by the ideology they advocate. They quickly abandon it. Dick Cheney objects to the injustice of gay inequality because his daughter is burdened by it. Nancy Reagan deviates from social conservative dogma to become a leading advocate of stem-cell research because she suffered through her husband's Alzheimers. Jane Harman instantaneously transforms from Surveillance State authoritarian to raving civil libertarian upon learning that her own telephone conversations were intercepted by the government. They advocate their views up until the point that it begins adversely affecting not only others, but also themselves.

Otherwise, the only victims they ever see are themselves, the only unfairness they recognize is to their own group, the only perspective they are capable of understanding is the tribalistic ones drummed into their heads from birth. Anonymous Liberal put this very well when writing earlier this week about the disgusting indifference to the plight of Chinese Uighurs, who have been kept in cages for years despite even the Bush administration's recognition that they did nothing wrong:

That the plight of these men elicits precisely zero sympathy (indeed, it provokes laughter) from most supposedly freedom-loving conservatives in this country underscores the extent to which many conservatives have managed to dehumanize in their own minds the many foreigners whose lives are impacted by our policies. As Jonah Goldberg put it this morning in a post entitled "Enemy Combatants as Toxic Waste":

The more I think about it, the more the enemy combatant "problem" can be understood like a toxic waste issue (and, no, I'm not trying to dehumanize these fairly inhuman people — they do that just fine on their own).

Jonah's right that feckless politicians in this country are treating Guantanamo detainees like toxic waste, but he doesn't seem at all disturbed by this fact and has no problem casually describing all the detainees as "fairly inhuman people."
It's a defining attribute of early adolescence to be incapable of seeing the world through any lens other than total self-centeredness, self-absorption and empathy-free self-obsession. If you watch for it (principally though not only) in right-wing discourse, you will see that this is really the central theme animating most of what they write: My group is superior. My group (political, national, religious, ethic, gender) is victimized and treated unfairly. The misery and suffering my group inflicts on far less powerful groups is irrelevant and always justifiable. Even those societies we bomb, occupy, devastate and destroy -- even those we lock in cages without trials -- are the ones victimizing us. They never advanced beyond the adolescent stage of tribalistic self-absorption and it's amazing how completely that lies at the core of most of what they believe and argue.



UPDATE: In comments, Gator90 ponders: "How different might the world be if Dick Cheney had a Muslim daughter?"

We can only speculate about that, but there is a similar, real-world example from which we can infer some answers: Long-time, hard-core movement conservative Grover Norquist has a Kuwaiti-Muslim wife; was a vocal opponent of many of the Bush/Cheney "War on Terror" policies; and has been viciously accused by entities such as Front Page Magazine of pursuing a "wicked project to dress Islamists up as patriotic Republicans so they can infiltrate the government"; by New Republic Editor Frank Foer of having a "strange alliance with Radical Islam"; and by movement conservatives who once revered him as "being in bed with Islamists" and "acting as an 'agent of influence' for groups hostile to American interests." How revealing that right-wing polemicists abandon their own side when the ideology personally affects them.



UPDATE II: Here is what Liz Cheney -- who, like Jonah Goldberg, undoubtedly opposes affirmative action because it unfairly allows people to advance for reasons other than merit (such as family connections) -- thinks that Obama should be saying to the world (h/t A.L. via email):

We've now seen several different occasions when [Obama]'s been on the international trips, where he's not willing to say, flat out, 'I believe in American exceptionalism. I believe unequivocally, unapologetically, America is the best nation that ever existed in history, and clearly that exists today.' Instead we've seen him do what we saw him do in the speech in Cairo, which is sort of, 'on one hand this, on the other hand that,' and then attempt to put himself sort of above it all. I think that troubles people.

Just ponder how psychologically disturbed -- how deeply self-absorbed -- is the need to announce to the world, let alone to believe: We are not only better than all of you - we're better than everyone who has ever existed for all of human history!!" Imagine if you heard someone saying that about themselves; wouldn't you conclude that there was something deeply wrong with that person? And speaking of inflaming anti-American sentiment, do you think constantly announcing that to the world might do so a bit more than releasing some detainee photos? But -- as is so often true -- Liz Cheney's statement is a perfect distillation of the core right-wing view of the world: our group is better than every other -- not just that exists now but that ever existed -- and it's terribly unfair to us when our superiority is not recognized and affirmed. That's just pathological.

Persistent misogyny

I was talking with a friend last night about feminist issues. Sorta ironic that this op-ed should crop up today. The author starts with a bit about how Miss California's Christianity moved her to condemn gays, and yet didn't prevent her from posing naked. Then he moves on to a general discussion on the big picture and gay marriage. Really good stuff from the Huffington Post...

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"Would Jesus Oppose Gays and be Silent on Porn?"
by Rabbi Shmuley Boteach

Here's a glimpse of religion in America. All gays all the time. It seems that there is nothing else that can capture the spiritual imagination of this nation. Jesus came to the world to stop the damned gays. He had precious little else to say.

Forget the fact that we Americans are desperate to be liberated from our materialism and narcissism. Or that our youth are clamoring for anything other than American Idol to inspire them. We clerics will get around to it just as soon as we stop them gays.

The latest installment in the American obsession with gay marriage comes from Miss California, Carrie Prejean, who said in the Miss Universe competition that she opposes gay marriage and was immediately championed as a Christian heroin throughout America. But it seems that her Christianity could not find expression in preventing her from posing topless for men or having the Miss Universe pageant pay for her breast implants. Now I ask you honestly, what is a bigger threat to heterosexual marriage today? Gay marriage or porn? When a wife waits alone in bed for her husband who is downloading pictures of naked women on his laptop, do you really believe she consoles herself by thinking, "Well at least those gays can't marry"?

For all my Christian brothers and sisters who scapegoat gays for undermining the institution of marriage, I would remind them that we straight people have done a mighty fine job of destroying it ourselves, thank you very much. The gay population in the United States is at most ten percent while the heterosexual divorce rate is more than fifty percent and has been so well before gay rights ever became a national issue.

The foremost danger to marriage in our time is the wholesale degradation of women in popular culture. In magazines, on TV, and especially on Internet porn, women are portrayed as the libidinous man's plaything, not an equal to be respected but a subordinate to be used. On college campuses male womanizing is an expected right of passage. Why devote yourself to one woman when idiotic shows like The Bachelor reinforce the idea that the rich and good-looking guys get to have a harem. Even well-meaning women like Miss California who participate in porn become complicit in their own degradation and further the male view that a woman's principle purpose is to satiate male erotic needs.

Beauty pageants don't help much either and it's surprising that my Christian clerical brothers haven't spoken out against them as they have gay marriage. Can you believe that sixty years after feminism rightly pointed out that a woman's mind is even more important than her legs we still have televised contests of women parading around in their underwear for Donald Trump to rate their bodies? And what would Jesus say about Miss California's implants? Would he endorse the message that women ought to stuff their chests with silicon to appear as perfect male eye-candy, or would he emphatically declare that beauty is not merely skin deep?

How any of this congruent with Christian values is beyond me, but it seems that we've entered some weird Twilight Zone where opposition to gay marriage alone makes one into a Christian in good standing.

Look. I'm not here to condemn Carrie Prejean and I can of course be just as religiously inconsistent. But my point is that America has real problems and can really use an authentic spiritual voice to lead us out of the shallowness, greed, divorce, and teen sex that are plaguing our country. And so long as we make gay marriage the only issue of importance we abscond our moral responsibility to provide spiritual leadership to a starving generation. Most of all we shift our focus away from combating the misogyny that has become such a central staple of American culture.

Patti Stanger, Bravo's Millionaire Matchmaker, and I recently debated in Los Angeles in front of 1100 young people about Patti's belief that women ought to marry rich husbands. I argued that this just fuels the stereotype of women as greedy gold-diggers prepared to sell themselves as a commodity to a guy with cash. When men come to believe these stereotypes it affects their respect for women. Soon they believe that can they can neglect their wives as long as they give them credit cards. But three quarters of all divorces today are initiated by wives who are making their own money and would rather be alone than remain with a distant husband in an empty marriage. The most influential TV show over the past decade was Sex in the City where four female friends have nearly given up on men and turn to each other for intimate companionship instead. As for married women in America, approximately thirty percent are on an anti-depressant and Maureen Dowd of the New York Times scored big by publishing a book suggesting that perhaps women are better off without men.

As for the guys, well, the only ones who still want to get married are gay. While the gay men are out petitioning the Supreme Court for the right to get hitched, the straight guys are inventing brilliant excuses not to wed their girlfriends with whom they have lived for years and even have children. It's curious that Brad Pitt proclaims that he and Angeline Jolie, who admirably have six kids together, will only get married when all people, gays included, can wed. But that has not stopped him from adopting children even though in most states gays can still not adopt. Which just goes to show you that when a man wants to find reasons to stay single he becomes as bright as Einstein.

We can save marriage in America and get men to become gentlemen who treat women like ladies. But that must be accompanied by women not only demanding male respect, but respecting themselves as well.


Rabbi Shmuley Boteach this week publishes his new book, "The Blessing of Enough: Becoming Materially Content and Spiritually Hungry." He is the founder of ThisWorld: The Values Network. www.shmuley.com