By Victor Davis Hanson
Tuesday, February 05, 2013
We live in an age of falsity, in which words have lost
their meanings and concepts are reinvented as the situation demands. The United
States is in a jobless recovery — even if that phrase largely disappeared from
the American lexicon about 2004. Good news somehow must follow from a rising
unemployment rate, which itself underrepresents the actual percentage of
Americans long out of work.
At the same time, we are supposed to be relieved that we
are in a contracting expansion, where fewer goods and services are proof of a
resilient economy. In our debt-ridden revival, borrowing $1 trillion each year
is evidence that we don’t have a spending problem.
If an unemployment rate of 7.9 percent and the economy
shrinking by 0.01 percent a year — with a fifth consecutive $1 trillion annual
deficit — are indicators of recovery, what would the old 5 percent
unemployment, 4 percent growth in GDP, and $300 billion annual deficits mean?
Or do the meaning of words and the nature of “facts” depend on who is in the
White House at the time, or rather on whether the president is trying to make
us more equal or to enrich the 1 percent?
At key points, whole controversies vanish without a
trace. Suddenly, about four years ago, Guantanamo was no longer a gulag. Then
it became no longer much of anything — in the manner that renditions,
preventive detention, tribunals, and drone assassinations likewise disappeared from
public discourse even as they became institutionalized.
We can scarcely remember now that the country tore itself
apart over the waterboarding of three confessed terrorists, as it snoozes
through its government blowing apart 2,500 suspected terrorists — and anyone
caught in their general vicinity when the drone missiles hit. I think the logic
must have been that a reactionary George Bush wished to waterboard a few
confessed terrorists more just to bend the law than to derive any information
that might save Americans — whereas Barack Obama actually reads the great
ethical philosophers as he “reluctantly” signs off on targeted assassinations
that have no doubt saved more people than he ordered killed. And we have to
understand that if we were to object to such a kill tally, we would thereby be
endangering the greater good to come at home over bothersome details abroad.
We have only a faint memory of promises of no more
lobbyists in government, no more revolving doors, a new civility, a new
transparency, and a new bipartisanship. Do we now even remember all those
slogans that went up on the barnyard wall, and have since been painted over?
When the president lectured us that the captains of Wall Street were not to get
bonuses for snagging federal bailouts, he was not speaking of his future
secretary of the Treasury, a progressive who does what must be done for the
people.
An ambassador and three other Americans were murdered,
ostensibly because of an anti-Muslim video whose producer still languishes in
jail in California. The party line was that Libyan demonstrators, irate over
that Internet production and out for a walk one evening, brought along their
GPS-guided mortars and machine guns to spice up a demonstration at our
consulate. Things can always get out of hand, when a right-wing chauvinist
makes a hurtful video.
In this age of fakery, what is legitimate dissent? Is it
Hillary Clinton attacking an administration in 2003 (“I’m sick and tired of
people who say that if you debate and disagree with this administration,
somehow you’re not patriotic. . . . We have the right to debate and disagree
with any administration”) or Hillary Clinton nine years later, as an
administration insider, turning on her interrogators in an effort to deflect
inquiry (e.g., “Was it because of a protest or was it because of guys out for a
walk one night who decided they’d go kill some Americans? What difference, at
this point, does it make?”)?
Al-Qaeda must be imploding, as its new profile from Libya
to Mali is proof of its overstretched presence. The Muslim Brotherhood is
largely secular; jihad is a personal spiritual journey; we ordered an overseas
contingency operation to get bin Laden, who had been responsible for some
man-caused disasters, and one of whose acolytes waged workplace violence that
threatened our diversity programs. After Chuck Hagel forgot what he had said,
what the president had said, and what his inquisitors had said, we knew he
would be confirmed as defense secretary. All these are mere bothersome details
that should not impede the general truth that the United States is now on the
right side of history, at home and abroad.
Suddenly our troubles are blamed on those now known as
the 1 percent, who make more than the new moral cutoff line of $250,000 per
year. These public enemies are fat cats and they use corporate jets. Worse,
they don’t build their own businesses, and they profit when it is no longer
time to. They make money way beyond the point where they should have stopped,
they don’t spread their wealth, and they don’t pay their fair share. Sometimes
we would almost imagine that they worked for Citigroup, vacationed at Martha’s
Vineyard, or used insiders to cash in on cattle speculations. Millionaires are
rightly grouped with billionaires, who have 1,000 times the money, but they are
not the same as thousandaires, who have one-1,000th the money.
Whether the president is responsible for the economy
depends on the circumstances. Bush did nothing to improve the economy between
2001 and September 2008. But he is responsible for the bad economy from
September 2008 to January 2013. Neither house of Congress has any real
responsibility for our economic fate, so between 2007 and 2011 both were
irrelevant. But one house of Congress does sometimes. So starting in 2011 the
House of Representatives in two years caused the mess we’re in now, in a way
that the Senate and House had not in the four previous years.
Golfing used to be proof of plutocratic remoteness and
idle folly, where rich guys dress up in funny clothes and putter about. Now it
is a green sort of downtime for our commander-in-chief to unwind in the best
tradition of Dwight Eisenhower. Thanks to Barack Obama, golf is now finally
recognized as politically correct recreation. The president shoots guns “all
the time”; we know that because the White House both released one picture of
him with a gun and earmuffs, and ridiculed those who thought the occasion
unique rather than ordinary.
When watching Al Gore plug his latest alarmist book to
progressive interviewers, I can no longer remember whether he is supposed to be
a selfless public intellectual who, at enormous financial risk, started a new
progressive television channel to promulgate long-needed awareness about
politics and the environment, or whether as a rank speculator he scrambled to
push through a secretive deal to sell his $100 million inflated interest in
that channel to an anti-Semitic, anti-Western news conglomerate, run by an
authoritarian Middle East dictator laden with oil-cartel profits — right before
new higher capital-gains taxes might lessen his take by 5 or 6 percent. There
are apparently two sorts of wealthy people: those on the left who reluctantly
make big money and seek hyper-profits and tax avoidance as means to a noble
social end, and those on the right who eagerly seek needless profits and tax
reduction to enrich themselves and not society.
The world’s premier cyclist says that he was lying about
his doping for most of his career, when it was in his interest to fabricate,
but that he is no longer lying now that it is even more in his interest to come
clean. The hottest singer in popular culture now confesses, after a long
silence, that she faked singing “The Star Spangled Banner” at the Inauguration
— that she lip-synched not a ballad at a football game, but the National Anthem
at the president’s inauguration. And she faked it for our sake, she says, out
of a sense of professionalism. Both believe that once they crossed the
threshold of fame, the prosaic protocols no longer applied to them.
In the tradition of heroic Notre Dame football stars, we
are moved by a collegiate football standout sharing his lamentations about a
dying girlfriend on the eve of his Big Game — except that the story is so
contorted and fanciful that most are more confused by the truth than they were
by the lie. To reinforce the prevailing narrative of race and class in America,
we want to believe that Trayvon Martin — no doubt innocently walking home from
the store — was gunned down by a racist redneck vigilante, and so we must
invent a new term to describe his shooter, “white Hispanic,” as our media
endlessly air a doctored telephone transmission to produce the desired result.
If the therapeutic culture wants something to be true, then why should
inconvenient things stand in the way of what should have happened?
“Impartial moderators” in the media used to go through
the motions of declaring that their intertwined Washington marriages or their
prior partisan employment did not affect their objectivity; now they don’t even
make the effort. If in 2008 Gwen Ifill had a hagiography coming out about
candidate Barack Obama, as she was pegged to moderate the vice-presidential
debate, by 2012 Candy Crowley had no inhibitions about fact-checking Mitt
Romney — and only Mitt Romney — in the middle of his answers, even though her
interruption and editorializing were less factually accurate than the
statements by the object of her scrutiny. Again, there are no rules per se; the
question is who has good intentions and who is without them. The facts follow
accordingly.
Even on the rare occasions when public figures are
caught, doublespeak follows. “I accept full responsibility” is the new nothing
sentence of contrition, rarely to be followed up by resignation or demotion in
rank and pay. “We will not rest until the guilty parties are brought to
justice” means even less — nothing much other than to remind us that after six
months the latest terrorist killing will be mostly forgotten. “My actions were
entirely inappropriate” is a banality offered as verbal penance in order to
continue, rather than end, a career. Plagiarism — ask Maureen Dowd or Fareed
Zakaria — is an archaic word for a little borrowing, an e-mail confusion, an
overzealous research assistant, the complexities of Microsoft Word, or a
right-wing gotcha game. To preach against hubris, one must practice hubris.
Why do now live in an age of so many meaningless things?
Our elites in academia and the media have some
culpability. Thirty years of nihilist postmodern relativism — no absolute
truth, just constructs based on race, class, and gender privilege — have
finally filtered down to the popular culture. An obsession with celebrity also
has meant that we increasingly worship the antics of the wealthy and famous and
decreasingly worry what they had to do to obtain or maintain both.
In the new progressive age, the exalted ends of equality
sometimes require that the means of achieving a place on the public stage
should remained largely unexamined. If there is no consistency, no
transparency, no absolute standard, then it is because the task of fairness is
hard and occasionally requires extraordinary sacrifices for the greater good.
And to the degree that someone is deemed cool, then cool trumps most everything
else: Google executives don’t outsource. Rappers are not misogynists. Green
apostles don’t have conflicts of interest. And men in camouflage with assault
weapons don’t just kill less than 1 percent of those Americans lost each year
to gun violence, but account for all sorts of vastly more evil things that we
cannot even begin to describe.
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