06 January 2006 Blog Home : January 2006 : Permalink
When Bush followers use terms like "subversives" and "traitors," and when they accuse people of engaging in "treason," many assume that they are joking, that it’s a form of political hyperbole and it’s only meant symbolically.
He seems shocked to learn that Dean Esmay actually has to explain that "traitor" means "committed treason" and that the correct punishment for treason is, in fact, death. This shock is, IMO, symptomatic of the usual liberal disconnect from the "cause" and "effect" relationship that works for the rest of us. I'm not sure that the NY Times and the NSA leakers are in fact guilty of treason, I'll leave that to the lawyers and juries in the USA, but I do think that a reasonable case can be made that could be broaught before a court and hence logically, if they they are found guilty, they should be punished with the mandated punishment. This is not hyperbole, it is called the rule of law, and it is the same rule of law that applies to President Bush, Jack Abramof and Tooke Williams. To the left though it's all a game or should be, and the appropriate response for getting caught for overstepping the mark, if you are a "liberal" and have your heart in the right place at least, is to be told not to do it again and this time we mean it.But many listeners in our day and age have lost sight--not just of truth vs. relative truth, or objective vs. subjective truth--but of any truth-falsehood distinction outside of their own perceptions. So the new definition of a lie has become: something that fooled me. Something that I heard and thought was true, and then discovered wasn't true. It made me angry to be jerked around like that. So it's a lie.
Such a listener lacks awareness of any need to ascertain the state of mind of the speaker in order to define an utterance as a lie--it is simply irrelevant; it does not compute in the equation. In fact, the so-called liar is actually often either mistaken, misinformed by others, in denial, or deluded. But that doesn't matter to a listener who hears everything only in terms of him/herself and how something makes him/her feel.
It is the same problem as that I mentioned up front about how things far away don't count and precisely the reason why Majithise and Greenwald don't see how the NY Times can possibly be guilty of treason and for that matter how it is possible that the NSA was not in fact breaking the law. It boils down to the whine - "but I don't want that to be true so it isn't" - and is precisely the lesson that has resulted in children who aren't allowed to have their self esteem dented by any taint of failure:Behold the wholly sanitized childhood, without skinned knees or the occasional C in history. "Kids need to feel badly sometimes," says child psychologist David Elkind, professor at Tufts University. "We learn through experience and we learn through bad experiences. Through failure we learn how to cope."
Messing up, however, even in the playground, is wildly out of style. Although error and experimentation are the true mothers of success, parents are taking pains to remove failure from the equation.
And as the article goes on to explain when it does finally kick in, generally in college, the law of cause and effect gets an extra kick due to the simultaneous application of the law of unintended consequences. I don't know what the fix is, but I reckon that it must involve some version of "the burned hand teaches best" that is to say a rather horrible event somewhere. Fortunately for the Blue staters in the USA, the smash is more likely to come over here on this side of the pond - whether it involves an attempted or actual nuclear atteck on Isreal or a civil war in our European cities - the red staters are going to keep the US safe where the rest of us aren't because we don't have enough of the same, or rather we don't let them have the power they need to take action.