(583 posts)
Jul 15, 2010 7:59 pm
rant to stop the ranting
labeling, name calling, scare tactics, and demonizing are all a bullies ways to depersonalize the other person-- to reduce "them" into an object-- the unquestioned language gets pretty thick in these parts (OK was the reddest of the red states--no single district went blue in the presidential race, so i tend to get it mostly in one direction) --my periodic rant is a reaction to the bullies tactic not the particular ideology --
more than once i have found that by "forthrightly re-personalizing" the issue - by putting my own personal face on the group in question it can sometimes break the conversation out of its tendency to talk past one another -- to get out of the rhetorical and mythological and back to the human world--person to person world -- it is a a confrontive calculated risk -- it is a shock tactic... but i think a useful one
a dear old crazy friend once was railing very irrationally against Muslims since in his mind they had all become reduced to the demonized stereotype of murderous extremists
"We should kill all Muslims! Since they want to kill all of us!" he concluded -- my instinct, which i failed to follow through on at that moment, was to immediately inform him that i had converted to Islam and he should put ME (one of his closest friends) at the top of his "to kill" list. It was a moment that might have made a difference, might have shook him loose from his delusion, but my lack of courage in the face of his bilious rage caught me up short.
I made my self a promise after that i would not lay low in the face of such madness ever again.
so for the record-- i'm a"lefty progressive" and a "rightwing gun nut "; i am "a righteous christian" , and a an "devout muslim" and an "confirmed atheist" to boot; i am the "filthy rich" and the "lazy poor"; i am the "greedy capitalist" and the "radical Marxist"; i am a "liberal and a conservative and the whole damn thing -- in short I am using myself as an Exemplar of the the one that the bully wants to reduce into an impersonal other and "im callin em out face to face" to make a spectacle out of it so that ALL can see what the bullies are up to ... simple as that
As to my own personal views and preferences, outside of this exercise, i do think "all of the above" hold useful and partial truth. I can genuinely be in sympathy with each, appreciate each, but at bottom i think we are all vast and complex and irreducible and i feel that we deserve real conversations, not worn out mythos or hollow rhetoric-- to my eye it is up to us, all of us, to make real conversations possible again
I take it as a given:
Democracy is not created or sustained by force of arms alone. Democracy rises or falls on the quality of its conversations.