by James M. Crotty
There was a moment during Zell Miller’s hate-filled rant at Wednesday night’s Republican National Convention when I had to pause and reflect on how public discourse ever got to this sorry state in America. Was it a decline in educational standards? Was it a lingering anti-intellectualism that finally found expression through the proliferation of electronic media? Was it the the work of pioneering auteurs of bellicosity, such as Liddy and Limbaugh?
Here I was watching a man who, in a smarter, more civil, era, would be seen as a raving lunatic. Not a passionate orator. Not even a rabble-rouser. But a bona fide madman.
Yet the audience at the Republican National Convention did not see Zell Miller as crazy. They saw him as a truth-teller. I sat there puzzled. Any person, of any political persuasion, who has full command of his or her faculties, who knows how to separate fact from fiction, could easily perceive that this man was not telling the truth. To even answer his points would give credence to his wildly inaccurate claims.
So why were these people in Madison Square Garden wildly celebrating his performance?
Then it dawned on me. For years I had derided left-wing critics for their extreme caricatures of right-wing zealots. I pleaded for nuanced portrayals. I especially bridled at the loose use of the words “fascist” and “totalitarian.”
And tonight, suddenly, I was not so sure.
While we are a far far cry from anything remotely resembling fascism in America, the virulently hostile climate encouraged by Zell Miller’s speech, and the lockstep praise for it on Fox, CNBC and MSNBC, made me think that, in fact, I might be watching the beginning of something very much akin to it. And that twenty years hence, when the transformation only hinted at now fully blossoms into something genuinely draconian, one might think back on Miller’s speech, and Dick Cheney’s equally specious follow-up, as a virtual Kristallnacht, when rules of decency in American public discourse completely collapsed once and for all. And the reason will be because champions of truth, balance and objectivity finally through in the towel, effectively deciding that the only way to respond to crazy below-the-belt evil was to let the crazy “evil-doers” have their way.
But how could I be thinking something so preposterous? Surely Mr. Miller’s fevered delusional expiation was just partisan bombast, designed, as commentators like to rationalize, “to rally the base.” But, then again, this speech was in prime time. The so-called undecided voters were ostensibly watching. Could they possibly believe the hypocritical claptrap this man was pontificating? Surely the Bush people thought these viewers would buy it or Rove and company would have vetted Miller’s speech more judiciously.
I was stunned. What could one possibly say? In previous times, when at least the appearance of reasoned discourse prevailed, one would write such a lunatic off. After all, CNN’s post-speech interview of Miller exposed the Senator’s complete inability to explain why he was still a Democrat, his pathetic grasp of evidence, and his sad failure to comprehend that Dick Cheney had voted against many of the same weapons that Miller had excoriated Kerry for opposing.
But to counter Miller point by point would be like countering David Duke on the subject of race. I mean, Zell’s Bells, you can’t be serious, Senator. But Zell Miller definitely was.
In his speech Miller said that “Senator Kerry has made it clear that he would use military force only if approved by the United Nations. Kerry would let Paris decide when America needs defending.”
I clearly remember, and hopefully you do too, that Mr. Kerry said, point blank, in his own address to the Democratic Convention, that as president he would most assuredly NOT wait for international approval for war when America was in imminent danger. Here are Mr. Kerry’s exact words:
“I defended this country as a young man and I will defend it as President. Let there be no mistake: I will never hesitate to use force when it is required. Any attack will be met with a swift and certain response. I will never give any nation or international institution a veto over our national security. And I will build a stronger American military.”
Confronted with his bold-faced lies in the CNN interview, Mr. Miller merely waived some notes around, like he was toting Joe McCarthy’s list of Communist spies. My God, was I watching Sen. John Yerkes Iselin of “The Manchurian Candidate” here? CNN’s Judy Woodruff, Wolf Blitzer and Jeff Greenfield could barely control their laughter. Zell Miller was imploding before their eyes. They decided to take a break before it got to the Admiral James Stockdale phase of total self-destruction.
Yet, a day later, even with the utter absurdity of his monstrous performance, Zell Miller would not recant even one of his lies. Nor would anyone at the RNC. Nor would any right-wing pundit. It was as if the RNC didn’t care if a simple Google search completely contravened Miller’s claims. It was if their focus groups were telling them that most Americans didn’t care about messy things like truth and accountability.
Of course, we’ve long known that facts, tact, and diplomacy don’t matter to most conservative ideologues. After all, when confronted with their gross distortions, their inevitable response has been a furious ad hominem retort: “The person who pointed out these carefully fact-checked inaccuracies is a LIBERAL!” You only have to watch Bill O’Reilly’s raging, foaming, apoplectic attacks on Paul Krugman on their now-infamous joint “Meet the Press” appearance to see my point. Ad hominems have always been considered the lowest form of argument precisely because they close off debate. If ad hominems are allowed — and Zell Miller’s and Dick Cheney’s lies don’t even meet an ad hominem standard — we are left with two remaining options for persuasion: demagoguery or brute force. Genuine logic and argumentation arose, so we could evolve beyond such Hobbesian stratagems.
Which is why this fascist premonition is starting to really trouble me. Take, for example, my dear father. Dr. Richard Q. Crotty is a Yale and Creighton-educated dermatologist. He is an intelligent, respected, and beloved man. But my staunchly Republican father still believes, with all his heart and mind, that Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11. I asked him recently to read the the bipartisan 9/11 Commission Report, which totally repudiates this right-wing canard. But shortly afterwards I realized, even if my father read the report, I am certain that he would continue in his unshakeable Republican-stoked faith in the Saddam connection. Why? Where to turn for an explanation?
Perhaps to the master of the Big Lie, a failed Austrian painter by the name of Adolph Hitler, who writes:
“The magnitude of a lie always contains a certain factor of credibility, since the great masses of the people in the very bottom of their hearts tend to be corrupted rather than consciously and purposely evil, and that, therefore, in view of the primitive simplicity of their minds they more easily fall a victim to a big lie than to a little one, since they themselves lie in little things, but would be ashamed of lies that were too big. Such a falsehood will never enter their heads and they will not be able to believe in the possibility of such monstrous effrontery and infamous misrepresentation in others; yes, even when enlightened on the subject, they will long doubt and waver, and continue to accept at least one of these causes as true. Therefore, something of even the most insolent lie will always remain and stick – a fact which all the great lie-virtuosi and lying-clubs in this world know only too well and also make the most treacherous use of.”
In an utterly baseless sleight of hand — currently employed by Fox, Limbaugh, Hannity, and our sitting President — Hitler blamed his bogeymen for the huge lies he so blatantly told. In Hitler’s time, the primary bogeymen were the Jewish people. In this age of Republican domination, there are myriad bogeymen. It’s the United Nations, Old Europe, the seekers of a sane energy policy, and anyone who stands in the way of the Bush administration’s unilaterist vision. Hitler delivered the autobahn and higher productivity as a mask for his unspeakable barbarities, the Republicans delivered a somewhat weakened Taliban and a captured Saddam Hussein, as a cover for thousands of massacred Iraqi civilians, the abuses at Abu Ghraib, 1100 + soldier deaths, thousands of gruesome American injuries, the distrust of America by most of the free world, the failure to stop proliferation in Iran and North Korea, the failure to capture Osama bin Laden, the exploding deficit, the unjust imprisonments at Guantanamo Bay, the porous borders, the faltering economy, the still-failing schools, and the lack of a sane and ecological plan for energy conservation and independence, the root cause of our foreign policy mess. Those who question now — just as with those who questioned in the Nazi era — are branded as cowards, traitors, and “girlie-men.” Maybe putting Arnold the Austrian on the RNC stage had far more historic symbolism than I realized.
Here is an excerpt from German propagandist Joseph Goebbel’s December 31, 1938 address to the German nation:
“This ability to believe is rather weak in some circles … Our so-called intellectuals do not like to hear this, but it is true anyway. They know so much that in the end they do not know what to do with their wisdom ….
They were also unable to believe in the victory of National Socialism while the National Socialist movement was still fighting for power. They are as little able today to believe in the greatness of our national German future. They perceive only what they can see, but not what is happening, and what will happen.
That is why their carping criticisms generally focus on laughable trivialities. Whenever some unavoidable difficulty pops up, the kind of thing that always happens, they are immediately inclined to doubt everything and to throw the baby out with the bath water. To them difficulties are not there to be mastered, rather to be surrendered to. One cannot make history with such quivering people. They are only chaff in God’s breath. Thankfully, they are only a thin intellectual or social upper class, particularly in the case of Germany. They are not an upper class in the sense that they govern the nation, rather more a fact of nature like the bubbles of fat that always float on the surface of things.
Today, they seek to give good advice to National Socialist Germany from abroad. We do not have to ask them for it. They focus all their energies on the small problems that always are there, complain about the cost and believe that crises and unavoidable tensions are on the way. They are the complainers who never tire of bringing National Socialist Germany before the so-called court of world opinion. In the past they always found willing and thankful followers. Today, they only have a few backward intellectual Philistines in their camp.
The people want nothing to do with them. These Philistines are the 8/10 of one percent of the German people who have always said ‘no’, who always say ‘no’ now, and who will always say ‘no’ in the future. We cannot win them over, and do not even want to. They said no’ when Austria joined the Reich; they said ‘no’ when the Sudetenland followed. They always say ‘no as a matter of principle.
One does not need to take them all that seriously. They do not like us, but they do not like themselves any better. Why should we waste words on them?”
And now right-wing propagandist Zell Miller from Wednesday night:
“For it has been said so truthfully that it is the soldier, not the reporter, who has given us the freedom of the press.
It is the soldier, not the poet, who has given us freedom of speech.
It is the soldier, not the agitator, who has given us the freedom to protest.
It is the soldier who salutes the flag, serves beneath the flag, whose coffin is draped by the flag, who gives that protester the freedom he abuses to burn that flag.”
Nevertheless, as preposterous and mean-spirited as it was, Zell Miller’s jeremiad Wednesday night was still no match for the concerted rhetorical evil of the Nuremberg rallies. Yet in their total adoration of the man and his message of hate the screaming acolytes inside Madison Square Garden evoked strange and eerie echoes of those dark days over sixty-five years ago. If Lili Riefenstahl was filming Zell Miller’s speech, she would have noted the obvious parallels.
But I have to pull myself up. What I am saying is equally preposterous, right? Zell Miller is a crank, who says he remains a Democrat because he “was born a Democrat.” You can’t take such an misguided old coot seriously, Crotty. We’ve had cranks before: Father Coughlin back in the 1930’s; Pat Buchanan in the early nineties; Savage and Coulter today.
But those people in the audience chanting. Those Bush poll numbers slowly inching back up. Those lies and distortions about John Kerry. Hate is winning. Disinformation works.
The President can pull on our heart strings with his high-toned talk of liberty and the call of History, as it was some Hegelian force marching through time with George W. Bush as its chosen vehicle of deliverance. But underneath his lofty rhetoric is a daily message of hate, division, and destruction, delivered by a cadre of paid lieutenants, from the Swift Boat Veterans, to AM Radio nutballs, to the addled Zell Miller of Georgia.
It has forced me to confront the pivotal question of this election: How do you best respond to evil when it is coming at you full-bore from within? If America is buying the tainted red meat that Miller, Cheney and Giuliani are proffering, that pretty much dooms reasoned public discourse as a suitable response. This dark reality thus becomes the signature conundrum that besets the Kerry campaign: When confronted with unconscionable knavery, how do you respond without giving credence to knavery itself?
Because right now in America we are faced with twin evils: the clear and present evil of Al Qaeda, and another evil growing more emboldened every day: the thoroughly untethered evil represented by the Republican Lie Machine.
The tenacity with which Kerry responds to the latter evil will tell you everything you need to know about how he will respond to the former.
Jim Crotty is the author of How to Talk American (Houghton Mifflin) and cofounder of Monk: the Mobile Magazine, http://www.monk.com. He can be reached at Jim@Monk.com.