Sightings of Others in The Whale And That's One Gnostic Whale

Last night on C-Span 3, I watched a fascinating summary of American reading habits:John Heath and Lisa Adams discussed their forthcoming book, "Why We Read What We Read: Exploring Contemporary Bestsellers and What They Say About Our Books and Ourselves" as part of BookExpo America 2007 held in New York City. Their observations about thriller / horror / action fiction (Grisham, King, etc.) revealed a very polarized view of good and evil without either good or evil having any empathy or understanding for the other--evil people are insane and not at all like the good people who cannot fathom evil, crazy people. What they also found in the non-ficiton political genre was the same sort of assumptions: Coulter believes anyone marked by the "L" word is evil, and Franken and others on the left descend to easy generalizations about the right--in other words, whether a fiction thriller or non-fiction socio-political book, the same oversimplifications are in play.

Now add this column on Hullabalo.

[Cuz We're So Good

by digby

After 9/11, I remember being quite surprised that the US government would so freely use the phrase "good and evil" when our attackers had been extreme religious fanatics. Laden as those words are with religious association, it seemed to me to be fanning the flames when a smarter approach would have been to distance ourselves from such rhetoric and try to redirect the focus to more rational ground. I did a post quite early on in which I compared speeches by George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden in which their frequent references to God and good and evil and satan were nearly indistinguishable. Both speeches could have come right out of the 13th century. (It was one of the creepiest posts I ever did, and I recall that at the time we were in the grip of such paranoia, I wondered if I would gather the attention of the authorities for writing such a thing.)

From very early on Bush used archaic religious verbal constructions like "the evil ones" and "evil-doers." Perhaps the most startling example is what he reportedly told Palestinian Prime Minister Mamhoud Abbas in 2003: "God told me to strike at al Qaida and I struck them, and then he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did, and now I am determined to solve the problem in the Middle East. If you help me I will act, and if not, the elections will come and I will have to focus on them." Yikes.]

Digby goes on to cite Glenn Greenwald's new book "A Tragic Legacy: How a Good vs. Evil Mentality Destroyed the Bush Presidency", which emphasizes how the Iraq war between "good and evil" became a reason to reinterpret the Geneva Conventions and the Constitution (see the post on the VP as not part of the executive branch).

So, an electorate that longs to be entertained by and edified by battles between absolute good and evil, absolutely estranged from each other, along with a president who believes in that same battle occurring in the Middle East right now. Lovely.

A loss of reasonable nuance, of understanding of the opposition, of history is critical for a republic, even for an empire.