Five Before Chaos

No, don’t worry, this isn’t a post abut my favorite and thoroughly unhip rock band. It’s the reaction I had when I read John Dolan’s Alternet article, Fighting Words: How to Humiliate — and Convert — a Right-Winger.Being one who’s often stressed the importance of not making nice with the wingers (I often mention “ripping out their spines and jumping up and down on their heads”), let’s just say that the article struck a nerve with me. Dolan summs it up quite nicely in his intro:

I’d like to suggest a very simple strategy for American liberals: Get mean. Stop policing the language and start using it to hurt our enemies. American liberals are so busy purging their speech of any words that might offend anyone that they have no notion of using language to cause some salutary pain.

Hallelujah and amen to that, brother. One thing that many liberals fail to see (or simply don’t know how to deal with) is the fact that for the right-wingers, they’re not interested in negotiating.  Whether it be Rush Limpballs saying how we are “snakes that need to be destroyed” or  Ann Coulter’s inane, belligerent B.S., or Dick “go-fuck-yourself” Cheney, it’s obvious they’re not into making nice. This viewpoint that somehow they are somehow able to be reasoned with is naive and incredibly harmful. And I’ve often been critical of the absolutist pacifist perspective, in that it denies us a sometimes effective tool, and often puts one’s own moral purity above saving lives:

Liberals aren’t generally perceived as fighting the robber barons — they appear as a secular clergy far more obsessed with cleaning up our gloriously obscene language than fighting back.

Note that I’ve used the word “fighting.” Americans are a violent people — and I mean that as a compliment. We are a magnificently violent people who value courage above all else. In this, the ordinary American is in total agreement with George Patton, John Paul Jones and John Brown. They were all violent leaders, who sent a lot of Redcoats, Nazis and secessionist slaveholders to an early grave. I consider that glorious; so do most Americans.

And so the argument goes that we shouldn’t embrace their tactics. Well, considering how effective their tactics are, perhaps that needs a re-examining. We should fight like they do, with one difference: don’t make stuff up. Now, I know that there is a wide, diverse range of opinion on our side. And of course, some of you may accuse me of being captivated by machismo, or whatever, or romanticizing violence. Whatever. Sorry, I just tend to look at it as having an understanding of human nature that’s not so idealistic. Most of my arguments with my fellow lefties are not over the goals or aims of our movements, rather over the effectiveness (or more often, non-effectiveness) of the tactics that people use. Simply put, it’s time to stop being so goddamn nice all of the time. The time for politeness and symbolic gestures has long passed. Dolan gets that. As Putney Swope once said, “Don’t rock the boat. Sink it!”

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