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Re: Land this suckah, and leave it on the runway to rot

Yay!!!!  Thanks Fred for a soothing read.  Like a breath of fresh air.  Ever 
since Saturday morning, I've just been deleting most of the messages on the 
list.  The only reason I read yours was because it didn't have the word 
"inflamed" in the subject.  Here's to hoping for a little civility.


>From: Alfred B Johnson <hoopyfrood at juno_com>
>Reply-To: Alfred B Johnson <hoopyfrood at juno_com>
>To: Over-the-Rhine at actwin_com
>Subject: Land this suckah, and leave it on the runway to rot
>Date: Sat, 20 Jul 2002 14:39:00 -0500
>
>Look, I think Don is right that the political discussion underway is
>potentially more divisive and destructive than any past conversation
>about OtR's Christianity.  I don't want to read the list and feel anger,
>as I do right now.  I don't have time to even begin to respond to all the
>specific comments made.
>
>I will say that no matter what else K and L believe, one time,
>accidentally, Linford expressed his disgust with some anti-American
>comments made on this list; and the list just about went to the trash can
>of memories over the incident.  If you don't know what it was, review
>September '01.
>
>I have to talk about rhetoric now.  Not the things being said, but the
>way they are being said.  I remember saying once before on this list that
>we need to limit our responses to one thing.  In a discussion like this,
>throwing out a thousand random threads, or even five, in a general way,
>can fuel too many fires, too quickly.  Take one claim that's floated out
>here in the past 48 hours: America is racist.  Holy freakin' freakin'
>freak.  Is this not a HUGE discussion, a massive claim, an inflaming
>claim.  Can this not OBVIOUSLY lead to a lot of rancor?  And yet it came
>in the midst of several other comments like it in their anti-American
>tone, equally inflammatory.
>
>Two problems, just to start with: first, the comment is made with no
>support, no specificity, no discuss-able dimensions.  Second, its being
>embedded in a bit of anti-American screeding makes it little more than
>gas on an already big fire.  I wouldn't mind discussing a racial issue on
>the list, specifically, in a limited way.  But we have no business
>addressing all the racial issues, and a general splattercrap bomb like
>that can ONLY lead to a too wide-ranging, too-emotional discussion.
>
>In general, we've been exhibiting the worst habits of public debate.  TV
>talk show snippetting.  Big bomb rhetoric, the yaddayaddayadda pointing
>fingers and hating rhetoric.  (Not everyone has done that.  There have
>been some wonderful, balanced responses, too.)
>
>Lemme say this: in a typical debate, no one--no one--who cannot
>understand the logic of the other side, who cannot appreciate the origins
>of the other side's decision, is worth following.  Why?  Because that
>person is dangerous.  These are human decisions, human political
>situations we're addressing: no answer is 100%.  Good leaders know that
>they have usually made an informed decission and that they might have
>made a different decision and that there are drawbacks to the decision
>that has been made, but a decision had to be made. There are, of course,
>situations where one side is flat, cold wrong: legal slavery, for one.
>(But any particular solution for ending slavery in a particular country
>is bound to have flaws.)  But most of the issues slipping around the list
>in the last couple of days have not been such issues.  For example, if
>the issue was really ALL OUR RIGHTS ARE BEING TAKEN AWAY, now, that would
>be big.  But that isn't the issue at all, and you know it.  Even where
>there is a move to mess with our rights in the wake of 9/11, our country
>has plenty of speech and expression apparatuses for us to speak out and
>make changes and keep egregious rights violations off the books.  There
>are even apparatuses with which we remove laws from the books.  Get
>this--we can even vote a president out of office every four years.  That
>is such a radically liberal thing in the history of the world.  It's
>astounding.  We take it for granted.
>
>So, yeah, we can find examples of problematic situations with rights: but
>we don't have general oppression or anything nearly like that. (In Cuba,
>for example, some of these posts would already have been illegal and
>potentially-life threatening for the posters.)  People on both sides of
>our proverbial political aisle have spoken out against the PATRIOT acts
>specific provisions.  (There's a gun-rights advocate on the right, Dave
>Kopel, who has written as cogently as anyone about the problems with the
>act.)  The debate is going on, the concern is there.
>
>In general, too, we should all recognize, our country has tended toward
>more and more rights, not less and less.  A slippery slope argument would
>have to contend that after the Japanese internment in WWII, Americans
>would be permanently on the way to authoritarian anti-rights-ism.  But
>what followed WWII?  Oh yeah.  The 60s.
>
>But what I am trying to talk about here is not the issue of rights.  It's
>the issue of rhetoric and communication.  The old liberal belief is that
>letting ideas be aired will allow people to see which view is the
>stronger.  But big bomb rhetoric does the opposite: it encourages the
>people to be inflamed without considering the full arguments.  It
>encourages mobocracy.  It's dangerous and more scary than [you pick a
>scary thing].
>
>In a similar vein, I have just about zero tolerance for any comparison of
>American conservatives, or most other people, to Nazis.  The comparisons
>won't hold and almost always come as part of the sort of inflaming crappy
>rhetoric that incites mobs, not the sort of balanced exchange of ideas
>that will keep the republic on its feet.  Nothing done in the States so
>far bears any resemblance to the Nazis coming for the Jews.  To make such
>a comparison is facile. Do you see ovens?  Do you have any sense that the
>American people would stand for such a thing?  If you do, what are you
>smoking?  Stop smoking it now.
>
>I could say much, much more; but I don't need the ulcer.
>
>A phrase I recently learned: "Life is short, let asses bray."  We may
>need this phrase in the future, on this list, to keep our selves out of
>the bad fights.  We are on the brink of bad fights.  At least one person
>has publically announced that he's leaving the list.
>
>Fred
>
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