I just counted my way through Steve Weinberg’s annual list of journalism books published in the media trade magazine IRE Journal. Altogether it amounts to 231 titles. One reason Steve Weinberg should be everyone’s hero is that he’s probably already read a huge stack of them.
Me? Yeah, I’ve only read five. That’s just over 2 percent of the total (2.5 percent if you let me sneak in James Fallows’ repackaged magazine articles, which I totally swear I read in their original serialized form in The Atlantic).
It’s no surprise that after you lump George W. Bush, Karl Rove, the recently deposed Republican Congress, Iraq, Osama and the 2004 election into one big red pile, it easily tops the list of most commonly recurring topics. Deservedly so, I would say. I won’t feel like an informed citizen until I’ve cracked The Looming Tower and despite all I’ve already picked up in newspapers, magazines and elsewhere, I’m still interested in learning more.
I can’t say the same for topic number two. Ranking in with seven appearances on Weinberg’s list, it’s yet more scary stories for the sheltered secular humanist in the family.
And that’s not even counting omissions like Kevin Phillips’ American Theocracy, Chris Hedges’ Losing Moses on the Freeway, or Hedges’ early 2007 follow-up—this one tops them all—American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America.
I know I’m painting with a broad brush. I’m sure much of it is quality work, but the shrill tone wears on me. The overheated eagerness in journalistic and left-wing circles to distinguish oneself from the Bush administration and unfashionable elements of its constituency (see the preening fixation with the now notorious “reality-based community” quote), grants any use of the right-wing’s alarmist rhetorical tactics a special whiff of hypocrisy.
And, to me, a lot of this stuff about the impending Christian overthrow of the Constitution is packaged in exactly the same language as all the right-wing noise about the liberal conspiracy to destroy America. Look no further than Ann Coulter’s Godless, Ramesh Ponnuru’s The Party of Death, Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism and, my latest favorite, Dinesh D’Souza’s The Enemy At Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11.
It’s possible that I’m missing the severity of these supposedly dire conflicts. Yet if things were grave as we’re told, I’d like to think the threat would be more apparent. As far as I can detect from my own experiences combined with observations gleaned from sources that I trust, both sides here have gone a bit overboard. But I guess that’s what people think will sell books. Or maybe I’m wrong. Maybe, to torture a phrase, the barbarians are at the gate (or the crusaders, depending on your politics). You tell me. My intention isn’t to be dismissive.
And not to get too intense about it, but if two strongly opposed sides can each get away with labeling the other fascist without any clear contradictions, that means the battle George Orwell took up in 1946 has failed to progress much at all. In his essay Politics and the English Language Orwell wrote:
The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies “something not desirable.” The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another…
…One ought to recognize that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language, and that one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end. If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy. You cannot speak any of the necessary dialects, and when you make a stupid remark its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself. Political language — and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists — is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. One cannot change this all in a moment, but one can at least change one’s own habits, and from time to time one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send some worn-out and useless phrase — some jackboot, Achilles’ heel, hotbed, melting pot, acid test, veritable inferno, or other lump of verbal refuse — into the dustbin, where it belongs.
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