This is a stupid thread, but I gotta say that this idea doesn’t really improve the thread much. It’s a pretty insulting thing to say toward people who work with the disadvantaged. Certainly none of the teachers I know, including teachers who work with the impoverished, display a desire (conscious or unconscious) to perpetuate the misery in which their students live. Yet these same teachers oppose voucher programs.
Vouchers seem to me to be an idea about which people can disagree honorably, without desiring either to perpetuate poverty or (if we want to balance the ad hominems) abandon bad schools to the very poor, who still won’t be able to afford the infrastructure of a private school even if tuition is covered.
Of course this is true – which is why I said “In my darker moments” – indicating that the idea was not one which I was advancing and defending tooth and nail, but rather an idle and generally unsupportable speculation.
I am absolutely convinced that vouchers are a wise approach, but I recognize – as I said above – that reasonable people of good faith may disagree on this point.
It is interesting, however, that “reasonable people” such as you and I are in the minority here, and rabid idiots – those who seemingly cannot admit any way of thinking other than their own is correct – hold sway.
Well, I suspect most of the world is like this. Hell, I can remember pretty vividly when I had the epiphany (thanks in large part to an Isaiah Berlin essay) that decent people could have fundamental disagreements.
Didn’t we recently have a thread about you poor, poor reactionaries–oops! I mean conservatives being in the minority.
I can disagree honorably with conservatives on many issues. But not on GWB. The man and those who control him are the very worst choices for leaders at this time. Those who support them are truly blind.
Except for those who are literally mentally ill, nobody is so arrogant as to think they know everything or are always right. Everyone knows they are fallible; even a smug and arrogant person will allow there are some things he doesn’t know about.
The real test of one’s wisdom, grace and humility is exactly when you are faced with someone who disagrees with you on your deepest beliefs.
This is such bullshit. It’s the Republicans who do everything in their power to prevent the “liberal” attempts to give these people those tools. Hypocritical asshole. The Republicans just want to write them off so they can have more pocket money for booze and prostitutes. (OK, that last part was meant sardonically.)
Dragging this kicking and screaming back to the OP for a moment, I just watched a British reporter interviewing a bunch of Ohioans who have recently been laid off, asking them why they were voting for Bush. To a (wo)man, they all indicated that they didn’t like him and held him responsible for their economic plight , but – and I quote one representative interviewee – “there’s a war on.”
It’s not Bush they’re voting for; it’s the myth of America. If you accept that we went to war on false premises, then you believe that all those soldiers (never mind the Iraqis) died for a lie, that the President of the United States is an unscrupulous man, that the Bad Guys got away with hurting us, that the sacrifices being made are in vain, and (worst of all) that* America Does Bad Things*. That last one is an especially strong incentive for rationalization.
It’s easier just to believe the stories: that we’re always the Good Guys, that our troops are fighting for freedom and justice, and that the President is working for the good of the people. To believe otherwise is anathema.
Hey, Brutus – go check your calendar. Look at the year. Are the first two digits “19”? No? Then can we discuss current affairs please?
“The communal march against an enemy generates a warm, unfamiliar bond with our neighbors, our community, our nation, wiping out unsettling undercurrents of alienation and dislocation,” writes Chris Hedges, a foreign correspondent for the New York Times. In War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, Hedges draws on his experiences covering conflicts in Bosnia, El Salvador and Israel as well as works of literature from the Iliad to Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism to look at what makes war so intoxicating for soldiers, politicians and ordinary citizens. He discusses outbreaks of nationalism, the wartime silencing of intellectuals and artists, the ways in which even a supposedly skeptical press glorifies the battlefield and other universal features of war, arguing not for pacifism but for responsibility and humility on the part of those who wage war. "
I suspect the antidote to this would be the perception that we are losing the Iraqi War. This explains the Bush Admin’s steadfast denial of reality. Humiliation and loss of will is what overthrows military rulers.* As noted in last month’s Atlantic Monthly (October 2004) :
“As a political matter, whether we are safer or more vulnerable is ferociously controversial. But among national-security professionals there is surprisingly little controversy. They tend to see America’s response to 9/11 as a catastrophe.”
So, no, it’s not a mental illness. Indeed, I would argue that we are all hard-wired to rally around the flag when our leaders beat the metaphorical drum of war.
(Hey, W is the one who claimed he was a War President).
So those people in Ohio either don’t know, or don’t care that the war has been based on lies. They don’t care that we were the aggressor. Just so long as we have a war. That is frightening.
No, no, it’s not that they “don’t care”, it’s that they can’t conceive of such a thing. We are America, the America that Hollywood and Tom Clancy says we are. We don’t do that sort of thing.
Of course, history demonstrates that we clearly do do that sort of thing – and worse – but the truth is usually messy and unpleasant. Best not to think of it.
