Victor Davis Hanson starts the ball rolling:
In America of 2009 the following are “true”:
The Arabs invented the printing press, and spurred us on to the Enlightenment and Renaissance. Muslims in Cordoba advised the brutal Christians to show tolerance during the Inquisition. Slavery ended in America without violence. The Berlin Airlift was a worldwide effort. The Americans liberated Auschwitz. There are 57 states. FDR was President in 1929 and gave television addresses. We can either drill offshore or inflate our tires properly.
There are no terrorists or a war on same, but only overseas contingency operations and man-made catastrophes. Those who object to health care are ungodly, and the nation’s children must go to school and see the messiah address them en masse on state-run television screens. Nazis, brown shirts, a mob, insurance lackeys, Brooks brothers elites, etc. all go to Town Halls. Doctors chop off limbs and gleefully take out tonsils for profit. George Bush is our Emmanuel Goldstein whom we must hate collectively each morning for a couple of minutes.
Now, are there really people who believe that obvious, laughable falsehoods are true? The continuing popularity of horoscopes says, “yes”. Additionally, the continued prosperity of those who peddle theories about things like the Kennedy assassination and aliens at “Area 51” demonstrate the unwillingness of people to contradict those who will state something with great earnestness. This is especially true if the person making the assertion has a college degree and/or has published a book. We can be suckered and even when not easily taken in, we are ill-disposed to make trouble by calling a huckster on his scam.
The unfortunate thing for us is that those who are most susceptible to this sort of thing managed to elevate one of their own to the White House this past November. This is not to say that Obama, himself, believes in horoscopes and Kennedy conspiracies (though I’ll bet money he does, at least, believe in some sort of Kennedy conspiracy) – but those who most ardently back him are that incapable of critical thought and/or unwilling to contradict what they see as the consensus. In short, we’re dealing not just with nitwits, but nitwits holding power.
Now, we must not excuse this. The knaves who vend and the fools who swallow are responsible for their actions. The con artists are, of course, engaged in an act of deception and know they are doing it – but the rubes who believe it are not innocent victims. No, not at all – you see, once a person steps in to a false position, only a humble admission of error will get him out of it. You’d think this would be easy to do but the fact that God had to come down here and sacrifice himself in order to redeem us from our sins indicates our unwillingness to admit error. Its much easier – and appears safer – for the gullible to keep up the pretense. To, in a large sense, become part of the con – there being a false sense of safety in having larger numbers believe the lie.
We can’t argue these people out of their position – because, once again, they’d have to admit error. Personal error; the hardest thing to do (come now, you know it is – how often have you reviewed your errors and discovered a hundred reasons to justify or mitigate your sin?). All we can do is fend them off and delay them until we regain power – and once we do regain power, we really have to root-and-branch this sort of thing out of our public life. We must, once and for all, expose these liars for what they are – lest they come back, again, with new lies to deceive the people.
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