Done Unto the Least of These

At the risk of repeating myself ad-fucking-nauseum, thou must goest and readest the words of Charles P. Pierce:

The assault on Trayvon Martin's character implicitly argues that he was expendable, too, the once-living price we "all" have to pay to be free in the exercise of our Second Amendment rights. It began almost immediately after he hit the pavement. They drug-tested him, but not the man who shot him. Now, we've got conservative "journalists" creepy-crawling through every aspect of his life to find some reason... well, to find some reason for what? That he was a kid who tweeted silly stuff, posted some silly stuff on Facebook, and once got suspended because he was found with a bag that may once have held marijuana? This is not a search for justice. It's a search for an alibi, and it's a search through some of the uglier aspects of American society to find the oldest, cheapest alibi of all — that the lives of black children are less important than the right of someone to pack heat, that the lives of black children must needs always take a back seat to fear, that black children in this country are bargaining chips, and not very valuable ones at that.

It seems as though there is an actual collection of people in this country who absolutely want to turn America into Omelas.  Someone should tell them that we're not supposed to want to live in the world Le Guin envisioned.

The other half of the article is about the arguments that the people on the steps of the Supreme Court are making against ObamaCare.  For a certain subset of those it's a poorly-aimed salvo against Sandra Fluke and her supposed wannabe whore constituency.  Turns out there's a sci-fi book about that, too.

One of the problems with being a historian -- for what little value of that word I can place upon my own head -- is that I see historical patterns.  I've been meaning to write about this for a long time but I never have quite figured out the words to use.  I also haven't managed to come up with the thirty- or forty-thousand words it will require.  No single event in history is ever particularly applicable to any event now, so saying, "This is exactly like what the Romans did and therefore _________________," isn't particularly useful.  There's also the problem that people by and large only draw the comparisons between now and then based on popular knowledge and what

Hell, look at all the people trying to draw comparisons between Carter and Obama or Clinton and Obama.  Enough has changed since 1980 and 1996 that we can't draw anything more than an extremely suspect comparison.  Saying that we can compare the US now to the Romans then is laughable, at best.  The past is a foreign country.  They do things differently there.

That said, it's possible to determine patterns.  Studying Byzantine history, for one, kind of depresses me.  I read the stories of the last half of that empire and wonder what would have happened if the people there had realized, "This is a moment which will resonate through history."  I wonder if there were those Byzantine Cassandras who did see it and tried in vain to sound the alarm.  It's obvious now that they failed by doing A and doing B would have made way more sense.  Doing thing A was disastrous at the time but nobody knew for a generation or two so how was anyone to know?

I see those Byzantine moments in America on a regular basis.  That saddens me to no end.

Comments

[The Everlasting Dave]

The point about comparing Obama to his blue-team predecessors resonates the most with me. Leaving aside the military and economic differences that dominate Mr. Obama's days, the thing that makes it incomparable to previous administrations is the internet. When Bill Clinton was reelected, high-speed internet was not a regular thing, and using your dialup connection to find the AOL chatroom that best fit your beliefs was more obviously a waste of time. But now freedom of speech doesn't just relate to the books we read, the radio shows we listen to, the movies and the TV shows we like. Anyone with a blog, a Facebook account, or a Twitter account uses it themselves on a daily basis. And with that freedom explosion we're also freed from the limits of truth, if we want to be. When people speak idiotically, they assert correctly that they have a right to do so. And there are enough idiots out there to agree with them that even if something is dead wrong, socially toxic, and frightening to the rest of us, they get enough confirmation that it drowns out voices of reason entirely. There may have always been echo chambers in American society, but they're much larger and louder now. The fact that we've used the technology to get dumber and more dangerous is sad, but not really that surprising. Everyone thinks they're an expert once they start talking.