On the Stinkfruitism of Dr. Gitlin

The Rev. Gitlin’ never gets as far as preachin’ us down here in the choir any SECONDLY after

The first general rule is: scrupulous good behavior.

Like unto the Rev. E. Gantry on fornication is the Rev T. Gitlin’ on civility in political discourse! The lips of such scribes and Philistines may appear to be mumblin’ somethin’ edifyin’ about "Let the bullies and idiots discredit themelves. Don’t scream back ... but expose!" But who cares about their lips, when Dr. Gantry sports a used prophylactic device in his buttonhole and Dr. Gitlin’, a garish flier from his local den of ideological videoporn?

(( Perhaps that is enough of the GOP Brand® neo-Homelandic grammar and orthography to classify the specimen? Around here were are all wicked elitists (are we not?) who can easily imagine a missin’ final ‘G’ in gerunds and participles for ourselves without having it written out in its unfullness each and every time. Silly season or not, that shtyk gets borin’ fast unless you happen to be a middlebrow Victorian novelist or some other statistical improbability. ))

I guess the specimen in the pulpit this morning must have thought that it was fighting back, that referring everybody to that dismal home-movie clip constitued exposure of the errors of militant extremist Republicans and Kiddie Konservatives.

That train of thought is so far off the track that extending charity to it becomes a challenge. The best I can manage off-hand is to fancy that Dr. Gitlin does not waste a lot of time observing how his agitprop counterparts at Wingnut City and Rio Limbaugh and Hooverville go about their business. Especially his top-drawer agitprop counterparts.

The present keyboard’s preference for listening to the dotty bozos of the Big Management Party and the AEIdeology rather that to the thirty-eighth rehearsal of sensible moderate liberalism and democracy (stuff that one knows all about already, of course, if one be adult enough to have a cognitive acquaintance with one’s own views) -- this preference seems to be very eccentric. Dr. Gitlin seems rather an extreme case of factional self-cocoonment, but it does not appear that many of ‘us’ enjoy the performances of, for example, Neocomrade Dr. R.. Limbaugh as I do. Actually enjoy the bozodom, I mean, naturally: not merely run through transcripts of it quickly once in five years to compile an anthology of stinkfruits.

It may not be worth doing, but if you were to try it, Dr. Bones, you might notice what I have noticed, that the GOP geniuses (plus probably a lot of their Party base ’n’ vile) are themselves heavily invested in stinkfruit collectin’. [1]

Especially, as noted, up towards the high end of the Great Scale of Neoreaction. Indeed, the past master of stinkfruit collection (in my experience) is as up-market a neoteric as they come, him bein’ Kramer Minor, the head honcho of The New Criterion. Every month since time out of mind, Neocomrade H. Kramer (or possibly Neocomrade Herr Prof. Dr. R. Kimball) has been scribblin’ a vanity-press column at the front of their mag that the criterionmongers call Notes & Comments. Myself, I’d call it the Apotheosis of Stinkfruitism. To peruse it regularly is to beome a member of the Worst-L*b*r*l-Outrage-Yet of the Month Club. As it were.

Dr. Kimball and Mr. Kramer are well above the level of cartoons and YooToob stuff. A strict equivalent of that wretched Gitlinguesque exhibit must be sought elsewhere, perhaps in Outer Pajamastán. But since I have nothing good to say for stinkfruitism, I owe it to my argument to take a first-class example of it. (Don’t I?) This month’s WLOY selection (somebody called "Mike Hale") is not much to my own taste, but it will do.

The ... lemme see ... "the first general rule" about stinkfruitism is surely that it is but a small province in the vast imperium of Anecdotal Evidence. The second general rule is, or ought to be, that it is a swindle: stinkfruit artists rarely say out loud "Look at this! And remember, comrades, THEY are ALL like that!!" If that is not what they are thinkin[g], their misbehaviour is unaccountable.

Hence the first thing to do to pick up after Dr. Gitlin is to think as clearly and distinctly as one possibly can [2] that probably not one Party-’n’-Ideology neocomrade in three hundred thousand is like that boob on the Toob clip. As a specimen of stinkfruit culture, of the Kramerian and Gitlinguesque technique, it is of mild interest, perhaps. As a reflection of what THEY are ALL like, it is worthless.

I began by criticizing the Rev. for his emulation of Dr. Gantry, i.e., pointing out that his dissemination of that particular stinkfruit is completely at odds with the Rev.’s own pious professions about playing our cards right and "Americans who may be baffled about health care issues--who can blame them?--don’t especially like being yelled at" and so on. If this friendly agitpropper cannot understand that his nifty little video is the virtual equivalent of yellin’ at, it must, I conjecture, be because he does not understand what a "virtual equivalent" is.

This, however, is not the chief defect. By my lights, that honor must go to the sheer inaccuracy of the thing, the underlying attempted swindle about "THEY are ALL like that." They aren’t. And if Dr. Todd Gitlin does not understand very well that they are not, why, then I am Marie of Roumania.

On the other hand, this is political discourse, so one must not leap to any such crude conclusion as that our agitpropper is simply telling lies. Stinkfruitmongering is so common that its ability to deceive any political adult is very dubious, and, when deception is not in fact possible, my judgment, perhaps not the best possible, is that their cannot be any genuine lyin’ goin’ on -- not even when deception was originally intended.

The original intentions of others are known but to Father Zeus, and therefore they can not count for much when one attempts, as I do, to moralize in the style of M. Pascal: Travaillons donc à bien penser, voilà le principe de la morale!

Perhaps, however, one can not fairly subtract any points from Dr. Gitlin’s score when one cannot tell with whom he moralizes. A Pascalian would, obviously, be wiped out by such badly thought behavior, but not (say) a Nietzschean or a Marxist or . . . .

Plus of course it is the Silly Season, after all, which means that there may not be any critical or philosophical moralizing present at all: what we have here may be no more than "animal spirits," some Greenspanoid ‘exuberance’. It falls short of bien penser because it isn’t any sort of penser at all, really, it’s just a dog-days ebullition of hormones.

To take another whack at charity: Dr. Gitlin may have scribbled like that to assure us good guys that he belongs to our tribe: the particular shibboleth and secret handshake happens to consist in badmouthing and stinkfruiting of the militant extremist GOP, but, because its real function is to identify the scribbler as a good guy, not to convey accurate information about the ostensible subject of THEM, it would be a naïve misunderstanding to worry much about the inaccuracy, and positively childish to impute mendacity. [2]

But Father Zeus knows best.

Happy days.

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[1] Dr. G. can be let off the hook philologically, but when it comes to echt wingutettes and wingnuts, I shall persist in the dialect of (presumably) Crawford TX. ’Tis second nature to me now to do so.


[2] Bien penser seems (to this keyboard) to require that one suspend judgment about how well an attempt is carried off until one is quite certain what feat was being attempted.

Dr. Gitlin professes to be offering good tactical advice to America’s party. Whether anybody should take him at his word is not clear to me, but if we do so provisionally, the attempt cannot be rated very high. Is it not, in fact, shipwrecked on the rocky shore of "Actions speak louder than words"? The Gantry-Gitlin ‘hypocrisy’ (as such misconduct, this radical lack of mouth-hand coördination, is usually called) is not merely unedifying to the moralist, it is unpromising for the practical pol.

On the other hand, the blunder cannot do liberals and democrats and Democrats much damage, because, just as most of ‘us’ do not pay a significant amount of attention to Neocomrade Dr. R. Limbaugh, so the vast majority of THEM would not be caught dead at an e-place like Talking Points Memo Café. Thus they’ll never be aware that the Gitlinguesque boo-boo happened to take advantage. There will be lots of similar boo-boos further down towards the gutter that militant extremism will take advantage of to make us good guys out hate-filled antagonists and shameless throwers of unrepresentative stinkfruit -- but this particular rotten egg is not likely to matter.

Gott hat eine besondere Vorsehung für Idioten, Betrunkene, und die Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika."