Tiger Beatdown › Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Rally
“So, why would we work together? Why would you reach across the aisle to a pumpkin assed forehead eyeball monster? If the picture of us were true, our inability to solve problems would actually be quite sane and reasonable. Why would you work with Marxists actively subverting our Constitution or racists and homophobes who see no one’s humanity but their own?”
Why indeed, Jon? Why indeed would you say such things about people on the right, making it impossible to work with them? Except, of course, that it’s not your rights being denied. It’s not you who can’t marry your girlfriend, who when you look down the road at your potential futures see the horror of not being able to protect your assets together, or even be by each other’s side at a hospital bed. It’s not you who have had to fight all your life to get your gender accepted, even grudgingly, as a legal reality, not you who will have whispers following you the rest of your life or who fears to publish things under your own name because it outs your entire life history. It’s not you who worry that you’re getting older and a woman in an industry that is not known for accepting women, not you who are worrying that if you get fired from your job you may never find another one like it.
We’re pretty clear that you’re not up with that last one, actually.
The thing is, is that it’s not a lack of reasonableness on both sides that’s the problem. It’s that one side is completely unreasonable–whether because of true belief or cynical calculation is immaterial. It’s that ultimately you can’t compromise your own belief that you are a human being and deserve every. single. damn. right. as everyone else does. I mean, what is there to compromise? I’ll be some percentage of a person until you get around to agreeing my troubles are important? You go, and you go, and you go, and for some of us it never seems to be our turn to edge into traffic.
The ludicrousness of the idea that the left and right are equivalent, that for every Scott Roeder there’s an unrepentant Weatherman terrorist, is the most pernicious result of the fake “impartiality” of the modern media, who somehow have all become perfect postmodernists in their belief that if you present two sides to every issue you’ve somehow avoided bias–even if one side is saying that Dachshunds hold up the sun and Santa Claus wants us to nuke Iran.
If you want to take a stand for “sanity” in the media, Jon, why not ask them why the hell they won’t stand on the facts?
