[lbo-talk] Dumbing Down (was Can Politics Be Liberated from the von Neumann Style?)

Lenin's Tomb leninstombblog at googlemail.com
Sun Oct 14 12:12:52 PDT 2007


On 10/14/07, Yoshie Furuhashi <critical.montages at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I'm struck by the dumbing down of political vocabulary on the Left:
> Saddam is a "monster"; "the Iranian regime sucks"; and Lee Bollinger
> is "rude."*
>
> These are children's vocabulary.

I expect there's a big difference between the deliberately insouciant language used by Doug in this context and the deliberate infantilisation of discourse in US politics as a whole. Gore Vidal once wondered why American right-wingers often talk like Little Orphan Annie. I think in part there's a deliberate attempt by Presidents like Reagan and Bush to nurture paternal projection by feeding us with baby talk, but there must also be an awareness among the PR men that the proper stimulation of nationalist feeling relies on psychological regression. One is encouraged to recall how one felt about the nation (or Heimat, Albion etc) as a child: any political programme that is attached to such sentiments comes with a fundamental ethical guarantee of (presexual) innocence, and any attack on the nation is experienced as an attack on one's childhood.



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