This election-eve, things are stirring. An odd manner of events have led to this particular point. The biggest picture being the election and subsequent administration of barack obama, along with the events having to do with its deployment legislatively (and the monumental oppositional hurtles forced by a stagnant, malicious minority party). The administration thus far has, in your editors view, felt overwhelmingly sombre and daunted, and it is very easy to see why. If we atomize our immediate history, one might claim that the deepwater horizon oil spill this summer was and endures as an appropriately apocalyptic image to summarize what has occurred in our country over the last decade. And even more recently, the flare-ups involving our muslim minority have pointedly emphasized the fear and instability that has become the new normal in is country. Undergirding all of these images and emotion and events is the deeply unsettling reality: this country is faced with an existential threat. Not from without, as the government and many other propagandists would have you believe, but from within.
Accurately portrayed in kos's American Taliban, the american rightists are for all intents and purposes an exceptionally powerful theocratic bloc in our politics. They believe that their god is implicit in this country's founding documents, and that our government must act accordingly. They believe wholeheartedly in willfully dismantling our government from the top down, arguing on the surface for states right but subliminally for the abolishment of virtually all social institutions. Alone, this would not be an especially remarkable position; the political right in this country has for years been oriented around those goals. What's new is the virulent anger, the mindless droning, the doublethink, and the complete unwillingness to deal in what people consider to be logical or factual. The right in this country is an epistemically closed system; fox news can legally call itself "news," and it can legally cite andrew brietbart as a source. They have the right to propagandize as they see fit, and, incredibly, they are not required to disclose that their parent company donates millions upon millions to the political right. What is the end result of epistemic closure? The american right has no method for entering new knowledge into their belief system. This was made manifest in an extremely visceral way when, in 2003, the country was swayed towards invading an actual other country based on fear and paranoia. When it quickly became apparent that those fears had been unfounded, the political right used its position of power to enforce its resolve and cultural relevance, and opposition to the Iraq war became virtually taboo among not only our politicians, but our public. We were forced to 'stay the course', watching helplessly, sometimes enthusiastically, as our citizens and theirs died for literally no reason.
What makes the american rightists so horrific is not their vehemency or passion. It is their complete rejection of the entire notion of thinking. Not only are their policy proposals far more radical than what had been generally deemed acceptable in American politics, but they directly participate in and encourage an entire culture of illogic, blind devotion, fear, and uneducatedness. They desire not a return to the reagan years, but to the feudal ones. Their thinking is a product of pre-renaissance ideals retrofitted and repurposed for the modern era. It is not so much that they consciously desire to be ruled over by a lord, its that they have never been presented with the facts about the things they have been told to believe. This is the greatest benefit of epistemic closure as a method of control: it is a sort of fascism of the mind. Citizens indoctrinated into the rightist ideology become inoculated against counter-argument. There is literally no arguing with them, because even if all of the people involved in a debate are courteous and civil, their philosophy allows them to write off all other participants as strange and nonsensical to their worldview. Because, simply, they are. No one using logic and reason can debate a contemporary Republican. Many of them running for office barely seem to hold anything even resembling a policy position, opting instead to run on what essentially amounts to fear, emotion, and good old-fashion throw-the-bums-out american mentality. How much can the system take? We live in a halfway approximation of democracy: representative government. It follows, then, that we might want somewhat more stringent standards for those who represent us. We must not be afraid of calling the insane in our midst precisely what they are: unable to be swayed by reason; un-sane, unfit for command, a form of mental illness by some metrics.
The eyes of a shark are dead to us because they are mindless automatons. They are perfect killing machines, engineered by evolution to consume everything around them as efficiently as possible. The actions of a shark are dictated only by consumption and self-preservation. They have no capacity to surprise observers, because a shark is a shark and a shark wants only one or two things. The logic of a shark is one of the most simple logics of the world. When we humans see these beasts in action, we look into those black sockets and see only darkness. An absence. The lack of a self, the lack of a compassion. The void, uncompromising and simple. A candidate in Nevada who can barely formulate a complete sentence. A candidate in Alaska who literally employs a suite of private guards because apparently such a thing is legal. A candidate in Delaware who has spent her life advocating for sexual abstinence. None of them say anything that bears any resemblance to actual knowledge or insight. The void, uncompromising and simple.
Vote early and often.
