Liberal Media Elite

I didn’t bother reading Kersten’s latest diatribe very closely. Mostly because it’s a series of rehashed conservative arguments about the fundamental liberalism of universities.

Straight white males are pariahs now, I suppose. They’re the only acceptable groups to whom insults can be hurled. Ridicule of other ideologies. And so on.

Setting aside the fact, of course, that insults are hurled at nearly everyone but straight white males in day-to-day life. And ignoring that delicious irony that conservatives who aren’t being propped up by every conceivable institution are essentially complaining about negative self image and low self-esteem (those loathsome, ridiculous liberal goals). And turning away from the strong temptation to remind conservatives that they’re supposed to be the strong, rock-steady, groomed-for-leadership ones, not the ones who cower in the face of unpopularity and peer pressure, political and otherwise. And assuming impossible the notion that, maybe, conservative students on campuses crumble in the face of lefty arguments is because lefty arguments are better than the those offered by the tighty righties, and that maybe just because you raise your children to be your political, religious and cultural clones is no guarantee that that’s how it’s going to turn out (as with affirmative action, you may level the playing field, but that doesn’t guarantee outcomes—which, natch, is a conservative argument)…

Oh, wait… Let’s not just throw those things into the dustbin. Not just yet. Because, you see, what Kersten is complaining about—as are all conservatives, really—is that their God-given grip on power is being questioned. And not in the 1960s sort of neo-natal-neo-conservatives storming the student union kind of questioned. No, this is much more fundamental and much, much, much more dangerous to the conservative hegemony in institutional power. Namely, that conservatives feel they are the scions of the Founding Fathers going all the way back to Jesus, and the rest of us are simply aberrations. We’re illegitimate Americans, barely citizens at all, really. So why should our ideas count?

For Kathy, Universities are a place for free-market economics and the Constitution-in-Exile, because those things are what this great country of ours is founded on. All conservative opinions are to be taken seriously, gravely because conservatives firmly believe in them, your empirical voodoo evidence be damned! Anything else is propaganda, junk science, indoctrination, lies, an attack. Let it be carved in stone above every entrance to our great learning institutions: DON’T TASE ME, BRO’! He was a martyr.

Now, no hegemony in power is ever a very good idea (as we can all see from one-party rule, our own and other countries’). And there certainly should be safeguards against political discrimination on campuses—measures that I’m sure Kersten would be more than happen to extend to socialists, communists, Islamic groups, GLBT groups and the rest. But there is the caveat that drunken 18-year-olds who are only going to university so they can pull down six figures and live in a McMansion—which, let’s face it, is the majority—are probably the least of our national concerns when it comes to granting one another political respect. They’re university students. They are, in their natural habitat, very stupid and self-righteous people, and ones that are gleeful to enforce whatever social order comes along like a pack of jackals. We shouldn’t take cues for political reform from them.

Anyway, that’s all. I have to go to work now. Because, you know, there isn’t a humanities department in this country that has produced anything worthwhile, so they’re not going to start now.

For more information about how much information is being generated about this cause, visit conservativecampus.org.

I don’t like Critical Mass. Let’s get that out of the way now. I think their goals are vaguely admirable (though they could be accomplished with something as simple as better road design and they could “raise consciousness” much more effectively with subtlety) but their tactics strike me as annoying and old-fashioned in much the same way wearing a “Make America McGovernable” T-shirt is annoying and old-fashioned. Many of us have moved beyond the need for flying our freak flag and giant puppets, if we ever had that need to begin with. (Alas, I still don’t believe that what they do is illegal. Being annoying isn’t illegal. I’m certainly embarrassed for them, of course, and wish they wouldn’t get all uppity about how They Know Best. But then, I clearly don’t like them, so why should they take my advice?)

I say all this as someone who doesn’t own a car and who, for the most part, relies on his feet, pedals and bus pass to get around town. My take on the whole bikey brouhaha is this:

Everyone involved with transportation is a dick: bicyclists, pedestrians, motorists, the whole lot. You add this with the Upper Midwestern propensity for passive self-righteousness, and it makes me want to move.

However, my old pal Katherine Kersten is at it with some sort of screed in the Strib about the lawlessness of that city of sin, Minneapolis. Scold, scold, scold. And somehow it all goes back to the “decadence” of the 1960s in Katherine’s World. Once again. So, yeah, you know how I said that Critical Mass was old-fashioned because, well, they’re sort of using tactics that have never been effective in entire history of American social change? Katherine Kersten is fighting a battle that’s nearly 40 years dead and keeps recycling the Sgt. Joe Friday Weltanschauung, yet the Strib still pays her. Think Again? Rename the thing “Paleocognition” and you’re getting closer.

Katherine and Critical Mass deserve each other. They can smoke a joint in her basement and she can look angry. It’s a match made in heaven. A heaven before Mary Tyler Moore went off the air.

Leave it to Katherine Kersten to make a string of back-handed insults the most boring thing I’ve ever read.

The Strib pays for that?!? Mama Cass jokes? Equating liberals with dogs? That only Kersten’s ideas are human and that anyone who takes pleasure is… Aw, hell, never mind. Kersten can’t write forty words without insulting the intelligence and lives of half the U.S. population. But, gosh, she’s just so plucky and honest and virtuous. Except for all the arrogant contempt. But that, apparently, is a virtue, too.

Conservatives, please stop trying to be funny, charming, clever, witty, etc. Elizabeth Edwards is so absolutely right: Trying to shine a light on your joyful hearts only reveals how black and empty they are.

Minnesota’s favorite “conservative” “thinker” and Strib “columnist,” Katherine Kersten, can now add mother of a superhero to her cornucopia of accomplishments, both professional and personal. She recounts a story of her daughter—possibly Jormungand, the World Serpent—back when she was in second grade:

“Mom,” she told me, “if everyone is special, then no one is special.”

Isn’t that what Dash said to his mom/Helen/Elastigirl in “The Incredibles”? Well, at least in spirit:

Helen: Everyone’s special, Dash.

Dash: [muttering] Which is another way of saying no one is.

Kersten doesn’t tip her hat to the Pixar masterpiece. Which is odd, because you’d think that she’d point to the line as a triumph of conservatism and the not-specialism of Ayn Rand.

Either that, or she’s getting her own life confused with cartoons.

Either that, or “Katherine Kersten” is just her secret identity.

Either that, or her entire political philosophy can be summed up more eloquently by children.

A wash, if you ask me.

I await word on what wisdom her husband and/or Edna Mode has to say about the Farm Bill.

Update: Google has 14 matches for “‘katherine kersten’ ‘the incredibles’”. Strangely, she doesn’t appear to have mentioned the flick before. Maybe because Sarah Vowell voiced Violet and a dude did Edna’s voice. Who knows? At any rate, I rescind equating her husband with Ms. Mode. Clearly that honor belongs to Mr. Michele Bachmann.

Here’s the link to Katherine Kersten’s latest column. It’s titled “Teach character to cut racial gap in school results.”

I have too much to do today to spend the energy and time reading it, rereading it, picking apart why its logic is faulty, finding the same reasoning in National Review circa 1962, finding the original article on the Center for the American Experiment site… and writing something pithy about the Strib’s very own Nellie Oleson. So if someone else could take care of that, thanks. Swatting at intellectual gnats will have to wait for another day.

Okay, fun game for today! I’m going to give you a couple of words, and you take a guess what would be the likely outcome. Ready?

Katherine Kersten, God and the planet Earth.

Think you got it? You do? Arrogant bastard! Look:

We see it in the apparent eagerness of some “people of faith”‘ to embrace worst-case environmental scenarios.

What?!?!? The phrase people of faith in quotes?!?? In a friggin’ Katherine Kersten column?!?!? OH MY GOD! OH MY GOD! She usually only reserves the “quotes of irony” for things like gay “marriage” and human “compassion”! She’s throwing us curve balls! She’s making us think again! She’s so smart and right about everything!

Robert H. Nelson, a professor of environmental policy at the School of Public Policy of the University of Maryland, has often rubbed shoulders with environmental true believers. In his view, contemporary environmentalism, in its extreme forms, has become a “secular religion.” Nelson likens it, in important respects, to Christian fundamentalism of the sort derived from the Protestant Calvinism of America’s Puritan ancestors.

Today’s “environmental gospel” is best understood as “Calvinism minus God,” says Nelson.

…

The environmental gospel has a strong appeal, especially for contemporary men and women who are turning away from traditional religion. The green crusade satisfies the universal human hunger for meaning. At the same time, it asks little of believers: no tough commandments about forgiving your neighbor or not coveting his wife. Instead, it offers rituals like recycling and (for those who aspire to sainthood) biking to work. The larger society will pay the serious costs of redemption.

I will keep that in mind next time I bike to work. I shouldn’t try to do every little thing I can to save creation, or enjoy it, or worry about its future, no matter how small, no matter how minor, no matter how personal. Why? Because I should forgive my neighbor for driving an SUV! As long as I fail to oppose gay marriage with the repetitive tenacity of a rabid mynah bird with a crack habit, clearly the things I treasure in the Bible are not the things that should be treasured.

And since when is forgiveness a commandment? The covet thing, yeah, but forgiveness isn’t mentioned… Anyway, when God entreats us—primarily through Katherine, methinks—to forgive our neighbor, I think we can safely assume which neighbors we’re talking about.

Oh, and I really love the part about quoting a single conservative thinker without actually interviewing any religious who is from the dreaded environmental gospel. That totally belongs in the metro section.

To make at least a nanogram of sense of her blog entry from January 26 in the Star Tribune, I had to go and find Katherine Kersten’s original article on, quelle surprise, the Center for the American Experiment’s website. Then I read both texts about five times.

I think, in essence, what she talks about are “values” and “virtues” as defining elements of a nation’s moral codex. Kersten argues that virtues are good for a nation because they are “universal standards of right and wrong”. Values however are as bad as unwashed hippies, made up by emotional individuals, merely reflecting their likes and dislikes: “In a society shaped by ‘values,’ the very idea of community — of a common good — evaporates. What remains is a collection of individuals, lacking a common language, who reject even the possibility of a common concept of good and evil.”

Unfortunately, according to the Gospel of St. Katherine, we live in a time shaped by values. We have to blame this “values revolution” on Germany, “a society that was notoriously antirational, antiliberal, disillusioned with mankind, and contemptuous of the American project of individual rights and dignity”, and, more specifically we have to blame it on Friedrich Nietzsche, who kind of messed it all up for the US by declaring that we need to re-evaluate our values since God passed away. Her blog entry ends with a cryptic: “In today’s “values” culture, in what sense can we talk about good and evil? An even weightier question: Can we be good without God?”

Oh dear.

They are so poorly structured that you can’t really analyze the texts logically or philosophically, let alone according to college rules for text composition. It starts with arbitrary assumptions, definitions, and classifications, and it gets worse from there.

The categories “virtues” and “values” in common philosophical discourse are part of a common thought system and not polar opposites. And the decision of what “virtues” and “values” mean to a society is according to at least some people’s opinion up to discussion by the members of that society. They are not, as Kersten wants us to believe, timeless and unchangeable, and preferably handed to us on stone plates in the handy dandy form of commandments.

I am not even going to try to understand the mental short circuit of attempting to defend “American individual rights” through a concept that is based upon forcing communal “virtues” down our throats. Curious that Katherine criticizes Germany, because this smells exactly like the old Esprit de Corps we were taught to resist in Germany.

While we are at it: Does the name Immanuel Kant ring a bell? Categorical Imperative? K, here you go: “Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.” See, no God necessary to be a good person really. It’s the good old “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” And imagine this: Immanuel was a German.

So, what Kersten really tries to tell us is this: We went to this workshop about “Framing” in Washington, sponsored by a neo-conservative think tank. They told us that we should replace the word “values” with something new and catchy, because the left is starting to reclaim “values”. That Obama kid is really getting annoying. Great idea! How about “virtues”? We haven’t used that in a while and it is one of those wishy-washy terms that we can fill with our own view of how this country should be run. Terrific! By the way, Gertrude Himmelfarb is a good one to quote. She is a historian, conservative cultural critic, and also married to our friend Irving Kristol.

Oh, one more thing:

German history teaches what can happen when nations elevate ethnic “values” over transcendent principles of good and evil. A conviction that “might makes right” seems almost certain to follow.”

No. If German history teaches us anything, Katherine, it is this:

Beware of semi-educated dimwits when they quote Friedrich Nietzsche in order to use him for their own agenda.

Katherine Kersten has a precious little article titled “Love is…” with cherubic Flash-animated babies gracing the pages today. After getting all of the typical Kertseny things out of the way (attack on the New York Times, dismissal of people who aren’t like her, “ironic quotes”), we have this little nugget:

In recent years, overwhelming majorities of high school and college students say they plan to marry, or agree that having a good marriage is important to them.

Compare and contrast to a UCLA study released a few days back that shows the concept of marriage equality for gay couples has a whopping 61% approval rating from college freshmen:

The study found that 61% of incoming freshmen last year agreed that same-sex couples should have the right to marriage, up 3.3 percentage points from 2005.

So, once again, Kersten has half the story—conveniently, the half of the story which suits her just dandy, thank you. Sure, high school and college students say that they plan to marry. I don’t doubt that. Who wouldn’t want that? In fact, barring very few individuals, everyone wants that. The only news I see here is that marriage isn’t on its way out, it’s on it’s way in. For everyone.

The question Ms. Kersten has to answer, then, is simple: What the hell do you want, woman? Do you want everyone to get married regardless of orientation (which, alas, is mostly seen as fixed and unchangeable), or do you want to further weaken marriage in the eyes of young adults who have come to believe (rightly) that the longer gay couples are kept out of marriage, the bigger the joke the whole damn institution becomes as it devolves into a privilege instead of a right? Enshrine the stability and importance of marriage in our society, or keep your guns blazing because a tiny minority wants in?

Which is it?

Presenting an occasional series: BATTLE OF THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA BLOGGERS.

I’ve long been of the opinion that mainstream, non-opinion media—newspapers, magazines, TV stations and the like—shouldn’t coax their staff into blogging or hire bloggers. They have too much to lose. Me? I’m a playwright. I have nothing to fear in the form of reprisals from CondéNast. Would that it were so!

So what would it be like if the bloggers who dare not whisper J C Penny’s name got into a fight? Or a popularity contest? That’s what I’ve been pondering all goddamn afternoon. So… Enter Amanda Congdon, ABCNews.com’s new video blogger, who just started this week (I know that because the ABCNews site has been featuring her peeling rack prominently in between Brittney and N-Mal, which is what I’ve decided we all should call the prime minister of Iraq so that he gets more ink).

Then enter Katherine Kersten, the former Center of the American Experiment shill who is a “metro” columnist (if by “metro” you mean “the block where the Taxpayers League eats foie gras out of the hollowed-out skulls of illegal immigrants”) and blogger at Minneapolis’s own StarTribune. Ding!:

Katherine may have the spunk, the drive, the sheer Force of Will in a very Ayn-Randy-Götterdämmerungish way, what with all of the friendly Wagnerian advice and the “Isn’t that a pity that you’re wrong even in the face of conclusive proof that my facts are embarrassingly inaccurate” clucking, but Amanda has the rack, the Web producers willing to exploit her rack and a check from Disney.

So Amanda wins. Back to the drawing board, Gyllenhaal.

Next up: The Star Tribune’s Green Girl vs. Time’s Andrew Sullivan. Or possibly National Review’s Kathryn Jean “K-Lo” Lopez vs. NY Times’s Stanley Fish. See how deliriously happy this can make you? Don’t you wish Dana Milbank had a blog right now?