Views » October 7, 2008
The End of Aggressive Ignorance?
Everyday Americans saw a lot of McCain and Palin in September, swooning over Paw and the self-styled Daisy Mae.
How surreal is life right now? Between a right-wing, government-loathing president insisting on bringing socialism to Wall Street, a Chatty Cathy doll (Remember those? You pulled a cord and they said the same five things) running for vice president, polls showing that still – still! – people give McCain the edge on national security issues. And the TV pundits, against overwhelming evidence to the contrary, claim that the first presidential debate was “a tie.” You start to feel like you’ve shot down that rabbit hole with Alice and may never get out. I mean, really, the country seems to have gone crazy.
Nevertheless, there is a war being waged now, in the waning days of the Bush administration and the campaign, against the triumph of aggressive ignorance, a fabulous term I’m stealing from my nephew.
Aggressive ignorance defiantly shoves its utter lack of knowledge in your face and brays: “Facts? We don’t need no stinkin’ facts!” Team Bush has repeatedly asserted that it didn’t need to know much of anything – about Iraq, hurricane relief, science, global climate change or the corruptions of the financial sector, and that we shouldn’t know anything about these things either.
McCain and Palin – the Dumb and Dumber ticket – have elevated aggressive ignorance to new levels. McCain, with his bone-headed assertions about the strength of the economy, not knowing Sunnis from Shiites, maintaining he hadn’t read the proposed bailout legislation he was swooping into Washington to vote on, and Sarah Palin with … well, where to start?
Already her insistence that “you can see Russia from Alaska” establishes her foreign policy bona fides, and her conjuring the image of Russian leader Vladimir Putin’s head flying over her home state have become howlers.
Who have been the white knights in the battle against aggressive ignorance, aside from Obama, who himself is banking on the hunch that maybe people have had enough of Jackass politics? Well, not necessarily who you might think. And it’s been mostly women (although, so far, not Hillary).
It took Katie Couric, the nightly CBS News anchor widely dismissed as having the least gravitas (and the lowest ratings), to expose Palin as the syntactically challenged, gibberish-spouting dunce that she is.
But Couric isn’t the only gyno-American who isn’t having any of this. CNN’s Campbell Brown, in a statement that didn’t get nearly enough attention given the bailout psycho-drama, charged the McCain campaign with sexism for sequestering Palin from the news media as if she were a fragile flower too weak and delicate to take the heat of reporters’ questions.
Can you imagine what would have happened if Dan Quayle (whom Palin is starting to make look like Disraeli) had been similarly locked in the powder room?
And “Saturday Night Live” alum Tina Fey has been pitch perfect in her assault on Palin’s perky ignorance.
And then there’s David Letterman, outraged that McCain would think he was so dumb that he would not discover that McCain had cancelled on him, claiming he had to rush back to Congress, only to be down the block getting powder-puffed for an interview with CBS colleague Couric.
And what about everyday Americans? Yes, we saw a lot of them in September, swarming to McCain-Palin events, swooning over Paw and the self-styled Daisy Mae.
But after the first presidential debate, many (especially women) repudiated the pundits who repeatedly claimed the debate was “a draw,” or that Obama had not really won.
McCain looked, simultaneously, like he was a nervous wreck and on Xanax. He barely answered most of the questions. He could barely pronounce “Ahmadinejad,” the name of Iran’s leader. When he flashed that rodent-like smile, he was truly scary. He lectured Obama about not knowing the difference between a tactic and a strategy, and then suggested that “the surge” was the latter instead of the former. And when Obama recited the list of everything he’d gotten wrong about Iraq, Obama whupped him.
So it was heartening the next morning to get up and see that, unlike the pundits, every poll showed viewers giving the victory to Obama.
Aggressive ignorance has been in the driver’s seat for a long time and we’re so used to it we can’t remember what intelligence, information and common sense might be like in the White House. But the indications are, at least as of this writing, that we’ve had enough.
ABOUT THIS AUTHOR
Susan J. Douglas is a professor of communications at the University of Michigan and an In These Times columnist. Her latest book is Enlightened Sexism: The Seductive Message That Feminism's Work is Done (2010).
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Reader Comments
Talk about an angry white female?!? For all the feminist accusations about men keeping women from the most powerful office in the land, we now find out that only certain women who fit a certain political persuasion are really qualified. Interesting how those “qualifications” were kept secret until Sarah Palin came around. How can Susan Douglas teach communications with the hatred she espouses? I guess the adage that “Those who can, do, and those who can’t, teach” is alive and well at the University of Michigan School of Liberal Feminist Communications.
Posted by chev1958 on Oct 8, 2008 at 12:11 PM
Ms. Douglas does sound angry (not hateful), and expresses herself firmly. But, contrary to the post by chev1958 (a good year, but very dated!), the article is dead on target. In the current administration, knowledge is considered somehow contaminating, and Pres. Bush prefers not to deal with information or facts, just with advice from his inner circle. Clearly McCain/Palin represent a continuation of the old, failed policies and solutions, with the added danger that McCain is an angry man with an explosive temper and no interest in trying to reach negotiated agreement with both allies and enemies. Now if the media can only catch on that they aren’t witnessing a sporting event, where the result has no real significance, but an election that will influence the country, good or bad, for decades to come.
Posted by rwk2008 on Oct 8, 2008 at 12:35 PM
Does Obama need to know how many states there are? Does conducting his campaign equal administrative experience of running a state?
This article reaffirms that liberals always try to preserve caricature and characterization over re-evaluation. And I’ve always wondered why extreme conflicts of caricature should be something charges to the subject of the caricature. “Hey! John McCain needs to reconcile my overwrought caricatures!!”
I know that it is important to stick to the “More of the same” party line, and at the same time pillory the conservative opposition (that Bush lost the backing of years ago) for being so amenable to government solutions. But, just a review of some of McCain’s campaign would tell you that McCain might not try to alienate the “government-loathing” conservatives, but he’s losing their vote, because he’s *not* government-loathing. (He was boo-ed at a Michigan event for proposing government solutions in the form of carbon credits and healthcare.)
Meanwhile Palin’s comment is taken as if she was arguing that she has *sufficient* exposure to seamlessly take up diplomacy. When she was actually responding to the argument that she was from a backwater state that had no exposure to international politics. When pressed with this misfitting characterization, she pointed out that the Alaskan governor has to deal with the Russia which is so close Alaskans can see them from an island.
Meanwhile, when Obama questioned her administrative ability as mayor of a town of 1200 (totally ignoring the governorship), he contrasted his administrative skills of running national campaign. No “aggressive ignorance” there.
I also have to laugh that you’re incensed that more people don’t agree with you on who won the debate. Not enough people agree with me about who’s responsible for Fanny and Freddie fiasco as well, and want to elect the guy who received the biggest flow of campaign money from those organizations (and who’s #2 overall) to address it.
I’m supposed to be respectful, so I won’t ask the question about what “aggressive ignorance” might mean in regard of your possible retirement from writing this column. Is “Dumb and Dumber” “respectful” Is “respectful” even in view, here?
Posted by axeman on Oct 8, 2008 at 2:20 PM
The Bush administration engineered the housing/credit bubble in order to finance the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Otherwise they would have had to raise taxes, raise the interest rates and re-institute the draft. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were brought on board four years later, with Democratic demands of comprehensive oversight and regulation, which the Republicans, as usual, refused.
Posted by Major Major on Oct 8, 2008 at 3:53 PM
Major Major, with all due respect, you have the parties in reverse. The Clinton administration began pressuring Fannie and Freddie to loosen credit standards so more lower income people could buy houses. You could go all the way back to the Carter administration, but that’s a stretch even for me. In 2004, the Democrats were standing up for Freddie and Fannie and attacking regulators who were issuing warnings about those organizations. The video is all over YouTube. Maybe you should check it out and get your facts straight.
Posted by chev1958 on Oct 9, 2008 at 7:02 AM
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