So much to write about. COVID-19, Michael Flynn…now the riots around the country in the wake of the George Floyd killing. So many people smarter than I have said it better than I could regarding the last item. Think I’ll draw on and repeat things that have been said that I wish I could have said!
John Podhoretz, in an op-ed titled “Only an Intellectual Could ‘Justify’ These Riots” May 31st in the New York Post:
“George Orwell’s timeless admonition, ‘Some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals believe them,’ has been given new life by the desperate efforts of pundits, scholars and Twitter blue-checks to defend the violence, looting, disorder and general monstrousness that have overtaken America’s cities.”
The glorification of mob violence and petty criminality that was one of the disgraceful hallmarks of bien-pensant thinking throughout the 20th century resonates through every tweet, every deep TV observation and every piece of writing that casts the coast-to-coast destruction and anarchy in a positive light.”
Comparisons have been made between the violent rioters setting fire to police precincts and department stores over the last few days to the ‘hoodlums’ of the past. Podhoretz cites in his article the difference is: “…our insurgents are fully aware there is a phalanx of media and academic apologists at the ready, who will not only excuse their behavior but laud it. This both provides them internal psychological cover for the unleashing of the evils inside them and a vocabulary to explain away the evils they release.”
“Making excuses for rampant violence has been a reflexive habit among the cognoscenti in the United States since the 1960s, from the Leonard Bernsteins hosting the Black Panthers at the elegant party immortalized by Tom Wolfe in his essay “Radical Chic” to the aftermath of the 1977 New York City blackout, when the looting of entire neighborhoods causing more than $1 billion in damage ($4.5 billion in today’s dollars) was justified in the op-ed columns of The New York Times as a consequence of (wait for it) a cutback in city-provided teenage summer employment.
Ideological partisans of all stripes face this temptation every day — the temptation to believe that those who seem to be making the same argument you make but then add violence to the mix only do so out of an excess of zeal. In other words, the violent people may be wrong in their tactics, but their passionate loathing of injustice simply got the best of their good intentions.
Perhaps they feel it necessary to do so because they don’t want the bad behavior to discredit their beliefs, or because they can’t bear to examine their beliefs in light of the violence and wonder if they are a part of what made the violence happen.
Or they double down and come to think that the violence is a mark of virtue — that the violent are even more committed than the cowardly couch potatoes who sit on the sidelines bemoaning injustice but refuse to put it all on the line. That was also the story with the cop-killing and bank-robbing terrorism by the Weathermen and others that erupted from the anti-Vietnam-War student protests.
The perpetrators were romanticized rather than vilified. That was half a century ago. And the spiritual virus that provided such rancid moral “immunity” has surged anew with a recurrence of the evil.”
Wish I could have put it like that. Thank you John.
