Your ideas are noxious to us: the truth about leftism
She brought back a whole bag of books for her, but she said that there is also one book that I might like, since it looks like the books that I borrow, so there was no harm getting it. When I lit up and asked her what book this was, she said that it was something about "bullshit", so I naturally assumed that she had got me the book "On Bullshit" by Harry Frankfurt which I have been meaning to read for a while now. However, this wasn't the case, but the book was "Your Call Is Important To Us: The Truth About Bullshit" by Laura Penny. So let us again pour a refreshing drink and get comfortable in the armchair and start learninating about the world.
Unfortunately, unlike what the back cover promised, this book is not really an "hilarious and honest" analysis of "bullshit" in the public sphere, but it is a perfectly cookie-cutter laundry list of topics and issues that the author considers are wrong in our society. Actually, make that the American society, even though the author is Canadian, since virtually everything about this book is about the United States and its politicians. Anyway, this book is yet another data point for my observation that political polemic in book form is dead, no matter which side of the fence it comes from, even if this genre hasn't noticed that its head has been chopped off and its body is already rotting. Once again, there was absolutely nothing in this book that hasn't been said many times much better in the blogosphere, or for that matter, in the earlier books of the same genre, since this book simply recycles everything and presents very little of original observation. For example, has anybody heard about this guy Tom DeLay and that he is quite corrupt? I sure as hell didn't, until Laura enlightened me.
But Ilkka, what things does the author find bad in our society, I hear you asking. Well, pretty much all that I need to answer that query is to duplicate the author's bio taken from the book jacket:
Laura Penny holds a B.A. in English and Contemporary Studies, and M.A. in Theory and Criticism, and is (still) working on her Ph.D. in comparative literature. She has toiled as a bookstore wage slave, a student activist, a union organizer, and a university instructor, and currently works as a teaching fellow in the Foundation Year Program at the University of King's College in Halifax.
I could also scan and post
here the photo of the author, but why bother? You should be able to
visualize her already from the above description.
To be honest,
I actually fully read only the first three chapters of this book, and
when the nature of the book had dawned on me, skimmed the later ones
and taking a closer look only at some parts whose topics I found
interesting. But like I said, the whole thing is perfectly
cookie-cutter recycling of the talking points of the left. I could mock
the author's lament about how call center work is bad, which is later
followed by her complaining that Internet, computers and automation are
taking away these jobs. I could point out the single silliest chapter
of the whole book, the one about the insurance industry, in which she
is angry of how all those insurers dare
to charge higher premiums from customers who are deemed a higher risk.
But why? Shooting leftists in a barrel is fun only for so long.
I could similarly mock her about when Wal-Mart (being against Wal-Mart seems to be sine qua non
of modern leftism, coupled with the sneer towards people who buy "tons
of shit" there) shut down a store in Quebec to avoid unionization
(something that she, surprise surprise, is a huge fan of, but
unfortunately we don't get to hear about her views on illegal
immigration) since you'd think that this woman would let out a raucous
cheer for the fact that one town doesn't have the burden of Wal-Mart
within its limits. But since there just is no pleasing some people, it
is best to not even try. And since we are now mired in this topic, did
you know that Wal-Mart is evil for not using expensive celebrities and
models in its ads, but more like regular people and even their own how
floor-level employees? I sure didn't. You learn something new every
day. When Dove does this, I have understood that it is somehow a great
and liberating thing, but for some mysterious reason, what is good for
the gander is not good for the goose in this case.
To be "fair
and balanced", I should say that I was positively surprised about a few
things about this book. First, unlike her fellow "cool" young
intellectuals on the left, the author doesn't like smoking and doesn't
try to look "edgy" and like a "rebel" by posturing with a ciggy hanging
from her mouth. Smoking is rebellion, and this book is all about
rebellion towards oppressive society, but the author does not conflate
these two. Second, I was similarly surprised that I couldn't find even
one word about nuclear power in this book. Since nuclear power has
always been an even scarier bugaboo to leftists than Wal-Mart, and it
lends itself to easy scaretalk about three-eyed children glowing in the
dark, you'd assume that the author would have had at least something
to say about it and its proponents, in the same spirit as the rest of
the book. Perhaps the author was simply too embarrassed to repeat her
party line about nuclear power since even the dumbest reader would have
noticed it to be textbook bullshit. And this would be a bad thing since
in her book, only conservatives, capitalists and other bigots ever
engage in bullshit, whereas the greens, unions and other fellow
travellers serve the People, always tell it like it is and just give
the facts straight up. I also chuckled when the author grudgingly
admits that the free market produces wealth better than socialism, and
how she enjoys the many material comforts of her life. She just doesn't
like the way the sausages are made, you see, and would apparently
prefer if all those brown people in the Third World and the Flyover
Country rubes just knew their place and remained in their more
authentic way of life. But I am sure that things will be very different
once Laura and her fellow travellers grab the power.
For
conclusion, I can't help but think that somebody ought to write a book
about the pernicious form of bullshit that manifests itself in books
that have no real information content but merely consist of lots of
researched-by-Google snippets of loosely connected tidbits that were
chosen mainly for their emotional effect in the spirit of Two Minute
Hate, to brainwash the readers under the bloody banner of
"consciousness-raising". As useful and sorely needed as such a book
would be, it will probably be a long time until we see anybody actually
writing such a book. I was also thinking about my old idea of making it
compulsory for all college students who major in what I can just sum up
as "resentment studies" and other non-reality based fields to spend one
year toiling in some Third World country, to give them some perspective
on life and things.
It reminds me of some of the nutty things (some) feminists say that demonstrates how stupid they are.
For example, Susan Maushart in Wifework: What Marriage Really Means for Women, says that women are creative because they produce babies.
That is, she is making the claim that women should be accorded more slack because they are inherently creative ... they create babies.
I will have to look up the actual words and report back.
Posted by Loki on the run | 3:03 PM
That book is written obnoxiously but it's got some kernals of truth. For example, the maintance of extended family relationships is something that provideds benefits to the couple - free babysitting, housesitting, people who are on call for emergencies - but the work of maintaining the relationships is usually ignored by the man. It doesn't matter if you don't care about keeping up the social fabric and if you plan to be able to afford to hire someone to pick you up from outpatient surgery, feed your cat when you're on vacation, and help you move. But in reality, what happens is that either women do this unpaid work - and it is work; that's why wealthy people have social secretaries and housekeepers - and men benefit from it, or women refuse to do it on feminist grounds and you're screwed when there's an emergency.
And since there aren't artifical wombs, and since pregancy and labor are not walks in the park, I am not sure why you find the idea that women should be afforded some slack for childbearing so laughable.
The way this used to work for middle class people is women bore children, were responsible for their care, were responsible for the house, and were the family's social secretary, in return for being freed from the burden of earning the money. It used to be generally recognized that all these things needed to be done to have a life that most people would find satisfying, and that having to work and do all this stuff on top of it sucks.
What feminism did was simultaneously devalue this area of life and insist that men pull their weight in it. That's not going to fly; you have to choose one. And the brutal truth is, you can survive without this stuff getting done. I wouldn't call it living, but no one is going to die if the thank you notes don't get written, the children aren't taught manners, and you can write your name in the dust. And you don't have to have children.
It's not ludicrous to ask for special treatment because you are willing to put yourself through pregnancy and be the family's scutwork person. What is ludicrous is to say that you want that special treatment, but you also want the ability to walk out on it any time and have all the professional options and respect as someone who has devoted their life to their career.
Posted by Anonymous | 9:30 PM
"I can't help but think that somebody ought to write a book about the pernicious form of bullshit that manifests itself in books that have no real information content but merely consist of lots of researched-by-Google snippets of loosely connected tidbits that were chosen mainly for their emotional effect in the spirit of Two Minute Hate."
Like those of Ann Coulter, Michael Savage, Hannity et. al?
You seem to save your ire for intellectual dishonesty exclusively for those on the left, as I never see it applied to anyone on the right.
I like your blog because it's so predictable.
Posted by Peter L. Winkler | 5:17 PM
Peter, have you read this post? It might give you some more insight into Ilkka's politics. He doesn't strike me as all that different from the Danimal, but I suppose that he emphasizes some things to different degrees.
Posted by tggp | 4:33 PM