Another Perspective

Fear of a Red Planet

There is something that stinks worse than horseshit, and that is pigshit!
-Nixon responding to Krushchev, who had farmed swine in younger days.

BY BRYAN ROBERTS

The late, venerated, conservative journalist H.L. Mencken said of communists in the final sentence of his farewell column for Baltimore's Sunpapers that "the way to dispose of their chicaneries is not to fight them when they are right." The underlying assumption here is that there are sneaky reds behind every proverbial corner who will employ all manner of sophistry to undermine the fabric of the way decent folk perceive the world, and that part of this calculated subterfuge will include saying some things that are perfectly true. Back when I was a naive youngster and, thus, a churchgoer, I was told exactly that about Satan. What is it with our Protestant culture and the color red?

That column appeared in 1948-several years before McCarthyism would leave its scars upon our American minds, several more before we would find our institutions of higher education in the stultifying climate we now know: a relatively small band of angry, variously well-informed students who proclaim that the aforementioned chicaneries have all but consumed everything wholesome in American education; another relatively small band of angry, variously well-informed students who insist that greed and heartlessness (put into action largely by none other than our dear Uncle Sam) have all but choked the world of human decency; and a mass of more indifferent students who disregard the whole spectacle, assuming that it will take care of itself.

Members of either of the first two categories are fond of referring to those of the opposite camp as fascists or-my favorite-knee-jerk reactionaries. Less impassioned observers tend to classify the first group as conservative, the second group as liberal, and the third group as, um, liberal. ("Moderate" refers to something different altogether: people of the real political world who actually run for office or intend to vote for a candidate, but are more concerned with the polls than the issues. Take that back; that's everyone. Damn-I'm losing it here.) Faculty members of these educational institutions tend to fall into the same categories, in proportions corresponding to a given school's students. The fact that at the University of Oregon, a school that puts the "liberal" in liberal arts education, influential professors are said to have touted the Oregon Commentator as the "best written and edited publication on campus" is a testament to the utter weirdness of Eugene, Oregon.

When it comes down to it, though, the terms "liberal" and "conservative" are entirely negotiable. One definition of liberal that an Oxford Dictionary will give you is "favoring democratic reform and personal liberty." I can still hear Ronald Reagan suggesting that the peoples repressed by the then Soviet Union could use some of that. Ronald Reagan was a liberal? And who were Mikhail Gorbachev's enemies in the Politburo when he came up with that new-fangled perestroika? Something might have been lost in the translation, but on the television news those cranky old men were called conservatives. Yet American conservatives liked Gorbachev for the market he was opening up- excepting Rush Limbaugh dittoheads who claimed that everything positive happening in Russia and everywhere else was a manifestation of the goodness of Ronald Reagan- then contradicted themselves by claiming that anyone who derives pleasure from believing that one person can really change very much is experiencing a Gorbasm.

One runs the risk of losing one's footing when stepping into such murky waters as these, of having to grapple with the muck and stones just to step back out again, when one only intended to demonstrate the shallowness of the pool. One might even appear to affect the folly of Colonel Cathcart from that landmark novel of American cynicism, Catch-22.

One of the story's few sincere characters, Cathcart, is recognized by everyone he encounters for the moron that he is. He tries to explain the position of his communist friends to his conservative friends, and that of his conservative friends to his communist friends, but what he didn't realize was that none of them were his friends and that they all hated him for being full of it. He wasn't full of it because he held a faulty ideology; he was full of it because he disrupted their ideologies. A bucket of spilled horseshit plus a bucket of spilled pigshit equals one suspicious smelling soldier.

People who want to hate each other will hate each other; ideologies grounded in identity only make it easy. Hate will find a way. So ask yourself, before you read any further: do you feel that familiar burning right now? If so, and you enjoy it, think of this as a service, like porn. If not, watch your back: people for whom this sort of talk makes sense are sometimes regarded as suspicious.

Sometimes conservatism is defined as more of a philosophical methodology than a political identification. A confident reticence. The rational prudence which understands that ideas which are held by the culture to be true are of course true, and ideas of lesser privilege shall be held at arms' length until proven by standard logical procedures. Ideas which are found to be credible shall be incorporated into the paradigm and acted upon; ideas which are found to be as demented as they at first glance appeared shall be denounced, the motives of their propagators questioned. Almost anyone would agree that it seems like a sound way to go about life.

That, of course, is a liberal definition of conservatism, a charitable reading, some would say. To modify conservatism with the adjective "liberal", however, one has to go back to the philosophical attitude implied by the term. Liberalism would refer not so much to the mindset that favors high taxes or alternative lifestyles as to the appreciation of, or lack of apprehension for, ideas. Liberalism smiles at the man in the pink feather boa who walks into the serious meeting to tell you that religion is a sham and so is the war on drugs. It isn't that Liberalism takes the freak at his word, but Liberalism is pleased with the freshness of the idea and wants to keep it bouncing around for a while. Conservatism wants to know where the guy is from, how profitable his idea will be to the people deciding its fate, and how to deal with the people who come to different conclusions. The philosophy that looks at the sacrosanct American institution of political affiliation with such an irreligious eye is, possibly, Radicalism. Or something.

In the end the distinctions seem to be, if not meaningless, opiates which function to dull otherwise functional minds to the point of basing their beliefs upon identities which do not exist. Which brings us back to chicanery. Rational ol' Mr. Mencken would probably tell us that a good deal of the argument currently being spoken against the WTO in newsweeklies and activists' flyers and heated conversations around the country consists of chicanery. People who are rightfully agitated after learning from Jello Biafra or Ralph Nader that a number of this country's proudly democratic statutes have been overridden by that organization's titanic legislative ability feel called to the task of dismantling it, without giving much thought to the more serious implication of that fact: our own democratic government's executive administration has chosen not to consult its people on these specific issues, though it maintains that the organization extends that right to its members.

The fact that most people who object at all identify themselves as liberals is the very smokescreen which prevents them from disarming that which incenses them: the duplicitous public officials they elected. Instead they march against global capitalism, a notion so much more abstract than they realize, that whatever evils it may or may not embody, those evils may grow stronger like a bacteria faced with obsolete antibiotics.

The way to fight chicanery is never to commit yourself to what you do not know is right. And when you know what is wrong, have fun throwing it around.

Bryan Roberts, a senior majoring in English, is a featured columnist for the Oregon Commentator