FRIDAY ROUND-THE-HORN.
• Jonah Goldberg is doing his usual propaganda from a slightly higher horse than usual today:
You may boil down your beliefs to a series of ideas, but odds are that every lesson you ever learned came at the end of a story, either one you lived or one you watched unfold. All great religions are taught to us as stories. Every great journalistic exposé came in the form of a story.
Much like great novels, which, Goldberg earlier informed us, are "inherently conservative."
We evolved to learn through stories. We may as well be called homo relator, or storytelling man.
What's Latin for "bullshit"? Goldberg then tells us that while the things conservatives believe are ideas and the revealed word of the living Reagan, everything believed by liberals is just a bunch of stories (maybe fairy stories, har har why you gettin offended), including those so-called "studies" by so-called "scientists" with their "environmentalist" Gaia myths about how pollution is bad for you. ("If science could settle, man would never learn to fly or read by electric light," puffs Goldberg. Wait'll you stupid eggheads see the money he'll make on his fart-powered Cheeto-stuffing machine!)
Another example:
For much of the summer, large numbers of Americans insisted that the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., was one kind of story. It was a tale of institutional racism in which the police are the villains and young African-American men the innocent victims. This was the storyline many in the media wanted, and it was one they were determined to get.
Now, as a grand jury goes about prying fact from fiction, the story is falling apart as a matter of legal reality. But you can be sure the story will live on for decades to come. That’s in no small part because...
...of centuries of actual African-American experience?
... because many decent Americans have locked themselves into the belief that the heroic chapter of the civil-rights movement can never end. The story must go on so they can continue to cast themselves as the heroes.
Gotta love that "decent" -- when you're telling black people they're just playing the victim, Goldberg seems to think, throw in a nice word and no one can complain.
• I see Rod Dreher has identified a new liberal-who-hates-liberals-which-proves-liberals-suck. I thought Mickey Kaus had that market cornered. For half the column Dreher quotes the guy copiously, then tells us he read somewheres about another guy, "a white man who had grown up in a hardscrabble way... and he was expected to deprecate himself and apologize for his Straight White Male Privilege," so see, it's all true. The very best part of this plea for you-other-guys to be tolerant:
It’s not that I believe conservatives are free of these things; it’s that in my own world, it’s usually the liberals who behave this way.
Also he doesn't seem to get Woody Allen jokes.
• Oh God, Ross Douthat drew the short straw at Dracula's castle and thumbsucks over why liberals have a lot of newspapers and TV shows while he's stuck with Fox News. Allow me to synopsize his three possible reasons:
Liberals are "open-minded" and conservatives are "conformist sheep." Ha ha, as if!
The only people who read The New Yorker and junk like that are arty-farties and other members of the "liberal clerisy" who live on welfare/Soros checks, while "well-educated and well-informed conservatives are often businessmen" who "treat their media consumption mostly as a source of information rather than identity," so there. Plus liberals can waste their time reading about foreigners and operas because they don't have any children to beat.
Damn liberal media!
Too bad the free market isn't giving him the media empire Douthat really wants -- one that everybody thinks is smart and cool. Then Douthat could quit the New York Slimes and join it!
• If someone told me years ago that one day a big-time wingnut hack would be denouncing appeals for calm during a public health emergency and telling people science is bullshit -- well, actually, I would have believed it; I've always been pretty cynical.