Birth of a Demagogue

You may remember that I had some issues with Ayn Rand recently. My initial reaction, upon finally being exposed to some of her work, was to object vehemently, mostly on artistic grounds. I wrote a blog entry, posted it, and moved on to other things.

Then I discovered the power of Google Alerts.

Followers of Ms. Rand (you could almost call them Rand cultists) had Google Alerts set up for any mention of her name. So quite suddenly I found that my readership count increased measurably, and people were leaving comments on my post. And because the tone of my blog post was light (I believe the relevant phrase was “Ayn Rand can bite me”), these comments contained charming and insightful criticisms calling me, for instance, “intellectually jejeune.” (My new favorite phrase!)

Naturally, I immediately realized that this represented a host of new opportunities. Because what’s more fun than messing with the heads of a group of Ayn Rand cultists?

“Ayn Rand can bite me” set the tone, and I wrote a couple more entries in which I took little shots at the cult of Rand. And sure enough, my readership spike continued and the comments kept coming in. It was huge fun.

Trouble is, in order to keep the cultists aggravated I ended up writing things that I didn’t quite believe. I mostly believed them, they were in the neighborhood of what I believed, but strictly speaking, no, I was asserting untruths in order to keep the attention of the Randiacs.

Still, that “intellectually jejeune” comment stung a little. So I finally decided to stop telling lies in the name of outrageousness, and to write a thorough, essay-length critique of Objectivism. Then an actual dialogue could begin, and perhaps a real back-and-forth might prove possible with the people I had been maligning as Randiacs.

The result: crickets.

The readership spike stopped spiking. The only comments I got were from friends of mine who already agreed with me. From the cultists, nothing. Stone silence.

I joked about it in a subsequent blog. Pretended that since no one had attempted to refute my argument then ipso facto it must be considered as having been proved true, and I expected sales of Atlas Shrugged to plummet immediately. No such luck.

The more likely explanation is, per Occam’s razor, the simplest one. Now that I was no longer being provocative, no one was provoked. And to the cultists, the idea of responding to a 3,700 word critical essay was absurd in a Comments box on someone else’s blog post, so naturally none of them even attempted to.

This is one explanation for how Rush Limbaugh was born. How Glenn Beck came to be. Being as charitable toward them as humanly possible, I have to concede that once upon a time, they might have been real people with something real to say. But that they quickly discovered that real criticism vanishes into the wind, while verbal grenades draw attention and response and further attention and increased ratings and yet more attention and bigger paychecks and then more attention. And never mind if, little bit by little bit, the things they said strayed further and further from the neighborhood of truth.

Do that long enough, and eventually it does become true, because you start to believe your own bullshit. And then you’re a weeping monstrosity like Glenn Beck.

So.

Just in case my mention of Ms. Rand happened to trigger a Google alert, if you are one of her devotees, I ask only one thing: don’t bother. There’s no need to respond in any way. We’re not going to agree, so don’t waste your time. If you are one of those who believe Glenn Beck is the new messiah, and you too have a Google alert set up, there’s just no point trying to defend him here, so move on. I’m not going to say anything outrageous just for the purpose of picking a fight, and if you try to pick one I’m probably going to just ignore it. So move on. There are better things to do, and I plan to go and do a few of them.

Have a lovely day.

(Chowderheads.)

Bill O'Reilly is a Smelly-Pants! (Neener Neener)

So apparently Bill O’Reilly has decided to boycott Sean Penn movies. He recognizes that Penn is a great actor but doesn’t like the man’s politics, and so he has decided to protest with his dollars, as is his right.

It’s also completely childish.

Several years back, I did the same thing. Except for me, it was John Wayne who was to be shunned. A sometimes strident right-winger who made movies like The Green Berets, I decided that the man was an ignoramus and could safely be ignored. I went on like that for years. (I wasn’t so crazy about Clint Eastwood, either, for exactly the same reasons, and stayed away from his films as well. Dirty Harry? Please.)

(There was one exception made: The Quiet Man. But that’s because the movie was set in Ireland and made by the great John Ford, so I rationalized the exception by saying it was an atypical movie more about Ford than Wayne, and in it Wayne played a man desperate for peace after a lifetime of fighting. Plus it had Maureen O’Hara and her streaming red hair, and who could resist that?)

At the same time, I vociferously stood up for Jane Fonda’s right to speak out. And Vanessa Redgrave’s. Even though I didn’t always agree with them, damn it all, surely they had the right to speak their mind like anyone else! And yet never once during that time did I stop to question my own hypocrisy.

And then I saw The Searchers. Another John Ford film, and a truly great movie. At this point I had a dilemma: in order to catch up on the ouvre of John Ford, I was going to have to watch a lot of John Wayne films. What to do? What to do? (Then I discovered that Ford was himself pretty right-wing. Curses!)

And I thought, You know, Wayne gave a pretty damn great performance in The Searchers. Can it be possible that I’ve been, o horror at the thought, a bit unfair to the man? I watched Stagecoach, with that brilliant zoom-in on Wayne’s first appearance that made him an instant icon. I began to appreciate his incredible physicality (no one else, ever, has been able to walk like that), and I began to find levels to his performances that I’d never have been willing to grant before. And Fort Apache followed, also a truly great film. And Man Who Shot Liberty Valance with one of my favorites, Jimmy Stewart. (Another dilemma: how could I reconcile the fact that I loved Jimmy Stewart but that he was great friends with both John Wayne and Ronald Reagan?)

(I even watched Dirty Harry, and by gum, it’s pretty damn entertaining. Plus of course there was Unforgiven, which in a stroke turned me around on Clint Eastwood--and which Bill O’Reilly claims is one of his favorite movies. Mine, too--see, there is room for agreement here1)

I now knew for sure that by denying John Wayne I had been denying myself an awful lot of good movies. But what about the Wayne flicks that weren’t directed by John Ford? The Shootist answered that question as well. John Wayne was a terrific actor, and I’ve had hours of pleasure and edification catching up on his movies for the last couple of years. People can have whatever opinions they want, and they can say what they want no matter what those opinions may be. And I can choose to listen or not to listen. It’s fine, I’m an adult, I can handle it.

And so we come back around to Bill O’Reilly, who is older than me and really ought to have figured this out by now. He says he’s a movie guy, he loves watching movies, and he also says he realizes Sean Penn is a great actor. So I can only say to him, Grow up already!