How Real is Real? Faith Based Reality: Part Deux

Ignore Rush's sputtering obnoxiousness, if you can, for a moment. Here's what he said about actually said Cindy Sheehan: "I mean, Cindy Sheehan is just Bill Burkett [He's the guy who gave CBS documents "proving" Bush was a no-show in the National Guard]. Her story is nothing more than forged documents. There's nothing about it that's real, including the mainstream media's glomming onto it. It's not real. It's nothing more than an attempt. It's the latest effort made by the coordinated left." (See http://mediamatters.org/items/200508160009 for more on the issue.)

How real is real? The MSM has picked up the Cindy Sheehan story. It's true about the MSM, but for Rush at least, it's not real. Reminds me of that self-help phrase: "my reality." The context: "That's not how it was in my reality." It sounds like reality were not... well, not real. Sounds like the post-modern relativism the Right always tars academia with: there is no objective reality--no absolute right and wrong. The facts are clear. Cindy Sheehan lost a son in Iraq. Rather than dispute the facts, Rush gives reality the boot.

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Faith-Based Reality

Faith-based reality: I'm loving this phrase.
Apply it mostly to Conservatives, the President, or Benedict XVI, though I could imagine some out on the Lefty fringes to whom it could apply.

Left of center, though, most of us still believe in objectivity, at least as an ethic, and the more the Right trashes the "cultural relativism" of the Academic Left, the more obvious it becomes that we need critical theory just to explain what the hell it is the bad guys are doing. In the faith-based reality, beliefs are absolute. Facts are relative. The Bush Administration is the epitome: ignoring scientific research; suppressing figures about the cost of the Medicare drug benefits; the entire war. This morning I was reading about Hugh Hewitt, a conservative talk radio host, who is convinced that the media is liberal. He interviewed a WaPo columnist and just kept asking questions to "prove" liberal bias. The fairness of the questions? Doesn't matter. Evidence? Anything that fits a sound bite. The problem is only partly AM sleaze: the man, according to Nicholas Lemann believes he's right.

More on this later.

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A True Beginning or a False Start?

My doctoral advisor Irv Seidman half-jokingly suggested I start a blog. After using www.talkleft.com as a launching pad to the blogosphere this summer, I figured I'd give it a try. Every summer I think of all the things I will do, gradually don't do them. Instead I killed a lot of time on the internet, playing backgammon competitively, reading the Times, Talkleft, and posting on Masslive. Poker on-line got boring with play money. Too many wingnuts raising with a 2-7 in the pocket before the flop.

At the moment, however, the Big Question: will this blog go the way of my golf game?

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