CT Blue

For a variety of reasons I’ve had occasion recently to write a lot about the Acorn situation, both here and in a letter I recently wrote to the Day, though I really think the whole thing is sort of trivial and another right wing tempest in a teapot. Still, the recent “exposé” raise some interesting questions about our ability to carry on a rational national conversation. We have three news networks, each of which has plenty of time to actually probe below the surface of things, but that’s really a rare occurrence. This story has been covered as if it really establishes something important about Acorn, when a bit of casual reflection would convince any reasonable person that it doesn’t. Unfortunately, it’s the adjective before the word “person” in the previous sentence that causes all the trouble.

There’s a good discussion here, at a blog called Anonymous Liberal:

I suppose that’s to be expected when the storyline is driven by footage of people saying very questionable things. Just play the video and move on. But there’s something very problematic about how all this went down. Consider for a moment the premise of these “stings.” O’Keefe and Giles, who look like they just walked out of a Young Republicans chapter meeting, walk into various ACORN offices dressed up as a pimp and prostitute (or at least as they imagine such people might look). They then ask a bunch of totally off-the-wall questions to unsuspecting (or in some cases suspecting) low-level ACORN employees and record the responses. As Jack Schafer correctly notes in his otherwise far-too-credulous piece at Slate, this is not a sting; it’s the equivalent of a Sasha Baron Cohen sketch.

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What O’Keefe and Giles are doing isn’t quite entrapment, but it isn’t remotely the equivalent of a sting either, unless you assume that ACORN employees are routinely confronted with fake-looking pimp and prostitute duos who come into the office asking for advice on how to set up a prostitution business. I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that real pimps and prostitutes don’t usually wander into the offices of community services organizations and explicitly ask for help in setting up their illegal businesses. It’s a safe bet that none of the employees filmed surreptitiously in these videos have ever encountered a situation like this before. So all these videos really show are people’s instant reactions to a situation far removed from their everyday experience and training.

That’s why the comparison to Sasha Baron Cohen is so apt. When confronted by very unusual behavior or unusual situations, people have a tendency to be agreeable and to play along. Most people don’t like confrontation and will instinctively go to great lengths to avoid it. If you doubt this, go watch Borat orBruno or any episode of the Ali G Show. It is this same human tendency that serves as the basis for all of Cohen’s comedy. He specializes in getting people (often famous people) to say things that they would not normally say.

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The people caught in these videos were not engaged in deliberative activity, they were merely reacting to unusual provocation. The real test of their judgment was not what they said on the fly but what they did afterward, when the filmmakers had left the premises and they finally had a moment to process the encounter. Unfortunately, that moment is not on the tapes. We do know, however, that at least one of the employees captured on the video reported the duo to the police after they left the office (he was fired anyway). In another instance, the two were actually asked to leave and a police report was filed. Others undoubtedly concluded that it was a prank, either during the encounter or after having the chance to think about it for a while, and therefore shrugged it off and took no further action.

The whole post bears reading. The situation is really illustrative of the way in which we conduct our national discourse these days. Everything is surface. The whole story doesn’t really smell right, but that doesn’t matter- we merely disregard the smell, because then we don’t have to get into that nuance stuff. Better to assume the worst, defund the agency for the snap misjudgments of a few (while continuing to shovel billions toward the rechristened Blackwater, which quite deliberately engages in criminal activity) and move on. There’s every possibility that there are plenty of Democrats that know better, but they lack the spine to stand up to the right (the vote was taken with no hearings; the facts were deemed irrelevant), so Beck gets another scalp, a few hapless lives are destroyed and we all move on.

The Acorn thing is a minor matter, but it is not atypical of the way we deal with issues in this country. Sooner or later, probably sooner, our inability to deal honestly with the issues that face us will do us in. At the moment we have one party that traffics in lies, and another that traffics in cowardice, leaving truth and reason bruised, beaten and cowering in the corner. We’re seeing it in the health care debate. As Paul Krugman pointed out this morning, we are about to see it on the global warming issue. The Republicans may be able to persuade the gullible that there is no problem, or as Krugman predicts they will argue, that addressing it would destroy our way of life. (When you think about it, they’ve made both of those arguments about the Health Care issue) But whatever delusion we prefer to adopt will not change the reality, which will get us in the end.

This is a terribly asymmetric situation. The lying, the misrepresentations, the scaremongering and the racism are coming from one side only. Democrats might not always be right about everything, and there’s no one that can deny that some of them see the world through lobbyist colored glasses, but they do tend to stick to the issues. Perversely, and ominously, that leaves them at a terrible disadvantage vis a vis the liars, since lies make good copy, proving again that Mark Twain was right- that a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes. In the fullness of time things like the Acorn incident get put into perspective, but by then it doesn’t matter, because memories are short and the damage has been done.

This country, it should be remembered, was founded by men (women were encouraged not to apply) who believed above all (including above God) in reason. Our constitution is based on the implicit understanding that it would work only if people act reasonably. The Senate rules were written by Thomas Jefferson, who assumed that the privilege of unlimited debate would not be unreasonably misused. There are a lot of things the founders could not have predicted, but they could have predicted that the death of reason would spell the death of their system. Indeed, they expected that it would break down at some point. They were wise enough to know that nothing lasts forever. The situation we face at present would surely depress, but not surprise them.