The devaluation of shock
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From Wall St. Journal Best of the Web, by James Taranto:
Abe Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League is outraged over a comment Rep. Charles Rangel made the other day, the New York Daily News‘s Lloyd Grove reports:
The Iraq war “is the biggest fraud ever committed on the people of this country.… This is just as bad as the 6 million Jews being killed,” the 74-year-old Harlem Democrat insisted during a Monday radio appearance on the WWRL-AM morning show with Steve Malzberg and Karen Hunter. “The whole world knew and they were quiet about it because it wasn’t their ox being gored.”
When interviewer Malzberg challenged Rangel’s analogy, the congressman replied: “I am saying that people’s silence when they know things terrible are happening is the same thing as the Holocaust.”…
Foxman retorted: “It is so outrageous that I think he owes an apology not only to the families of the victims of the Shoah, but he also owes an apology to the soldiers who are fighting for freedom…”
It’s good that there are people like Foxman around who are paid to remind us that such comparisons are outrageous. For our part, we can barely muster the energy to roll our eyes. We have simply become desensitized to exorbitant liberal-left rhetoric. Bush = Hitler! Little Eichmanns! Guantanamo is a Gulag! By now what can one offer in response but a weary “whatever”?
This is a problem not only for those who resist the trivialization of evil but also for the liberal left itself. Shock can be a useful rhetorical device, but only if used sparingly — for the listener’s capacity for shock quickly diminishes. That’s why Republicans see Howard Dean as a laughingstock rather than a threat.
He’s right, of course. It’s a trend that’s been going on for so long that it’s not even worth the energy it takes to shrug. And just as deeply ingrained is the egregious double-standard by those on Sensitivity Patrol:One peculiar aspect of all this is that the defenders of left-wing shock-artists are themselves so easily shocked. When [performance artist] Karen Finley performed unnatural acts with root vegetables onstage, we were told this was an exercise of her constitutional rights. But the same people professed horror when Anita Hill alleged that Clarence Thomas had made ribald remarks in the 1980s. When Ward Churchill called 9/11 victims “little Eichmanns,” he was exercising his academic freedom, but when John Bolton called Kim Jong Il a tyrant it was outrageously undiplomatic. Urinating on a crucifix is art (Andres Serrano’s “Piss Christ”), but “mishandling” a Koran is a crime against humanity. And so on.
A good counterargument is that Finley, Churchill and Serrano, although they are or were government supplicants, have never held positions of actual responsibility, and those who do hold such positions are rightly held to a higher standard. After all, the things they say actually matter.
That’s fair enough — but the embrace of shock rhetoric by prominent Democratic politicians suggests that many in America’s minority party no longer sees themselves as responsible political actors.
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