Dennis Miller, would-be comedian and weed blowing in the winds of change, is whoring his lack of talent once again for a new television show on CNBC. Miller stuck his finger in his mouth after 9/11, held it high in the air, and decided his sagging, sorry excuse for a career would receive a boost if he transformed himself into the ever-popular staple of American TV and radio, the blowhard conservative opinion monger who hates facts and the people who use them.
Miller explained to the NY Times his position in other words:
"I've always been a pragmatist," he said. "If two gay guys want to get married, it's none of my business. I could care less. More power to them. I'm happy when people fall in love. But if some idiot foreign terrorist wants to blow up their wedding to make a political statement, I would rather kill him before he can do it, or have my country kill him before he can do it, instead of having him do it and punishing him after the fact. If that makes me a right-wing fanatic, I will bask in that assignation."
The only thing pragmatic about Miller is the way he has extended his Weekend Update gig by about 20 years by playing the "intelligent" card in the low-brow arena of American pop culture. Miller embodies the truth in Alexander Pope's assertion that "A little learning is a dang'rous thing." Only in the desolate intellectual wasteland of American television could Miller be considered smart and his observations on international politics worthy of consideration.
As Miller's words above demonstrate, he hasn't turned from liberal to conservative: he has converted from obscurantist to simpleton. Of course people object to the arbitrary killing of seemingly innocent civilians. But most instances of "terrorism" only look this simple on the surface. It's easy to bask in the assuredness of the blinkered logic of someone like Miller, but that way of thinking is what causes conflict and hate in the first place; it takes an understanding of subtlety and empathy to grasp the complexity of a situation, especially a geopolitical one.
Miller's response to 9/11 -- blind patriotism that ignores the facts about American intervention in foreign countries, and American complicity in terrorist atrocities, and the fact that, as Noam Chomsky has said often, America is the largest state sponsor of terrorism (according to its own definition of the word) in the world -- is dimestore hate mongering. Here is Miller's simplified view of the world:
The Sept. 11 attacks, Mr. Miller said, changed him. "Everybody should be in the protection business now," he said. "I can't imagine anybody not saying that. Well, I guess on the farthest end of the left they'd say, `That's our fault.' And on the middle end they'd say, `Well, there's another way to deal with it other than flat-out protecting ourselves.' I just don't believe that. People say we're the ones who make them hate us because of what we do. That's garbage to me. I think they're nuts. And you've got to protect yourself from nuts."
That's right: Everybody's crazy but him. It's exactly that kind of thinking that unnecessarily creates hate and distrust and conflict. Watch Errol Morris' excellent documentary on former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, The Fog of War. In it, McNamara basically says that most of the Vietnam War was the result of a lack of the administrations' understanding of Vietnamese people and their history; this he learned from his Vietnamese counterpart decades after the war. In other words, the American government had no idea what they were fighting. Their decisions were being made within an environment of isolated ignorance. The current administration smacks of this kind of operating procedure.
It's easy for conservatives to point to the underdeveloped parts of the world, especially Arab countries, and say, "Look how ignorant these people are. If we don't wage war against them, someday our civilization will be as vacant and powerless as theirs." This type of thinking -- the kind Miller exhibits when he says the anonymous "other" is just "nuts" -- ignores the profound interdependency of nations and ecologies, ignores the purely subjective lens through which other cultures are found wanting next to your own, and ignores the very real measures by some countries that have contributed to the state of affairs in other parts of the world. Power is a zero-sum game: What one country gains, another loses. The United States can't build an entire civilization on oil, and then claim to have no connection with the countries -- mostly Arab -- who supply the oil.
Is America the problem, the only problem? No. It's a big part of the problem. But "the problem" has many sides, many potential configurations. Only someone as half-learned and opportunistic as Dennis Miller would believe otherwise.
2:20:58 PM 
|
