Wappida wappida wappida.
That’s the sound my head made as I shook it over and over again, trying desperately to follow the loops in Jonah Goldberg’s latest column that appeared in this morning’s Columbus Dispatch under the headline, Media elitists believe only they know what ‘the people’ should know.
“Elitism” is defined by the Merriam-Webster Dictionary as “selectivity.” Princeton’s Wordnet defines “elitism” as “the attitude that society should be governed by an elite group of individuals.” The American Heritage dictionary defines elitism as “the belief that certain persons or members of certain classes or groups deserve favored treatment” and “control, rule, or domination by such a group or class.” The common thread in these definitions of elitism is a small group of people who believe they have the right to control others by limiting access to the tools of power: knowledge, status, and political power.
By this standard, Republicans and the Bush administration would qualify as “elitist” for pursuing agendas that centralize political power in their own hands, restrict public access to knowledge regarding their shenanigans, and exalt their own high status in government. Also by this standard, reporters at the New York Times who release information about Republican shenanigans, making it available to the public for their consideration, would be characterized as “anti-elitist.”
But Goldberg refers to the media, specifically the New York Times, as “elitist” for this very act of distributing information about Republican shenanigans. The Bush administration, in the language of Goldberg’s essay, strikes a blow against elitism for restricting the public’s right to know what it’s been doing.
Up is down. Left is right. Ignorance is Strength. Freedom is Slavery.
It’s senseless to even try and apply logic and refute the guys arguments (and I use that term loosely). Jonah Goldberg is a giant farking flatulating blowhole. He’s the poster child for why everyone shouldn’t go to university.
Yesterday on NPR, the linguist Geoffrey Nunberg spoke on how brilliantly the Republicans have taken over the ordinary language of political discussion and have provided an easy narrative that all in the party can believe in. He went on and on about how deep the problem goes by providing many examples of failed Democratic slogans, the splits in the party and how all discussions now employ the language of the right. It was depressing in that he failed to even elude to all the lies behind the Republican language, how so often they say one thing but mean another, how they conveniently avoid irrefutable facts, and that all their talk is a facade for the fascism by which we now find ourselves surrounded.