Enthusiasts for right wing ideology have a kind of passion for seeing themselves as the victims of persecution. Mel Gibson has been the most obvious example of this, signing up for movie after movie in which his characters are tortured into a kind of special state of righteous purity. The plot line soaked itself into Gibson’s head so thoroughly that when he was pulled over by the side of the road for drunk driving, he claimed that, somehow, it was all part of a plot by the Jews to persecute him.
Something of the same character has been going on at Princeton University, where right wing student Francisco Nava has been complaining that he and his fellow right wing students are persecuted by university liberals. Nava claimed that he and his right wing friends had been sent threatening emails by liberals, and that he had himself been physically attacked by violent liberals intent on punishing him for his punishing him for his political views.
Nava’s ordeal was cited as an example of how liberals aren’t really as tolerant as they claim to be, and how right wing Americans suffer under a liberal intellectual elite.
The trouble with the story is that it wasn’t true. After the police were called in to find the nasty liberals who attacked Nava and threatened other right wing Princeton students, they discovered that Nava had sent the threatening emails to himself and to other right wing students on campus, in order to create the false impression that militant liberals were oppressing him. What’s more, the scratches and scrapes that Nava claimed were evidence of the attack by liberal student fiends were actually self-inflicted.
Yes, Francisco Nava actually beat himself up in order to make it look like he had been attacked by a secret liberal conspiracy. Just close your eyes for a few seconds and try to picture what Nava must have done to himself to fake the injuries. That’s the fervor with which right wing ideologues have dedicated themselves to the cult of persecution.
The Passion of Francisco Nava is smaller reflection of the narrative of Homeland Insecurity that right wing activists across the United States have attached themselves. We are given stories of terrorists exploding flower pots, advertisements for cartoon television shows that might be bombs, and hordes of murderous illegal immigrants that simply don’t exist.
Most Americans don’t need to indulge in fantasies of being persecuted in order to find their moral center. In 2008, we need to choose a presidential candidate from the reality-based community that knows the difference between a genuine threat and a hoax generated out of the sublimated desire to be purified through persecution.
(Source: Associated Press, December 17, 2007)
