Speaking Lies to the Powerless

Very little time to blog this morning. Have to bring my young 'un in for a hernia operation this morning. He had it done last August, but it came undone. Please pray for his, er, testicles.

Interesting piece this morning at American Digest, entitled "The Shame of New Orleans." It reminded me of one of Petey's infallible axioms, that liberals do not Speak Truth To Power. Rather, they Speak Lies to the Powerless, in order to keep them that way.

The execrable Spike Lee, speaker par excellence of lies to the powerless, has a new crockumentary coming out about hurricane Katrina. It includes the bombshell truth that it was the U.S. government that blew up the levees. "Here's the thing," says Spike, "Even today, a large part of the African-American community of New Orleans thinks that those levees were bombed. Now, whether that is true or not, that should not be discounted.... In the collective mind of African-Americans, it is not some science-fiction, hocus-pocus thing to say that the government is doing stuff," he continued. "Even if it didn't happen, you cannot discount it and dismiss it as 'Oh you people are crazy'."

Do you see the chain of illogic? Some blacks believe the levees were bombed; it doesn't matter whether or not it's true; in the "collective mind" of blacks it is true; belief in things that are untrue is neither science fiction nor hocus-pocus; it is an insult to suggest that people are crazy just because they believe their own delusions.

Is this not a perfect description of the liberal ghost dance? It is wrong to call liberalism an ideology. That would be a compliment. Rather, it is an emoteology. Since liberalism has been discredited, it has been reduced to attacking the very foundation of truth, which is what deconstruction, "diversity," and multiculturalism are all about. Truth is perception. Perception is reality. My reality is my truth. All truths are equally valid, but yours is a racist lie.

Thus, speaking lies to the powerless is not some kind of intellectual parlor game for liberals. It is the very key to their survival. For example, if they did not get 90% of the black vote, they would no longer be a viable party in something like twenty-six states. Speaking lies to the powerless is absolutely essential to keeping power in the hands of those who create the perception that blacks are powerless, helpless children. It's entirely circular. Trillions of dollars later, there is still no "exit strategy" for the War on Poverty.

Vanderleun writes that "A man of Spike Lee's stature and position should be ashamed to continue to inject the poison of conspiracy into the race issue in America today. But being ashamed didn't get Spike Lee his position and stature. Being shameless did. Weaving the big lies of contemporary race hustling into movies made Spike Lee what he is. It is working for him and there's no reason to think shame enters the picture."

Exactly. Like the Muslim Middle East, it is not that these are "shame cultures." Rather, they are shameless cultures. They should be ashamed, but they cannot tolerate their shame, because they have never learned to regulate it. So they project the experience of shame and convert it to aggression that seems to be coming from the outside. But that is preferable to having to feel it on the inside. Far preferable to live in a persecutory racist, sexist, and homophobic country than to have to deal with one's own painful internal feelings of shame, guilt, envy, inadequacy, whatever.

Vanderleun recognizes the unconscious self-deception. That is, "there is a deep shame associated with New Orleans and you won't see it any Spike Lee 'documentary,' or in any other dramatization of the event." He quotes the black intellectual Shelby Steele, who, in actually speaking hard truths to power, is disqualified from being an MSM-appointed "black leader" like Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson. He is not "authentically black," and he certainly isn't an example of diversity, since he doesn't think like Jackson or Sharpton or the New York Times.

Discussing New Orleans, Steele observes that "I think New Orleans shamed black America.... For generation after generation, New Orleans was full of human despair and backwardness. The flood just brought to the surface what had been there for so long, so we could see it on TV every night. And black America was truly shamed -- just ask blacks and they'll tell you. The whole world finally saw how hopeless and desperate the poorest blacks are. So then the question becomes, what do we do? Instead of saying what we should have said -- which is that this was an extraordinary wake-up call to black America, and we've got to make some profound changes in our way of life -- we said, 'George Bush is a racist.' Then we weren't shamed any more. He did it. He's the bad guy. He's the problem. And, once again, we're victims of white racism. We pulled out that old trustworthy excuse that has served us so well for 40 years. We blamed our problems on white people. And it works."

Exactly. Dysregulated shame means that shame cannot be tolerated. So it must be psychically converted to something else. But this can only happen with a whole panoply of cultural messengers that help create the illusion that the perception is the reality, that the lie is the truth. Steele goes on: "It doesn't matter that you've got a black mayor who's obviously incompetent. Bush is the fall guy because he's white. And no American politician ever asks black America what they're going to do. Whites just accept the excuses. That's why Bush is just going to dump a lot of money into New Orleans."

And that's the point, isn't it? Money is power. There are different ways of going about getting it. One way is to engage in what is called "activism." Another more direct way would be to engage in "economic activism," otherwise known as "work." But really, what could Al Sharpton actually do for a living? Jesse Jackson? Louis Farrakhan? Who would hire them? To do what? These are deeply dysfunctional people.

Blacks who point this out are excommunicated from blackdom. And whites who point it out are branded as racist. Vanderleun observes that to actually speak truth to the powerful race-baiting money machine would threaten "the vast bureaucracy and wall to wall entitlement programs that have been thrown up by the government over the decades to keep so many African Americans firmly inside of the Democratic Party's Plantation."

The race-obsessed liberal media constantly reminded us of "the color of the faces" of the residents of New Orleans. A couple weeks ago, when the story came out about how many of those residents defrauded the government that was trying to help them, not one story mentioned the color of the faces. Nor should they have. Instead, they only focused on the incompetence of the Bush administration. Thanks to the MSM, we already knew that Bush was a racist. But it's worse than that. Now the liberal media have discovered that he is hopelessly naive, for he actually trusts black people. Unlike the MSM and the rest of our liberal elites.