The Nuisance of Nuance
For once I'm not going to bury the lead: it can't work. Societal Eugenics, I mean.
As far as I know (no, I haven't googled it), I just minted the phrase. So sue me. Or blame me when you hear it everywhere.
Science (valid, or bastard versions) take on a strange, dark and unnatural quality when applied to society. I mean hell, what doesn't, really? Even a clear, simple sense of fairness gets bolloxed up when it goes from a notion to a nation.
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Ok, ok...so I have to google it. So it does exist, but apparently only in rather literalist ways. I'm not talking about making society better by engineering better babies. I'm talking about culling the culture of ideas that are bad when measured against some rather literal idea of purity. So I'm good. You did hear it here early on, if not first.
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The Right is naturally past-minded. Or unnaturally so. If that conjures up ideas of brain-eating zombies, well, all the better. They're not far off the mark. Brains, deep-thought, gravitas, are all consumed by the Right, broken down into their constituent parts and used as energy to fuel the dream of a society that believes in Nothing New Under the Sun, a Past-as-Present world where no thought is required. The Past settled everything important, right? Right, Right?
I've gotten ahead of myself. Again. Why would anyone wish for a society where no one thinks? Even as a means of plotting one's own ascendancy, what would that put you on top of? What drudgery. Hell, even god created Free Will to keep herself from being bored to tears by the inevitability of a predictable future.
I honestly have no idea, except to suppose that the Right is simply not....wait for it.....thinking.
But still, why is nuance the nemesis of those who are on such a path as the Right have embarked upon? Easy: it dilutes the story. It's hard to be on-message when the message is so complex, so variegated, so subtled and nuanced that followers start to consider the content of the message. Begin to think about second-, third- and higher-order notions, consequences, realities. Hell, just that they begin to think at all.
Conversely, when agreement itself is more important than the things agreed upon, the thinking has already stopped and the ascendant path becomes adequately lubricated.
I have a shorter version of the message the Right is delivering: Nothing Unobvious Exists.
Nice economy of words, mostly understandable already, obviating the need to look up "hard" words, to consider anything beyond the "10 words version". Bite-sized, snack-sized, fun-sized!
So have at it, Ann Coulter, you curiously-silent-about-the-ACLU-and-Rush-Limbaugh traitorous bitch. Use it, Sean Hannity, you poisonous wretch. And Rush? Even the OxyContin haze shouldn't prevent you from getting what it means.
And Andrew Sullivan? You're lost. Hopeless. They don't care about the chockful-of-consequences writing of yours, they just want the unnuanced version; you're just a faggot. (hey, their sentiments, not mine. I'm a big ol' 'mo, too).
Gravitas is the truest victim of the Right. Most of them probably don't know what it means. Most of them won't bother to look it up.