If you were paying attention at all this last week, you probably saw the very, very depressing attempt by conservatives, because Star Wars III was widely opined to have vaguely anti-Bush messages, to
rehabilitate the Sith as being the Good Guys in the Star Wars universe. Because, you know, those Jedi were wimps.
Dear God, I wish I was joking. I'm seriously not. The leader of this particular assault onto the already blood-soaked beaches of Lighten The F--- Up Already was science fiction writer Orson Scott Card, in one of those pieces that, a hundred years from now, will be studied by legions of graduate students in the same way that the letters of Poe or T.S. Eliot are studied now, in an attempt to pinpoint the exact moment when the writer in question lost the last shreds of their own sanity.
But in the exceedingly narrow category of Batshit Crazy Things Written By Orson Scott Card In The Last Two Weeks, I got that one beat.
In this column originally for the Rhinoceros Times -- the paper with the biggest ass in the animal kingdom -- Card attempts to explain Newsweek, Muslims, and the riots. His conclusions are remarkable, centering around two major themes. First, Smartland, populated by the Smartish:
The press isn't running for office. [...] But in private, they are perfectly happy to mock patriotism in all its forms. They're only patriotic when somebody says they aren't.
They are loyal to a community -- but it's not America.
It's Smartland. The nation of the newsmedia people. That's where they live. Not in America. These newspeople generally don't even know anybody, apart from "sources," who serves America in the military. Smartland consists of a very different crowd.
I know that crowd. I've heard them jeer at all the values that most Americans still care about, laughing at religious people, at the middle class, at suburbanites, at the poor ignorant saps who don't think correct thoughts all the time. You know -- the citizens of Heartland. Those poor sentimental fools who stood in line to see The Passion and who like Adam Sandler movies and who get tears in their eyes when they see the American flag and whose hearts break a little when it burns.
And yet the irony is that the reason the radical Islamists hate the West so much is primarily because of the unchecked and uncheckable excesses of the Smartish. From Hollywood to newspeople to the soft-subject professors in our universities, the culture that makes people like Osama bin Laden want to blow us up or crush us into dust is the culture of the R-rated movie, the anti-religion intellectual, the glorified abortionist, the babies-without-marriage crowd, and the what-me-worry media elite.
So before being called Jedi, we all were first relegated to Smartland. Gotta say, these weird political insults are getting weaker by the month. Next we'll be called "world-threateningly handsome". (Incidentally, I think the defining feature of the Smartish is their excellent liqueur. You haven't really known inner warmth until you've had a nice Smartish Cream.)
The second major theme is that Muslims "can dish it out, but they can't take it." I warn you, reading this section in full may cause you to start bleeding from the ears, if not for the supreme irony then for his "advice" to Muslims.
What you see in those riots is the result of centuries of being in an almost complete majority -- and having nothing to show for it. Not freedom, not prosperity, not even respect.
Practically everybody they know is Muslim and yet they are still powerless and ashamed and angry.
*Cough* projection *Cough*
Muslims in the United States might feel all the same things, but they know they're not in the majority and they've learned to keep their heads down. Like every other minority that doesn't have the power of the state behind them. [...]
It's hard for me to feel even a shred of pity for all those poor Muslims who heard that somewhere in the world, their holy book might have been desecrated. Do they really expect people outside their religion to take their beliefs as seriously as they do? [...]
But you see, we Mormons are very much aware of being in the minority. The memory of "Christian" mobs and state militias murdering helpless Mormon men, women and children, and then betraying and assassinating our leaders while they were in government custody, is still keen within our culture. It didn't happen far away, it happened in Missouri and Illinois. And it has continued in the years since then, in isolated incidents of murder and expulsion throughout the world, not least in America. [...]
But in the years afterward, [Mormons] learned something else, too: How to get along. How to avoid making waves. How to blend in. How to make a moral stand when it matters, without alienating those who might stand with us and without (usually) provoking those who stand against us.
That's what you learn when you're in a perpetual minority.
There's very little to say about the column. You have to read it in full to get the full effect. I'll highlight the ending, though, since that's where we learn the real problem, here. It's the religious zealots of the Democratic Party shoving their "puritanical" laws onto the rest of us, foisting "propaganda" at our schools, and "flushing away" America's democratic processes.
Just so the fanatics who now rule the Democratic Party, serving the cause of Smartland at the expense of the Heartland, will find that if they ever really get control of government, they will quickly be the most hated rulers our country ever had.
Already large numbers of Americans seethe over the puritanical laws imposed on us by anti-democratic judges, who cannot wait for compromise and the political process to "purify" us. Already we are outraged by the propaganda they foist on our children in the schools, without reference to the values of the community or the roots of the American culture.
The Taliban of Smartland will be just as repugnant to the people of America as the Islamist Taliban was to most of the people of Afghanistan.
So as we watch the Democratic Party flush away democratic processes in order to get correct outcomes, it's worth remembering that we're not so different from "those wacky Muslims."
Dear sweet God. I dare you to come up with any measure by which to evaluate the irony of those sentences. It's not just irony, it's Irony!, with an exclamation point, like Jeb! or Cher! It's a oil-drenched gusher of Irony!. It's a double-barrel shotgun of Irony!. It's Irony! as performance art, as crack cocaine, as an Irony! Ham Sandwich in the most blistering famine-choked deserts of Africa.
Seriously... is it a joke? Is he pulling a fast one on his readers?
Dammit, I like Orson Scott Card's work. I've read his books. I have no interest in slighting the guy. But this particular piece demonstrates -- spectacularly -- how utterly, mindbendingly irrational some in the conservative movement are when it comes to viewing reality through anything resembling an objective lens, and for that, it's worth reading in full.
I swear, I can't wait to hear about Harry Potter, in a few weeks. I'm sure the new installment of that hellspawn pagan anti-Bush screed will get everyone really worked up.