perfidy

On a related tangent to my last post, I'd like to offer a few thoughts on discourse. The way I see it, there are two ways to argue. One is through fair debate. The other is through vicious ad hominem shouting matches. I've noticed lately that the ad hominem shouting matches are becoming many people's preferred method of disagreement. May I say, here in the little corner of the world where Mr. Two-Cents and Mr. Head have graciously allowed me some semi-public statement space, that ad hominem shouting doesn't get us anywhere.

I've been watching Bill Maher's HBO television program, Real Time, regularly lately. Maher, in his new HBO format, often has intelligent guests who present well-reasoned arguments, or at least thoughtful, usually with a cross section of left, right, and center. Some of his guests, however, quickly abandon the notion of discourse and go right to the ad hominem with a psychotic glean in their eye. Recently, he had a writer named Ann Coulter on his show. In my opinion, Ms. Coulter is a strong proponent of ad hominem shouting.

Here's my thing. Ms. Coulter has advocated the murder of 3,000+ Muslims to avenge the attacks of 11 September 2001. Few people in the United States, with the exception of looney tunes wackos (thus I'm going ad hominem over discourse) would argue that there was any thing positive about those attacks. People died. For no reason. It was horrible. There's another one of those events that toss moral relativism out the window. But how in the hell can the murder of thousands more innocents improve the situation?Isn't it better if no one else dies because of that shit? I'm sure few people have taken this seriously, but it's still not a good suggestion.

Ms. Coulter is also at work on a new book arguing that people who protested the war with Iraq are traitors. That is not the case. The Supreme Court long ago determined that treason was an act, not a statement. A person has to attempt to overthrow the government or give aid and comfort to enemies in time of war to be guilty of treason. I believed the war was unjustified, and I said so, publicly. A tiny little statement of protest. It doesn't mean I'm a traitor. If Hussein was sleeping on the futon in my living room and I harbored him, then it can go to court.

But back to my original point. On Maher's show, Coulter stated, to paraphrase, that liberals (current American sense) are a bunch of whiners. In one of her books, Coulter argued that liberals tell lies about conservatives and that liberals suck. Well, we all let our passions and beliefs get the better of us and we engage in this sort of ad hominem shouting match strategy. I've done it. Two paragraphs ago. But to offer a bit of unsolicited constructive criticism, Buckethead did it in writing that, "When Congress passed the welfare reform act back in 96, the left was having fits of apoplexy, crying and whining that we would have children starving to death because of the callousness and heartlessness of Republicans." He simultaneously pointed out that the left (though I will state that this is a very broad stroke, as I am okay with welfare reform since it is supposed to provide assistance and then get people back on their feet and working) was engaging in the same sort of ad hominem shouting. One more clarification, those members of the left who said what Buckethead correctly said they said, were some members of America's left-of-center aggregate. Not the whole goup. One more more clarification, to be fair, Buckethead was probably doing so for the sake of brevity.

But back to the main point, one of my professors at Duquesne, where I got my MA, argued that in a two party system, the parties are often defined by their opposition to each other. Shouting matches become the primary method of disagreement. That's where we are in America. We're just screaming at each other. "You're stupid!" one side says. "You're stupider!" insists the other side. "Oh yeah, well you're stupiderer!" responds the first. That needs to change. No good can come of it. Buckethead, you make good points about welfare reform and social security. Those programs need to be reconfigured to work better. Let me offer an apology for those times I engaged in the ad hominem shouting method. That was wrong.

Many thanks to my friend Tim Lacy, who with a very brief statement helped me fine tune this thought that's been running around my head.