Of course, he’s only doing this before he’s “outed” by Hollywood watchdogs. Who he doubtless feared would post pictures of him on the net engaging in gay sex, his gay porn COCK OF LIES fairly screaming its erect guilt reading some Edmund Burke or, god forfend, maybe even a Bible.
Anyway, let’s not question his motives. Instead, let’s just read what the degenerate poser—writer Andrew Klavan (Don’t Say a Word, True Crime)—has to say for himself:
The thing I like best about being a conservative is that I don’t have to lie. I don’t have to pretend that men and women are the same. I don’t have to declare that failed or oppressive cultures are as good as mine.
Nor do I have to say that everyone’s special or that the rich cause poverty or that all religions are a path to God. I don’t have to claim that a bad writer like Alice Walker is a good one or that a good writer like Toni Morrison is a great one. I don’t have to pretend that Islam means peace.
Of course, like everything, this candor has its price. A politics that depends on honesty will be, by nature, often impolite. Good manners and hypocrisy are intimately intertwined, and so conservatives, with their gimlet-eyed view of the world, are always susceptible to charges of incivility. It’s not really nice, you know, to describe things as they are.
This is leftism’s great strength: It’s all white lies.
[…] because it depends on  indeed is defined by  describing the human condition inaccurately, leftism is nothing if not polite. With its tortuous attempts to rename unpleasant facts out of existence  he’s not crippled, dear, he’s handicapped; it’s not a slum, it’s an inner city; it’s not surrender, it’s redeployment  leftism has outlived its own failure by hiding itself within the most labyrinthine construct of social delicacy since Victoria was queen.
This is no small thing. To rewrite the rules of courteous behavior is to wield enormous power. I see it in Southern California, in the bleeding heart of leftism, where I live. I’ve been banned from my monthly poker game, lost tennis partners, lost friends  not because I’m belligerent but because I’ve wondered aloud if the people shouldn’t be allowed to make their own abortion laws, say, or if the world might not be a better place without the United Nations.
It’s a rotten feeling. I sometimes think that I’d rather be deemed evil than a boor. Wickedness has some flair to it, even a whiff of radicalism. If you molest a child, there’s always a chance that you can get the ACLU to defend you as a cultural innovator.
But if you make a remark at table about the destructive social effects of broken homes and then discover that your dinner partner is a divorcee  trust me, you feel like a real louse. It’s manners, not morals, that lay the borderlines of our behavior.
This, I believe, is the reason conservative politicians so often lose their nerve, why they back down in debate even when they’re clearly right. No one wants to be condemned as a brute  especially not conservatives, who still retain some vague memory of how worthy it is to be a lady or gentleman.
And because we’ve allowed leftists to define the language of political good manners  don’t say women are less scientific; don’t remark that black people bear the same responsibility for their actions as whites; don’t point out that the gunman was a Muslim, it’s not nice  the sort of person willing to speak the truth isn’t always the sort of person you want to be seen with.
Indeed.
As I noted the other day, Harry Reid is being pilloried by his own side of late not for his belief but rather for his candor. For progressives, everything is about appearances. Straight-talking is only useful when the people are calling for a straight-talker; the rest of the time, politically correctness and a pander to identity politics is what wins over the leadership of grievance groups, who in turn deliver votes by recommending candidates to their identity group constituencies.
In fact, the only “group” worthy of being spoken of with disdain and vitriol is the “remainders”—those who oppose the strained political correctness of the progressive movement and who eschew identity politics for the politics of individualism and individual freedom.
This “group,” insofar as its ideas represent a threat to the voter-bloc politics of the left—that is, insofar as it refuses to buy into the progressive narrative of proper governance—is fair game for vicious attacks and, as Klavan makes clear on the micro level, even “shunning,” precisely the thing that Mona, Greenwald(s), and Firedoglake, et al., call for in the treatment of “neocons” who they systematically attempt to dehumanize (even as they strain to put the most sympathetic face on criminals, terrorists, and any other group they can “explain” by way of some slapdash pet sociological or psychological theory).
The irony being that the enemy, under this dynamic, becomes social dissent—the very thing “progressives” pride themselves on championing. The free-exchange of ideas is less a virtue than a hindrance to the progressive narrative, and so it must be snuffed out.
Or at the very least, relegated to free speech zones. Don’t want to be seen as opponents of free speech, after all. Bad form. Not good for appearances.
Concludes Klavan:
Still, mannerly as we would rather be, truth-telling continues to be both compelling and ultimately satisfying. There is, after all, something greater than courtesy.
“Firmness in the right,” Lincoln called it, “as God gives us to see the right.”
We find ourselves at a precarious moment in an endeavor of great importance: namely, the preservation of Western rationalism and liberty. It does mankind no good to allow so magnificent an enterprise to slip away merely for fear of saying the wrong thing.
It does mankind no good, certainly. But in the short term, it fits the agenda of progressivism—which presumes to know best which fruits of rationalism can be countenanced (and which need be obfuscated, repudiated, or shouted down), and just how much liberty should be doled out to the proles it pretends to champion.
Service the narrative. Police it.
And—well, you’re beginning to catch on, I think…
(h/t Major John)
*****
related: David Thompson, “Prejudice Revisited”—which contains a very nice excerpt from Tom Paine.
Rosie should hire this guy for whatever her next project is. I bet they’d have a lot of stupid things to shout at each other.
Appearances-centrism, Edmund Burke, and the Trooth servicing the GPCoL—if I may paraphrase—all in one post.
This is a good day.
Matt Stone and Trey Parker of Southpark fame had a similar take on what it takes to be “punk rock” in LA these days. This is a bit paraphrased, but they said that in LA it used to be you were punk rock if you were an anti-establishment anarchist. Now the most punk rock thing you can do is go to a party and say “Well, I don’t know about his policies, but that George Bush is one smart guy”.
My how times have changed.
Dressed as NINJAS!
I’d like to comment on this post, but I want to use a lot of words, the meaning of which I’ve changed. And that takes a lot of effort and I’m just too busy right now.
On a positive note, it looks like we don’t have to pretend that Asians aren’t smarter than us anymore.
At the Lushan party conference – when I openly criticized the Great Leap Forward – I felt like a conservative. I had became deeply disturbed by the use of politics, particularly political maxims, to substitute for economic and social mores. Mores that had guided my people for thousands of years.
Our Party enthusiastically jumped into collectivism based on political themes, and subsequently killed many millions of people.
For voicing these conservative concerns, I along with many Chinese patriots was deposed during the Cultural Revolution when correct political speech became the norm.
Do you still live in China?
My soul will always in China reside . . . .
. . . but I read protein wisdom everday.
Here is a nice example… local NPR host Pat Morrison, self-appointed arbiter of rationalism, today deems “wise” the sentiment that on September 11, Bush exemplified “cowardice.”
Here’s a taste:
Straight-talking is only useful when the people are calling for a straight-talker;
Homophobe!
It does mankind no good, certainly.
Sexist!
Greenwald(s)
Unitarian!
Police it.
Fascist!
slapdash pet sociological or psychological theory
Zoophobe!
There. I’ve just obviated the need for trolls.
Sorry –
here’s a link
Trollophobe!
Gives me the niiiiice bright colors
Gives the greeeeens of summer
Makes me think alllll—?
[…]
What? Isn’t that the name of that song?
Mama, don’t take my trollophobe away.
Mama, don’t let your babies – grow up to be trollophobes.
They’ll prob’ly kill Ay-Rabs and pee in their backyard creek.
Mama, don’t let your babies – grow up to be trollophobes.
Cuz gun totin’ yahoos don’t like to be told how to breath.
Now pass over that big fattie, Ernest…
Old Joke: What has a hundred legs and 5 teeth?
Front row of a Willie Nelson Concert…
BJTexas. Dang! You mean somebody brought their good eatin’ teeth to a Willie Nelson concert…?
Jeff, fine observations. This is PoliSci day, I guess.
Candor is a virtue, inasmuch as it immediately signals to others what your stance or opinion is on a given matter. However, just because someone is straightforward doesn’t mean they have a lock on the truth, as Klavan implies. “I don’t have to declare that failed or oppressive cultures are as good as mine.”—I know there’s a rhetorical term that applies, but I’m years out of the academy, so I’ll just call it the Fallacy of the Foregone Conclusion.
And “It’s not really nice, you know, to describe things as they are.” No, of course it’s not nice; but it’s a proven fact that women suck at science (along with all the other attendant assumptions), so why shouldn’t you be able to proclaim this openly and without question, dammit?
I’m not a big fan of PC, because I don’t like hushed tones and mincing around a point. I criticise Harry Reid and his whole “this war is lost” crap because he is not an authority, simply. He can bitch and moan about any aspect, just like I do, just like repubs can counter, because public discourse is an open marketplace.
Klavan is appropriating ownership of the truth, whatever that is. Jeff is extending that fallacy to create some hybrid underclass that somehow must offend an imaginary leftist rush week mentality. They bristle at anyone who reveals their secret tweaking of the sacred output knobs of the public opinion boombox. Not buying it.
cynn, being a conservative, however tempered, in a liberal environment and industry has very real implications. Klavan’s piece is more a warning than a proscription, but if there is a proscriptive aspect, it’s that individual integrity matters.
happyfeet: A warning against what? Politcal Correctness is also a product of the right, who undergoes a chronic seizure to reign in some of its ugliest stepchildren.
My brain asplode.
I love it when you talk dirty.
BECAUSE OF THE SECRET TWEAKING !!!
Klavan is a successful screenwriter, so it’s easy to overlook how the impacts he cite (“monthly poker game, lost tennis partners, lost friends…”) might be rather more severe in their implications for, say, a production assistant or the guy who took an entry-level job doing pr for a new entertainment website. Even without wearing your politics on your sleeve, silences do not go unnoted or unremarked in Hollywood, and leaving a googleable record of donations or activism would be extremely foolish. It’s “nothing personal” much of the time, not necessarily as tangible as the impacts cited by Klavan, but the very real issue is one of trustworthiness amongst people that are already extremely unembracing of the concept. It can be dealt with, and people can be assuaged and charmed (and flattered), but if a right-leaning person doesn’t have his eyes wide open, good freaking luck, boy-o. It also can be significantly countered if you are solidly good-looking.
Sacred output knobs? How freaking Freudian can you get?!?
Seriously, though, cynn, I think the assertion that conservatives are “appropriating ownership of the truth” in HOLLYWOOD of all freaking places is so far over the top that it’s skidded down past the tree line, over the foothills, into the delta and settled nicely at the edge of the continental shelf.
What I basically saw in your post, fallible interpretations being all the rage in human history, was the rather risible contention that the right is somehow UNIQUELY BAD in claiming that it’s telling the truth and the other side is lying, as opposed to the left, who do the same thing, just through megaphones and with huge special effects budgets and LOTS OF FREE PRESS COVERAGE.
It does sound rather like, assuming the best case for your side, the pot calling the spatula a cooking implement.
Do not forget sloshy, damn you. I demand my due.
happyfeet, are you in that shitty industry? Get out at once.
there’s in and then there’s in, cynn.
Evidence would be nice.
Well, let’s say you’re the president of a prestigious Ivy League University. And let’s suppose that you’re leading a discussion regarding why women don’t partake in your hard science programs to the extent that men do. And let’s say that you’re looking for a way to change or at least understand that phenomenon. And let’s say you suggest that innate differences between men and women might lead to a lower female interest in those sciences.
How long do you think it would take for the knives to come out, cynn?
Answer: < 2 days.
That bastard Summers obviously killed her with his loose, misogynistic tongue.
So that’s why, cynn. If those stupid men would just keep their big fat mouths shut, we wouldn’t have to repair enormous holes in San Francisco sidewalks. Ixnay on the iologicalbay ifferencesday!
Because, I’m sure, a lot of those university administrators who approved speech codes within the last twenty years were conservatives.
And I’m sure you’ll bend over backwards to point out the “chronic seizure to reign in” the right-wing politician who went on national teevee talking about “white niggers” within the last decade or so.
Oh, wait…
Remember: Josef Stalin and Mao Zhedong(?) were listed as “conservatives” in one of those studies trying to prove anyone with right wing views was insane, loved dictators, etc.
Dear Peng Dehuai,
How have you been? What have you been up to lately?
BRD