Sunday, June 14, 2009

Further adventures in the land of let’s pretend

I went off on a ramble about pretending a few weeks ago in commenting on Bill Moyer’s interview with David Simon.

The Holocaust Museum shooting this week made me think about pretending from a different angle—from the vantage point of conservatives who deny the evidence of systemic failures all around us. A thread runs through the thinking of a lot of political conservatives:

- The angry lone nut shooter isn’t influenced by the angry right mob
- Bernie Madoff is a bad apple; there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with Wall Street
- Abu Ghraib minders were just bad apples

Systems failure is way too scary to contemplate. If patterns seem to emerge, the safest course of action is to look away so you can pretend it isn’t there. 

The Tea Partiers aren’t revolutionaries. Everything is just fine, or it would be if we could cycle back to 80s Reagan ideas, and deal with those pesky bad apples one on one.