On False Equivalency, by Elayne Riggs

I was but a wee babe in the ‘60s, and I don’t really remember JFK’s assassination, or his brother’s, or King’s. I don’t think we had separate drinking fountains for black and white kids in New Jersey. But I remember racism. Anti-Semitism affected me directly (we were the only Jewish family in a heavily Catholic neighborhood) but, as our suburb became integrated and I was best buddies with a black boy, the jeers of racists were never far behind. Prejudice is kinda hard to forget, too, since it never went away.

Granted, everyone may be a little bit racist or sexist or homophobic. But there’s a difference, to my mind, between folks who need to work a bit more on their white or male or hetero privilege and people who wallow in it, who wear their ignorance proudly like a badge of honor. It’s like the difference between what superhero comics fans used to understand as the good guys and the bad guys. We read how the bad guys could fool some of the sheeple some of the time, but at heart they were just plain rotten because they had no moral core. And it was understood that they were not to be emulated nor aspired to and that there was a clear delineation between them and the “do-gooders.” This was in the days before do-gooders apparently became boring and passé.

I think the McCain campaign is counting on the American public to forget that he and his boring, passé do-gooder opponent are vying for a position that will affect millions of real lives very deeply, and pretend instead that they’re voting for the American Idol who will best kick ass and take names (especially yours, which reminds the government that they’d like to thank our fine troops so much for all their wonderful phone sex conversations!). Perhaps they reason that, since the whole Wild West schtick worked so well for the caricature currently occupying the White House, the same script can be retooled for the “James Garner He’s Not” Maverick and Sancho Bimbo — no wait, that’s Bible Spice — no sorry, I meant to say Caribou Barbie. Frontierswoman with a gun! And a helicopter! And golly gee, she knows how ta use ‘em, winkety wink!

But for some reason (maybe a series of cascading wake-up calls from 9-11 to Iraq to Katrina to Abu Ghraib to Wall Street etc. etc.), the vast majority of the voting public seemed to tire of that quickly, as the enormity of the financial hole we’ve bored for ourselves and much of the rest of the world started to set in. For many people it’s possible to ignore “all that political stuff” (especially when much of it involves foreign countries and you’ve been raised in an America First and Only xenophobic atmosphere) as long as you’re able to feed your family and pay your bills. Suddenly when you can’t, “kitchen table” issues become mighty important, and fiction is again relegated to its proper place.

Unfortunately, for a select few, this lizard-brained mentality still doesn’t recede even in the face of more important matters. If anything, they seem to sink deeper into fantasy, and woe betide the sensible citizen who questions any part of that fantasy (whether it’s We’re Number One or Our God Can Beat Up Your God or I Yearn For A Time When Bitches and Fags and N-words Knew Their Place). Fantasy is safe and comforting and knowable. Reality is risky and scary and improvised. Quick, get us rewrite!

And thus we see the worst elements of the McCain/Palin camp and their camp followers trying to spice things up a bit with good old-fashioned racism and red-baiting, the kind that never goes out of style in some parts of this fine country. And because it’s been the Republican MO these past two terms (okay, these past 38 years but who’s counting?) to immediately accuse (i.e., the lie that goes halfway around the world) your opponent of doing what you yourself have done before the initial truth about your own questionable actions can get out, the media is spoon-fed these little nuggets of grade-school “he does it too!” false equivalency designed to bring the good guys down to the bad guys’ level and foster an atmosphere of futility and hopelessness. After all, what’s the point of trying to effect change when both candidates are rotten to the core?

Well, because they’re usually not. There are usually degrees and nuances of “rottenness” beyond the superficial. Shouts of “[he’s a] terrorist!” and “kill him!” directed against the mention of Obama’s name at the McCain and Palin Nuremberg rallies are not the same thing at all as Palin getting booed at a Philadelphia hockey game even though she dressed her 8-year-old daughter in a Flyers jersey in a self-admitted attempt to stave off the hostility. "But what I thought I’d do is I’d put Piper in a Flyers jersey, bring her out with me. How dare they boo Piper!" she wailed, pretty much confessing the cynical, calculated move to make herself look good at the cost of possibly traumatizing her young campaign-prop daughter. It looks a lot more like this sort of thinking is what got her booed in the first place, rather than some fantasy of liberals being big ol’ meanies with filthy mouths.

But the hammering continues, on the Rovian theory that if you repeat a lie to the media often enough it becomes the truth even in the face of overwhelming facts to the contrary. (Yes, I know variations on the expression “A lie repeated often enough becomes the truth” have been attributed to Lenin, Goebbels and even Hitler, but Rove has really perfected their vision in the age of 24-hour news networks and the blogosphere.) My favorite TV pundit, Rachel Maddow, was flabbergasted on Monday that Sarah Palin outright lied about the findings of the Republican-led Alaskan commission that found her guilty of abuse of power and unethical behavior. Over and over she crowed about how delighted she was that the commission cleared her, even though it did just the opposite.

Although another current popular target for the Republicans, ACORN is hardly rotten. While I’m delighted that this well-respected community activist organization (which I first heard about years ago when they were helping build low-income housing) has been thrust into the public eye enough for millions of thinking people to check out their website for themselves and give their good works a nice boost, I’m of course disappointed about the way it happened, with the Republicans accusing ACORN of doing the exact opposite of what they actually did. ACORN registered tons of low-income people to vote, flagged every single problematic registration they had to submit by law, and when election officials said “hey, these are bad registrations!” ACORN replied “Yes, we told you that” and showed them the paperwork proving it and suddenly Republicans started crying “voter fraud!” It’s worth remembering, once again, that voter fraud is precisely the sort of thing the Republicans are guilty of in truth, rather than merely by accusation. Again, the current MO: Do something bad. Accuse your opponent of doing the same thing, even (especially) when they’ve done the opposite. Lie about your wrongdoing, and/or encourage the media to engage in false equivalency so voters will wind up confused or disgusted with the whole process. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

In countless superhero stories Our Hero is falsely accused by a bad guy who sets him or her up for a fall then replaces him or her in the public’s fickle taste. I can only surmise that, sometime in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, a number of the more macho-thinking comic writers got so frustrated with the way they felt the good guys kept being played for patsies (i.e., the modern man’s worst nightmare, being made to look impotent or, heaven forfend, womanly) that they turned them just a little bad. Jimmy Carter was sneered at for being too contemplative in the White House Rose Garden, so in rode the macho Ronald Reagan to save the day with his folksie anecdotes and early-onset dementia and trickle-down-upon-the-poor-while-the-rich-get-richer economic theories and pretty much set the ball rolling on our current income-disparity crisis. But gosh, wasn’t he the Great Communicator! After all, for every good guy gone bad, for every World’s Greatest Detective become the Goddamn Dark Night, there must be an equivalent bad guy who actually means well in his own head and who’s to say the Joker’s any less sane than the rest of us who might judge him too hastily?

And so the fictional line between good and evil gets blurred, but not necessarily in a good way. More in a macho way, so that all the male characters can metaphorically retain their never-seen testicles. Heroism is redefined as a Make-Believe Maverick, a “mean little fucker” so nasty and misogynist that he got hauled into court for excessive profanity. (Don’t forget, profanity is okie-dokey when a conservative uses it but is only strongly indicative of hate-speech when employed by liberals.) And his Strong Female Character running mate is a woman in high heels who can wield a gun as she stands by her man fighting the forces of truth.

Because truth itself is boring. Truth is hard to sort out, because it often contains complexity and nuance. It’s even harder to draw. Come on, make an exciting-looking comic out of all those Guantanamo prosecutors resigning because they consider personal integrity more important than keeping their jobs. Inject some visual pizzazz into a reformed Bill Ayers working with a Republican-led educational foundation with which Barack Obama was also involved without talking about Ayers’ dangerous past forty-plus years ago, I dare you. Good luck with that one.

Conflict creates drama. Blurred lines and false equivalency make everyone seem the same, so that it doesn’t matter for whom we vote, and thus voting becomes a popularity contest won by the more exciting candidate. Barack Obama is an even-tempered Superman type, a boring old Boy Scout. McCain’s the goddamned Batman, the unbalanced antihero who treats everyone like poop he just scraped off his shoe but it’s okay because he’s the GDB and wow, get a look at his running mate’s ass!

I swear, I don’t want to believe the Republican presidential campaign is being scripted by Frank Miller, but sometimes I wonder.

Elayne Riggs blogs at Pen-Elayne on the Web and has just been to see a new primary care physician (what we used to call "family doctors" in the old days), an expert in diabetes management among other things, who called her yesterday afternoon with the news that she does not, in fact, have diabetes at present. She’s wondering if that makes her last column moot, or if the condition comes and goes…