When I used to go out and engage people regularly who hated me, I got insulted a lot. It doesn’t bother me. I still have a friend on Facebook who told me to “go fuck myself”. Whatever. I get hot on occasion too, although I don’t think I’ve ever said that to anyone. I say the same thing in 30 words.
Anyway, my favorite insult ever was from either a grad student or professor at Vanderbilt University (which is a good school), who called me a “conserveretard toon”.
It made me think about cartoonish thinking. So often what we see floating around in people’s brains seems two-dimensional. Further: the obvious thing about cartoons is that they are coherent in their broad outlines, but lacking in detail. They are big on emotion, and movement, but short on the little stuff. They don’t move like real objects move. Anything is possible. A safe can land on your head, and you just get flattened.
I don’t want to make a long post of this, but it seems to me this is a trait of people like Van Jones who have very simplistic, Manichean views of the world, and solutions which amount to jumping over a building in a single bound. To say they are unrealistic is to claim that the people holding such views even WANT to live in the real world. They don’t. Everything is simple and neat and tidy where they live. This is the faculty lounge, where all the ghettoes need is more money, and where all our problems can be fixed just by asking for more money from the “rich people”–other rich people, to be clear, if we are talking Hollywood folks, or really fat, gross people who wear ballcaps.
But cartoons have consequences. Take any Communist nation shortly after the coup which put the Party in power. If you disagree with ANYTHING, you are a class traitor, or a Trotskyite, or bourgeois cockroach. It can be the silliest thing. Maybe you suggest that the Party could bring water to town in buckets rather than teacups. Concentration camp for you, insect.
People are viewed as these little cartoon sketches, whose whole beings can be reduced to a few lines drawn by a not-very-skillful artist.
Rich thinking has a robust structure, but permits for ENDLESS detail and concrete contextual variation. If I reject racism, do I perforce have to believe that all members of other races are virtuous? Of course not. I just have to judge them as individuals.
There is no structural difference between the cartoon pictures the Nazis created of the Jews (presumably this included literal cartoons), and those created by Communists of the bourgeoisie and Capitalists. There have been times and places where if you owned 2 cattle, or a nice teapot, or a small mill, then you were branded evil and shot.
This is ludicrous in the extreme, particularly when exhibited in people, academics, who are more or less professional thinkers. It is malpractice.