Agreeing to Be Agreeable

David Kahane promises a new tone of sweetness and light.

His Exalted Majesty Barack Hussein Obama II, Lord of the Flies, Keeper of the Hoops, and Protector of the Holy Cities of Honolulu and Chicago, is right. It’s time for a new tone. A kinder, gentler tone, just like the one Daddy Bush was talking about right around the time he tried to upend Saddam Hussein back in the day. A tone of sweet reasonableness, of civility in the way we interact with each other, an Athenian level discourse that would make Pericles proud.

If only you bastards would let us do it.

Taking my cue from such exemplars as Reps. Jim Clyburn of South Carolina and Robert Brady of Pennsylvania, I’m talking about a whole new way to look at political speech, one that combines First Amendment protections — which of course we could not possibly respect more — with a living-and-breathing constitutional view that above all prizes personal responsibility for public utterances, lest some wingnut loon or right-wing goon be driven into a homicidal fit of rage by Sarah Palin’s recipe for moose stew.

In other words, shut the hell up.

Yes, my brothers and sisters in Gaia, we men of the Left are hereby calling on you to police yourselves, beginning with the penumbrically emanating thoughts that originate within your brains (if you can call them “brains” — we need to see your advanced degrees from Columbia and Harvard). For we are so exquisitely sensitive that the pitiful waves of what you call ratiocination fly directly from your frontal lobes to Paul Krugman’s ears, driving the poor man to fits at the typewriter. Even if, mercifully, we can’t hear you, we know that you’re “thinking” and, worse, we know exactly what you’re thinking.

You miserable sodding savages.

You see, my beloved amigos across the aisle, we’ve got you all sussed out. We understand, far better than you, what animates you. We sense the dark and stormy nights of your souls, your inchoate, racist agita over our First Black President if you don’t count Billy Jeff Blythe III, your love of corporate plutocrats and your sheer loathing for the Little Guy, whom you would like to see ripped to pieces by the Thracian women, rent asunder by rabid weasels and forced to read Atlas Shrugged in its entirety, including the John Galt speech. We know you secretly root for Gradgrind and Naptha, whereas we are partial to Mrs. Jellyby and Settembrini. Or maybe it’s the other way around, whatever; in the Berghof that is the Hollywood Hills, even us A-list writers only read coverage, Cliff’s Notes, and Wikipedia.

You, of course, can’t read at all, which is why you’re so easily swayed by the simpleton musings of Sarah Palin, who is a bona fide moron and a blithering idiot who can’t tell crosshairs from surveyor’s marks.

We, on the other hand, are motivated by one of the highest values in our values canon, compassion. Right up there with Fairness and Tolerance, Compassion is, as you know, the thing that makes us feel really, really comfortable with ourselves; after all, living in Brentwood and Beverly Hills, we don’t have many opportunities to exhibit compassion in our daily lives, except when some sonofabitch blocks us from making the left-turn light at Wilshire and Santa Monica and we just smile and wave. I myself, living in my palatial pad in Echo Park, am made of even sterner stuff: I encounter dozens of compassionate opportunities every day, including the homeless undocumented immigrants coagulating down by the taco stands on Sunset, but I pass them by in favor of a more nuanced, abstract compassion. Call it dispassionate compassion since, like the great Martha Gellhorn, I love humanity — it’s just people I can’t stand.

The rest here.