nuance

Reading about Olbermann's so-called apology I am reminded once again of the big difference between rich and poor this election cycle.

Those who benefit from this difference typically call it "nuance".

I call it what happens when powerful people are given the unlimited right to translate what other powerful people "really meant", for the purposes of manipulating the perceptions of less-powerful people.

The point is to justify what ordinarily would not be excused, of course.

No matter what comes out of someone's mouth, it can be argued that this isn't what he really meant - or, failing that, they can find some reason why the person is entitled to behave badly or say crazy things.

Strip away arguments about gender or race for a minute and you can see power being used according to rules no one would accept if the rules weren't deliberately being obscured. This sort of "nuance" involves the deliberate blurring of boundaries and categories, so as to confuse actions and relationships. The point of it is to get fuzzy about issues of responsibility.

For instance, Rev. Wright gets to say whatever he wants, however politically poisonous, because in the 1950s life was really bad for people like him. (And, anyway, we explained what he really meant. You gotta understand. Context. Context.)

How can you criticize what Rev. Wright said when Obama is our first black Presidential candidate and he explained it all on a great landmark speech about race?

And so on.

So it says in the news that Olbermann didn't mean to suggest offing anyone. I paused. I read. I came away convinced of the man's insincerity - I don't believe he's really apologizing for anything. Let other people explain what he meant.

But I did stop and check it out. I did say, whoa, maybe I was unfair. I am not so convinced of the man's guilt that I will not hear new evidence. Did I misunderstand?

The problem is, there was no new evidence. Nothing he said changed anything. He meant to say the world would be better off if this person were murdered and that is what he did. He meant to make Clinton smaller and weaker and vulnerable, and he did. He meant to convey a certain contempt for the decent and civilized processes by which we solve problems, suggesting instead that we should just go the short easy route and use brute force to get our way. The arguments for whether this is or isn't sexist are not what interest me here (though the arguments never hinged on what pronoun you used anyway, Mr. Olbermann).

This exposes a real gap between them and myself. They like to take spin and make things okay. It's not such a big deal if Obama hangs out with with guys who bombed the Pentagon. It's not such a big deal if Olbermann issues some sort of fatwah on Hillary Clinton.

People who actually have to pay the price when there are consequences call this "moral relativism" (or in the more rural areas it's called "what's wrong with them God-damned liberals"). It is a bad thing because it leads to people getting hurt. It leads away from the sort of world where people can assume other people are basically decent and trustworthy. It leads to deterioration of entire neighborhoods. It turns our good children into the sort of adults who get into trouble, real trouble.

Because, of course, it's all about class - poor people just don't get away with the stuff rich people get away with. Look at the uproar when Frey was caught exaggerating on A Million Little Pieces, and then compare that with how the wealthy get to behave - what's a little lie here or there? (Make no mistake: what the Frey uproar was about was class - someone trying to move up in the world was found unworthy. That he was also handy as a scapegoat for a nation increasingly enraged at moral relativism was just a bonus.)

This is the mechanism by which real justice is replaced with cliques and in-groups. It is what we call 'socialization' when we are explaining why people should not be allowed to homeschool their children.

People outside of the clique might be hammered for lying about Bosnia, while in-crowd boys are not hammered when they claim their parents met at Selma (of course he was just trying to cement his credentials with a certain crowd, don't you know?) But tomorrow Clinton could be 'in' while Obama is 'out' - it's all about who has power.

It is the opposite of one standard, consistently enforced - which is the basis of equality.

In the real world, you can't have 'anything goes' - if people disobey the rules, then rules don't mean anything, and what you get is 'crime and blight' (which liberals tell us is just a code word for race - apparently they think that crime is an essential part of being black).

Some of us were raised by mommas who didn't fall for those tricks - we learned from our mommas that when someone gets busted, they're busted. That's not just how the world works, but how it ought to work, because it's fair and because it keeps things peaceful. For those of us with such mommas, there are only two ways out of being busted:

1. new evidence proves the original charge was unfair (conviction overturned on appeal); or
   
   
2. new reasoning persuades or proves that the rules were bad rules to begin with and need fixing
   

That latter point is what happened when Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke. People realized that the rules we were living with were bad rules - sometimes rules really need to be changed. Sometimes people really do grow, and so do societies.

But Olbermann broke rules that don't need fixing. Our society would not be a better place if the discourse were lowered to the point where it became clearly okay to talk that sort of trash.

What you don't see on that list of ways to get out of being busted is
(3) nuance. That is not because poor people aren't sophisticated enough to understand the concept. It's just that we tend to think "nuance" is why liberals are responsible for screwing up this country in the first place. It wasn't their soaring goals of equality for everyone. It was their nasty habit of 'nuancing' criminals right on out of jail.