In another elegant essay that goes right to the heart of the matter the Belmont Club discusses the flap over Kerry's Vietnam record (not so much the medals as the whole thing, including his after-service statements and the Christmas-in-Cambodia-Magic-Hat story) in terms of an "undercard" conflict between powers and institutions that will ultimately constitute our "unelected government." The penultimate and final graphs:
So when the Swiftvets story shouldered its way into the public consciousness despite the best efforts of the "gatekeepers" to consign it to oblivion, it posed an existential challenge to the news foundries. For where one could come, more would follow. The Mainstream Media responded to accusations by Swiftvets that Kerry had misrepresented his combat record in Vietnam by creating their own alternative news object, whose methods were restricted to OutrageAgainstBush( ) and SympathyForKerry( ), with read only properties Responsible and Respectable. They could no longer block the data, but they could still transform it.Yet for good or ill, the genie is out of the bottle. Before the Gutenberg printing press men knew the contents of the Bible solely through the prism of the professional clergy, who could alone afford the expensively hand copied books and who exclusively interpreted it. But when technology made books widely available, men could read the sacred texts for themselves and form their own opinions. And the world was never the same again.
One must hope that if the Civil Society of the first world, and therefore of Liberalism 2.x, is undergoing a genuine Reformation of the sort that Wretchard suggests the same will reach into the heart of God 3.0's realm and somehow manage to transform it into God 3.1, with room for Liberalism and no room for the latest bastard offspring of unreformed religion and under-examined counter-enlightenment philosophy.
Update: And WaPo finally gets the story right: it's not about the medals.
Posted by Demosophist at August 24, 2004 03:12 PM | TrackBack