The Los Angeles Times' conservative columnist Jonah Goldberg began his lecture Wednesday night by dispelling the notion that he was a humorist. He then went on to tell a joke.
He seemed unable to elaborate without resorting to humor; kittens were a favorite theme. Apparently, Dick Cheney eats them and rich, environmentally-negligent white men think they're adorable wastes of space. At least, those with "open-toed shoes and closed minds" like to think so. It was a joke about liberals' way of joking.
Interspersed between punch lines was a discussion about Hurricane Katrina, its meaning (or, according to Goldberg, lack thereof), and the media's shamelessly skewed coverage of the disaster. I didn't know what his point was until well into the hour, when he stated his theme for the night, "Liberal Confirmation"; in particular, the way in which this phenomenon, Goldberg's own self-professed theory, can be understood through the paradigmatic event that was Katrina.
He seemed unable to elaborate without resorting to humor; kittens were a favorite theme. Apparently, Dick Cheney eats them and rich, environmentally-negligent white men think they're adorable wastes of space. At least, those with "open-toed shoes and closed minds" like to think so. It was a joke about liberals' way of joking.
Interspersed between punch lines was a discussion about Hurricane Katrina, its meaning (or, according to Goldberg, lack thereof), and the media's shamelessly skewed coverage of the disaster. I didn't know what his point was until well into the hour, when he stated his theme for the night, "Liberal Confirmation"; in particular, the way in which this phenomenon, Goldberg's own self-professed theory, can be understood through the paradigmatic event that was Katrina.
Liberals, he explained, wait breathlessly for a moment like Katrina to come along so that they have an excuse to voice the absurdly irrational conspiracy theories that they so desperately cling to. Then he went down the list of supposed things reported on by the media during Katrina that did not happen. I don't know the facts but if he is correct, if no one did in fact die in the Superdome, then it's true, the media did a great job of misinforming the public.
He veered from the main topic repeatedly, but never without an acknowledgment of his doing so. This self-consciousness seemed to grant him pardon. Truly, Goldberg was at his most honest when he said he pretty much figured that it was "An Hour with Jonah Goldberg". Everything, and at the same time nothing, seemed up for grabs.
Of Course, Goldberg is a quite a speaker. He displayed a serious skill for repartee and anecdote and he had me wondering why, again, I had thought I was outraged at Katrina. Soon he had turned to the issue of race, which, wrongly, I had thought pertinent to the discussion. He made the argument that the reason poor, Black people were disproportionately affected by the hurricane was because New Orleans was a disproportionately poor, Black city, and that this, not any sort of deeply ingrained wrongs in our system, explained all the suffering black faces on our televisions. He said it triumphantly and I admit, convincingly.
As his words lingered, though, their emptiness revealed itself. This was description masquerading as argument. New Orleans is a disproportionately poor, Black city. That's true. But wait. What does that mean for the actual people--the poor and the Black and the others, too--who live there? Was this tragedy really just the bad luck of a coincidentally destitute, minority-filled city? We all understand that randomly terrible things happen worldwide. Was this one of those occurrences or was Katrina attributable to something other than maliciously unpredictable forces?
Goldberg had said something interesting about what he thought explained the irrational behavior of his desperately self-confirming liberals. Almost sympathetically, he said he thought it was a prevailing human instinct to find cause and effect in the world's tragedies. This, he explained, accounts for the religious zeal with which liberals, so sadly human, pursued truths where they didn't exist. The implicit criticism seemed to be that liberals failed to face reality or, at least, to take it seriously.
After the lecture, Goldberg invited questions. Someone asked him what, besides Groundhog's Day, he would qualify as some of the greatest movies of our generation. Another student asked Goldberg if he were willing to be the Conservative answer to Michael Moore. A few questioners merely stated world crises-- Iran, Sudan , oil dependency-- and waited for Goldberg's reply.
At one point, Goldberg separated Liberals and Conservatives into the group that emotes, testifies and hopes versus the group that considers tradeoffs, examines history and makes things happen. When the audience didn't respond to this, he continued by opposing the liberal environmentalist argument with a zealous takedown of Captain Planet, the long-defunct television show. I wondered if Goldberg, by his definition, was a true conservative. He had made a tradeoff, between serious discussion and humor-laden hyperbole. He had examined history, through a television show cancelled before I was in high school. But I'm stumped on the last one. What, exactly, had he made happen?
He veered from the main topic repeatedly, but never without an acknowledgment of his doing so. This self-consciousness seemed to grant him pardon. Truly, Goldberg was at his most honest when he said he pretty much figured that it was "An Hour with Jonah Goldberg". Everything, and at the same time nothing, seemed up for grabs.
Of Course, Goldberg is a quite a speaker. He displayed a serious skill for repartee and anecdote and he had me wondering why, again, I had thought I was outraged at Katrina. Soon he had turned to the issue of race, which, wrongly, I had thought pertinent to the discussion. He made the argument that the reason poor, Black people were disproportionately affected by the hurricane was because New Orleans was a disproportionately poor, Black city, and that this, not any sort of deeply ingrained wrongs in our system, explained all the suffering black faces on our televisions. He said it triumphantly and I admit, convincingly.
As his words lingered, though, their emptiness revealed itself. This was description masquerading as argument. New Orleans is a disproportionately poor, Black city. That's true. But wait. What does that mean for the actual people--the poor and the Black and the others, too--who live there? Was this tragedy really just the bad luck of a coincidentally destitute, minority-filled city? We all understand that randomly terrible things happen worldwide. Was this one of those occurrences or was Katrina attributable to something other than maliciously unpredictable forces?
Goldberg had said something interesting about what he thought explained the irrational behavior of his desperately self-confirming liberals. Almost sympathetically, he said he thought it was a prevailing human instinct to find cause and effect in the world's tragedies. This, he explained, accounts for the religious zeal with which liberals, so sadly human, pursued truths where they didn't exist. The implicit criticism seemed to be that liberals failed to face reality or, at least, to take it seriously.
After the lecture, Goldberg invited questions. Someone asked him what, besides Groundhog's Day, he would qualify as some of the greatest movies of our generation. Another student asked Goldberg if he were willing to be the Conservative answer to Michael Moore. A few questioners merely stated world crises-- Iran, Sudan , oil dependency-- and waited for Goldberg's reply.
At one point, Goldberg separated Liberals and Conservatives into the group that emotes, testifies and hopes versus the group that considers tradeoffs, examines history and makes things happen. When the audience didn't respond to this, he continued by opposing the liberal environmentalist argument with a zealous takedown of Captain Planet, the long-defunct television show. I wondered if Goldberg, by his definition, was a true conservative. He had made a tradeoff, between serious discussion and humor-laden hyperbole. He had examined history, through a television show cancelled before I was in high school. But I'm stumped on the last one. What, exactly, had he made happen?
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