Fiction is a better reality than reality itself

A commenter at 4&20 remarked yesterday

First, jhwyGirl, let me say it is nice to see you back posting again. You seem to be one of the few Bbirders who remembers there are any Montana state elections happening this year.

From there ensued a long thread containing the usual duckspeak. 4&20 is back in business! Prior to now it has been dominated by Lizard, one of a more philosophical bent and who keeps a necessary distance between his writing, poetry and party politics. That does not set well with most, especially in an election year. No doubt readership is way down over there.

Elections matter, to partisans anyway. Democrats and Republicans will draw either validation or disappointment. Winning is all that matters in that sphere. What happens in between cycles draws interest but vanishes in the biennial contests. When the ads are running on the TV screens, that’s reality.

In the meantime … I was remembering this morning a friend of ours in Bozeman who is a retired doctor. We spent a weekend with them, and when we got there he was reading Don Quixote. It wasn’t the first time, he said – perhaps the third. For myself I cannot read fiction. I don’t say that with any pride – the job of the writer of fiction is to describe large reality with small characters. That takes a special intelligence. I could cite great authors like Henry James, but I haven’t read him either. My sphere is hard, cold reality. Our doctor friend, reading Quixote, lives on a higher plane than mine.

This brings to mind the phrase I first encountered maybe twenty years ago … “thought control in democratic societies,” the subtitle of a Chomsky work called “Necessary Illusions,” drawn from the writings of Reinhold Niebuhr. Chomsky was no great admirer of Niebuhr, and from his personal democratic perspective held illusions to be a defect of supposed “democratic societies.” In his ideal world, people have power and exercise control over their lives to the exact degree that public decisions affect their lives. His distaste for Niebuhr was part of a larger dislike of elitism*, and I hold that attitude as well. Most educated people are indeed better educated than me, but also screw up on a much higher plane. Witness our financial meltdown. Witness Iraq. Witness George W. Bush.

Here are two exchanges from yesterday, the first from the post at 4&20 above, where a commenter answers jhwygirls’ post that (finally!) brings partisan politics back to that blog:

On the other side of this two-headed coin you will find more of the same “unethical” behavior. Presenting corruption in a way marginally less offensive to some is somehow preferable? 50% of potential eligible-age participants want no part of this.

jhwygirl’s response could not be more revealing:

You’re not clear in what you’re saying. Can you please be more specifically critical off my critique?

The commenter had gone beyond the realm of partisan politics. jhwygirl was not being snarky. She truly did not understand what he was saying. It is outside her reality – party politics.

Here’s another exchange, this one between me and Tyler Evilsizer, a Democrat who now writes at Intelligent Discontent. He wrote about Montana gubernatorial candidate Rick Hill receiving a huge boost of cash from anonymous sources, probably from out-of-state. I asked him

Just curious, as American party politics is corrupt up, down, over and under both in and out of your state. Under what stretch of logic does “out-of-state” money take on a nastier pall than in-state money? Are you merely saying you prefer local corruption?

Tyler did a bit of a strategic retreat before jumping back into the nonsense:

If Hill is going to owe one-third of his election (and all of his final momentum) to any one source, I prefer it to be a Montanan. It’s not radical to think that the Governor of a state should be responsive to its citizens[**]. Being in the pocket of an In-state megadonor is marginally better than an out-of-state one.

Elections are a necessary illusion. Niebuhr was well-meaning about that. He did not think that ordinary people were capable of governing a country, and so had to be distracted while the business of government was carried on away from the muddle of partisan politics. He did not address, to my knowledge, whether education was a viable alternative to illusions. Other countries, like Cuba and Venezuela, are going down that path. Right now you can bet that Cubans are well-educated (and have good health care and excellent teeth) but there must be quite a few of their own Evilsizers among them too to keep their own set of illusions in force.

Moral superiority is an important feature of our existence. That’s really what Evilsizer was getting at – Democrats are morally superior to Republicans. But consider this: Neocons (Obama is one, if he is anything at all beyond a spellbinder) generally believe that humans become soft in conflict-free environments, and regard ongoing wars as a necessary part of our cleansing***. They regard their thinking as morally superior to those who simply desire peaceful lives. Such softness would lead to our doom, so they are pursuing a greater good. They probably regarded 9/11 as a necessary illusion to keep us in war-making frame of mind – not immoral at all. I regard them as a curse on our existence. I feel moral superiority to them.

What I need now is some really smart dude to point out a work of fiction that says what I just said, and in a far more interesting fashion.
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*At South End Press, which used to publish his books, he was said to be occasionally observed on the business end of a broom.
**Isn’t it interesting here how he conflates “megadonors” and “citizens” of a state?
***This attitude also stems from an odd phenomenon among them – lack of military service.