Only it's not on the radio, the left being rarer on the radio than plate spinners on prime time TV, it's online. The left is almost as rare on the radio and the real left, the one with any prospects of gaining office and changing laws is entirely black listed.
After being alerted by the always alert RMJ to yet another anti-religious, OK, let's stop mincing words, it was an anti-Christian diatribe on Salon, I decided it's well past time to go after this all too common phenomenon. Just as you can count on the Phelps tribe to show up to get them some TV face time when a funeral is announced, you can count on the atheist haters to show up and spew on these cooky-cutter anti-religious posts on blogs and what pathetically passes for magazines online. That, as the always alert RMJ pointed out, they are known as "click bait" guaranteed to run up the hit count on blogs and magazines that carry advertising and so boost income, is not, credibly, a coincidence. Jeffry Tayler's screed asserts to be a list of 15 ways atheists can promote rationality. As Tayler is something of a self-appointed champion of the late Christopher Hitchens and he plasters a photo of Hitchens over his list, anyone who was familiar with his work and valued truth and rationality would at least get a good laugh out of that. The list is as obvious a lazy-assed, deadline filed style knockout that you can see in some of the NYT's more absurd columnists filed after a hard night of bar hopping. Only it's so bad that even Dowd has seldom managed one this bad.
As I said about Alternet a few months back, anti religious hate talk sells for these people. Only the quality of the hate on the pseudo-left isn't any higher than the hate on the real right. It is as superficially motivated and sustained, as geared to as low a caliber of discourse. They are a discourse of unreason posing as enlightenment. Only it's not enlightened, no matter how Bright the atheist ditto heads tell each other they are.
The pseudo-left that has developed online stinks as an intellectual entity. Conceited, bigoted and anti-democratic, it stinks even more as a political movement. You would think that the complete and utter failure of elite based would-be leftists for the past two centuries to capture the hearts and minds of the majority of the natural constituency of a real left, the poor, the destitute, the afflicted, ... that these people who love to believe they are intelligent would look at the history of that political failure and learn from it. Only they haven't and the evidence is that they never will. The revolution will not come from some brilliant atheist who is a big name in the Left Forum, it will come from The People and on the matter of atheism and what it has for them The People have voted with their feet and their votes. Atheism, certainly in the form being promoted by Salon and Alternet and dozens and hundreds of other peudo-leftist sites, is ballot box poison for the real left.
Hitchens famously criticized Mother Teresa, and while I might consider critiques of her support for the status quo of India in some regards, Hitchens was so over the top and vociferous even most of his followers haven't gone there. But it always leaves me wondering: what did Hitchens ever do for the poor, anywhere on the planet? Did he ever put his money where his mouth was? Do something besides type up more of his Oxonian argle-bargle?
ReplyDeleteDorothy Day was a supporter of the Catholic church even as she was a radical Christian; as was Thomas Merton. They didn't write checks with their mouths that their...ahem, backsides...couldn't cash.
You would think that the complete and utter failure of elite based would-be leftists for the past two centuries to capture the hearts and minds of the majority of the natural constituency of a real left, the poor, the destitute, the afflicted, ... that these people who love to believe they are intelligent would look at the history of that political failure and learn from it.
And give up the safety of the lecturer's podium, the convenience of the pundit's platform, the comfort of the big chair on stage with everybody applauding (because they paid to come see you)?