Pantload Principle

by digby

In a sign of the further degradation of the publishing industry, they have now made Jonah Goldberg a millionaire:

Oh, good, Jonah Goldberg just got a million dollars to write another book. Hooray for the publishing industry!

[…]

This next book is, for now, called The Tyranny of Cliches, though one wonders how Goldberg will make it through the foreword without employing a thousand of them. (And does he know the word is French?) Also: that’s a terrible title, and it will most likely be changed to The Tyranny of Barack Obama’s War on America’s Freedoms prior to publication. (The content of the book—an incoherent succession of Battlestar jokes, the Wikipedia entry for Mencken clumsily rewritten, and a repeated insistence that The Emperor was a liberal and Han Solo was a conservative—will not be affected.)

Goldberg is anything but intellectually sharp as the puerile column that precipitated his new thesis proves in spades. But he has a good feel for what makes the wingnuts tick.

Just as Liberal Fascism seemed absurd on its face to anyone who knows the real definition of the words, this new book seems like it has a bizarre and abstract theme, but it really doesn’t. It’s the logical step in PoMo conservatism, which seeks to deconstruct the social contract. One of the ways you do that is by giving people permission to ignore their own instinctive sense of altruism and compassion, things which are often explained to children in fables, parables, and yes, cliches. They are shorthand for “common sense” understandings which societies have constructed over millennia to keep everyone on the same page.

As Jonah’s column shows, his view of this comes from the freshman dorm, red wine and dirtweed school of moral philosophy, so its only real purpose will be to “explode political correctness” (again) and give fellow delayed adolescents another excuse to be Randian jerks. He knows his audience well.

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