Redstate

By My2Cents Posted in User Blogs — Comments (3) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

The dog days of summer, indeed.  Augusts tend to be lazy months of heat which most people try to escape by spending much of August on vacation, or otherwise hunkered down in front of the airconditioner.  Washington, DC, showing perhaps more sense than it usually does during the other 11 months of the year, takes August off and gets out of town.  With Congress and the President gone, the news media is a bit at a loss for stories.  Rather than (as one suggestion) sending their White House correspondents over to Iraq to report on the progress that's being made there, news agencies send their correspondents to Crawford, Texas, to report on George W. Bush clearing brush.  But this year, the news media has discovered a diversion from their usual August-in-Crawford tedium:  the grieving anti-war mother, Cindy Sheehan.

One would have to be on their own August hiatus from the television to not know about the Grieving Mother, so I won't belabor the point about her background, the loss of her son in Iraq last year, her visit with President Bush in June of 2004, and her moonbat conspiracy theories about how her son died in some neo-con plot to protect Israel.  My point here is to consider why she's gotten the media attention she's received.

We live in a period of history in which one of our major political parties is no longer motivated by a coherent ideology, but is energized by political nihilism.  The Democrat Party, and the left in general, is in possession of an ideology that went bankrupt in the late 1960s with the end of the New Deal, big-government paradigm.  They coasted for another 20 years or so on "feel-good" rhetoric, but with the Clintons, what emerged as the "unifying vision" within the Democrat Party wasn't a new ideology at all, but political nihilism -- cynicism, hatred, politics-of-personal destruction, moral ambivalence, anti-religion, anti-Americanism (i.e., being against everything that is good in America).  Today's Democrat Party is identified more by what it is against than by what it is for, making it a reactionary party.  About 20% of the electorat are hard-core political nihilists.  Another 20% simply vote Democrat out of habit (union families, blacks, public employees).  Another 8 or 9% are among the swing voters who simply vote Democrat for God-knows-why (probably ignorance).  Cindy Sheehan is the poster child of the left's political nihilism.

The other thing which has given Cindy Sheehan noterity is that we now live in "Jerry Springerland."  Personal loss in war is an intensely personal thing, where the personal agony used to be shared, if at all, within intimate circle of friends and family, where solace was received in places like one's church.  Now, people tend to share their personal problems and conflicts in front of the entire world, via a voyeuristic media.  It's unseemly, and horribly inappropriate to stick a camera in the face of a grieving mother and broadcast her personal anguish to the entire world.  It's even more tacky and dysfunction to be a grieving mother who actually seeks that kind of attention.  At that point, she becomes not a grieving mother tortured by unspeakable personal grief, but a media celebrity, or worse, a tool in someone's cynical political agenda.  When she crosses the line to becomes a celebrity, normal, healthy people tend to start seeing her public display of "grief" as simply a publicity stunt.  And what's even more despicable is that such a person is willing to be used as a shill by the political nihilists of our society.

Mrs. Sheehan, whose marriage is on the rocks, and who has ignored the pleas of her surviving children to come back to them and start living a normal life, has done huge damage to herself.  She's probably more in need of psychological counseling than another meeting with the President.  Once the media and the political nihilists on the left are done with her, she'll be discarded like yesterday's news.  Nihilism is not a postive philosophy, but a corrosive mindset that dehumanizes those who entertain its viewpoint.  Mrs. Sheehan is a case study in the destructive effects of the nihilistic mindset.  She's sad and pathetic, and I say that with empathy and sympathy.  The real villians in this sad tragedy are neither President Bush nor Mrs. Sheehan, but the news media and their patrons in the political left which are willing to use anyone to further their agenda, only to throw them aside when their political or public relations value has been spent.