Embracing Unpopularity

I caught Dennis Miller on Jon Stewart last night. Miller started out funny, but when the subject turned to the administration he embraced a view that I once assumed Miller would be smart enough to see for the rubbish it is. I can't quote it, but it went something like this: yes Bush was unpopular, but Miller discovered through his reading that two other presidents, Lincoln and Truman, were unpopular, and history judged them kindly. Stewart seemed slightly skeptical of the comparison, but Miller insisted on holding to it.

Dennis, Dennis, Dennis, the old you would have seen through the logic of this idea as if it were used Neutrogena. Schopenhauer expressed Miller's sentiment this way: "All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident." The more popular variant is, "They laughed at the Wright Brothers". True, but, as Carl Sagan pointed out, they also laughed at the Marx brothers. It's not true that all truth is ignored or ridiculed before it is accepted. Einstein's theories were neither ignored nor violently opposed. Nobody gunned for Achimedes or Da Vinci. (Actually, a soldier, looting the city where Archimedes lived, did kill him; but the soldier had no idea who Archimedes was.) Madam Curie's only enemy was the element she discovered: Radium.

Besides, many promoters of ideas are either violently opposed or ignored because they deserve it. Yes, people laughed at the Wright brothers, but they also laughed at the hundreds of other cranks and would-be inventors who promoted their ridiculous attempts at flying machines. Yes, Lincoln and Truman were unpopular in their eras but vindicated by history; but consider for a moment Nixon, Harding, Buchanon, Hoover, Andrew Johnson, Bush ancestor Franklin Pierce or Bush the First for that matter. All did things (or failed to do things) in office which made them widely disliked in their time, and history has decided that these men earned their imfamy.

A thing to bear in mind if you come in for public criticism--people may laugh at or attack you because they can't accept how right you are; but you must consider that they also may laugh at or attack you because you're either really fucking funny or dangerously wrong. Dennis Miller, much like his friend George W., is stuck on option A, unwilling to consider the (much more likely) option B.

Honestly, Dennis, do you seriously believe that historians are going to look back at the botched response to Katrina, the hideously mismanaged and horribly misconceived Iraq War, the massive public debt and corporate scandals, the torture and the killing, the rapid diminution of personal liberty and privacy, the degredation of the Atlantic alliance and the foreign policy order of the last half century, the ruin of America's image in the world as a good-faith and rational actor in world affairs, and conclude that there really was a pony under all this shit? If you can believe that, I have to wonder what President Bush would have to do to curdle your faith in him.