In opening his lecture on campus last Wednesday night, National Review conservative columnist Jonah Goldberg attempted to dispell the notion that he was a humorist. He then went on to tell a joke.
Mr. Goldberg seemed unable to elaborate without resorting to humor; kittens were a favorite theme. Apparently, Dick Cheney eats them and rich, environmentally-negligent white men think they're adorable wastes of space. Or at least those with "open-toed shoes and closed minds" like to think so. It was a joke about liberals' way of joking.
Interspersed between punch lines was a discussion about Hurricane Katrina, its meaning (or, according to Mr. Goldberg, lack thereof) and the media's shamelessly skewed coverage of the disaster. The theme of the night was "Liberal Confirmation" — in particular, the way in which this phenomenon, Mr. Goldberg's own self-professed theory, can be understood through the paradigmatic event that was Katrina.
Liberals, he explained, wait breathlessly for a moment like Katrina to come along so that they have an excuse to voice the absurdly irrational conspiracy theories that they so desperately hold onto. He listed numerous things reported on by the media during Katrina that supposedly did not happen. I don't know the facts but if he is correct — if no one did in fact die in the Superdome — then it's true: the media did a great job of misinforming the public.
Of course, Mr. Goldberg is a quite a speaker. He displayed a serious skill for repartee and anecdote and he had me wondering why, again, I had thought I was outraged at Katrina. Soon he had turned to the issue of race, which, wrongly, I had thought pertinent to the discussion. He made the argument that the reason poor, black people were disproportionately affected by the hurricane was because New Orleans was a disproportionately poor, black city, and that this — not any sort of deeply ingrained wrongs in our system — explained all the suffering black faces on our televisions. He said it triumphantly, and, I admit, convincingly.
As his words lingered, though, their emptiness revealed itself. This was description masquerading as argument. Yes, New Orleans was a disproportionately poor, black city. But wait. Why is it that way? Was this really just the bad luck of a coincidentally destitute, minority-filled city? We all understand that randomly terrible things happen all over the world. Was this one of those occurrences or was Katrina attributable to something other than maliciously unpredictable forces?
Mr. Goldberg had said something interesting about what he thought explained the irrational behavior of his desperately self-confirming liberals. Almost sympathetically, he said he thought it was human nature to find cause and effect in the world's tragedies. This, he explained, accounts for the religious zeal with which liberals, so sadly human, pursued truths where they didn't exist. The implicit criticism seemed to be that liberals failed to face reality or, at least, to take it seriously.
At one point, Mr. Goldberg separated liberals and conservatives into the group that emotes, testifies and hopes versus the group, respectively, that considers tradeoffs, examines history and makes things happen. When the audience didn't respond to this, he continued by opposing the liberal environmentalist argument with a zealous takedown of "Captain Planet," the long-defunct television show. I wondered if Mr. Goldberg, by his definition, was a true conservative. He had made a tradeoff, between serious discussion and humor-laden hyperbole. He had examined history through a television show cancelled before I was in high school.
Katrina and its aftermath cannot so easily be dismissed as something that, unfortunately, just happened. Serious discussion is needed to address the troubled response to such a serious tragedy — not Mr. Goldberg's humor-filled rhetoric.
Josh Cohen ([email protected]) is a freshman majoring in philosophy.
