the Figures (a Handbook)

File under "M" for Reagan International airport

A lesson in turning:

Irreverence is fun. Watch everyone exhaust themselves condemning you. Watch their outrage attract support for your claims. Stand back as everyone becomes entangled in their own arguments. Even when you lose, you win. After all, a statement must be true if so many people must spend so much time disputing it. Listing all the ways that Thomas Jefferson differed from Robert E. Lee is sure to raise more awkward questions than it answers.

Irreverence supposedly unmasks hypocrisy. Mostly it just repeats itself ad nauseam while our politics suffer from a serious lack of imagination. We have reduced the world to four categories—fact, fake, free speech, and fascism—and spend our days patrolling the borders of each on the look out for smugglers and itinerants. 

The question is, do we want open borders? More specifically, should Neo-Nazis have a political platform? We need a few more categories to answer that question, or at least some way of distinguishing between political organizations and organized murder.

For the record, no one excluded the Nazis from politics. They opted out all on their own. They used propaganda to aid their ascent and then they suspended the political process. In the social vacuum that they created, they got down to the business of murdering people. A political gathering in their name seems a strange tribute to that project. Like honoring Ronald Reagan by naming an airport after him.