Given our Gracious Host's recent posts about the Ministry of Propaganda and its edicts on "The Stakes" of the upcoming election (and the obvious questions they raise, like "Who's actually buying this drivel?"), I thought I'd take the opportunity delve deeper into how the Wingnut hivemind operates and how it has turned American politics into an episode of The Outer Limits.

A while back, the Poor Man Institute for Freedom, Democracy and a Pony issued an astute analysis of the ruling regime's communication strategies. It found that one can take an event of any type or size - ranging from stupid political stunts like George Bush ordering a Philly cheesesteak "Whiz with" and Sen. Dr. Frist's quacktacular VHS-based "diagnosis" of Terri Schiavo to world historic disasters like Operation Iraqi Freedom - and find the exact same patterns of deception and dementia. This is due to the fractal self-similarity of the Wingnut Function, the PMIFDP reported.

You're probably thinking, "Politicians lie? Thanks for the update, Uncle Cronkite!" But that's not what's really interesting about the Wingnut Function.

It's true! That damn Frenchman Benoit Mandlebrot is behind this country's trippy politics. 

What's astonishing is that Wingnut politicians' lies: 1) are so laughably stupid and easily debunked; and 2) are often unecessary: they lie about everything, even when the damage from the risk of exposure outweighs any political advantage (and the risk is high because of #1).

So why do they do it? Because it's good politics (or has been up to now). That's due to the third property of the Wingnut Function: the Wingnut faithful actually want to be lied to (Why? I'll get to that in a minute). Herein lies the key that makes Bushworld so inscrutable to those who dwell in the reality-based community, both liberal and conservative alike.

Faith is not something to grasp, it is a state to grow into.
-- Mahatama Gandhi

The media describes the role of "faith" in modern conservative politics as a religious phenomenon almost without fail. Not only is this patently false, and thus a grievous insult to God-fearing folk of all stripes, it also serves to innoculate the phenomenon from criticism. Questioning people's Belief is just beyond the pale, after all. Librul strategists then bend themselves into pretzels trying and inevitably failing to explain how the Preznit and his minions are more akin to execreble trolls than saintly shepherds without offending sectarian sensibilities. 

Wingnut Faith is a secular, worldly and all-to-human phenomenon. Yes, it's often couched in terms of religiously derived "values," but that's just part of the ruse. What's more, it has little to do with the concept of faith in either its divine or ethical  contexts. And it's the thread that binds the various, seemingly incompatible strands of the Bush base, from kooks like James Dobson to the "bullshit libertarians" of the blogosphere.

The source of this brand of faith isn't piety. In fact, it's about as profane as you can get, as described by Chuck Pierce in his masterful essay, Greetings From Idiot America:

In the place of expertise [and knowledge], we have elevated the Gut, and the Gut is a moron, as anyone who has ever tossed a golf club, punched a wall, or kicked an errant lawn mower knows. We occasionally dress up the Gut by calling it "common sense." The president's former advisor on medical ethics regularly refers to the "yuck factor." The Gut is common. It is democratic. It is the roiling repository of dark and ancient fears. Worst of all, the Gut is faith-based.

It's a dishonest phrase for a dishonest time, "faith-based," a cheap huckster's phony term of art. It sounds like an additive, an artificial flavoring to make crude biases taste of bread and wine.

It's a word for people without the courage to say they are religious, and it is beloved not only by politicians too cowardly to debate something as substantial as faith but also by Idiot America, which is too lazy to do it.

After all, faith is about the heart and soul and about transcendence. Anything calling itself faith-based is admitting that it is secular and profane. In the way that it relies on the Gut to determine its science, its politics, and even the way it sends its people to war, Idiot America is not a country of faith; it's a faith-based country, fashioning itself in the world, which is not the place where faith is best fashioned.

Ah, good ol' common sense. That's the ticket. It's a self-contained and self-referential concept, and therefore an ideal approach to politics. That's because to a Wingnut, "common" - i.e., the opposite of "elitist" - is the quintessential 'Murican virtue and whatever is common must therefore by definition make sense. And if something is self-evidently true, there's no need to introduce "facts" or "evidence" into the equation for it to make sense.

And that's what gives the Wingnut Function its self-similarity. George Bush ordering a Philly Cheesesteak "whiz with" proves he is in touch with the common man and therefore sensible (even though he embodies the old Northeast patrician establishment Wingnuts abhor more than the devilhimself), as does his noble effort to provide the common Iraqi the same freedoms as the common 'Murican. 

"People do not believe lies because they have to, but because they want to."

-- Malcolm Muggeridge 

This also helps explain why Wingnuts not only don't mind but expect to be bullshitted or outright lied to by their leaders. The only qualification is that the statement must  be in harmony with the above-described self-contained, "common-sense" universe. It doesn't matter if it's "objectively" false.

This dynamic not only shuns librul "truths" like how big a cluster#$&@ Iraq is. It also prevents GOP politicians and operatives from accurately describing conservative objectives. Uncomfortable realities like the fact that abortion will never again be outlawed outright because it would devastate Republicans at the polls, for example, are left unstated.

Avoiding uncomfortable truths is not a trait limited to Wingnuts, of course. It's the flipside of human ingenuity and imagination. But Wingnuts (and their mirror opposites on the left) take it to the extreme, constructing a cartoonish worldview, deeming all that lies within their paradigm True and Good. This is the totalitarian kitsch described so well by Milan Kundera in the "Grand March" chapter of the Unbearable Lightness of Being... "the complete denial of shit."

Everything outside the bubble, meanwhile, is Decadent and Depraved. Where 'Murica under Gee Dubya can do no wrong and make no mistakes, the dark masses of the Middle East are unquestionably and undeterrably hellbent on destroying the world. Lie-berals, who obnoxiously keep trying to burst this bubble and mix put peanut butter in the conservative chocolate, are deemed traitors to the cause.

The bubble may be under stress and shinking somewhat of late, but it will never burst. It's always been around in one form or another and always will.

Anyways, that's enough self-righteous librul wankery for now. In the next installment, I'll put the microscope on a single Wingnut fractal. We'll examine how it's constructed and see just how much lunacy lies within.