Here Hedges also hits on the thing that gets me about a lot of secular Progressive’s disdain for “faith-based”, like Ron Suskind who frequently places himself in the “fact-based” community , distancing himself from “faith” because of the Bush “faith” and “gut”, and a Bush aide’s remarks as recounted in a NYTimes article:
October 17, 2004, New York Times Magazine article by writer Ron Suskind, quoting an unnamed Bush aide :
The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” … “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”[1]
Hedges’ article
The Corporate Media State Has Deformed American Culture — Time to Fight Back | | AlterNet
He [Sturat Ewen] argues that the forces of social reform, those organs that support a search for truth and self-criticism, have mistakenly shunned emotion and rhetoric because they have been used so powerfully within modern society to disseminate lies and manipulate public opinion. But this refusal to appeal to emotion means “we gave up the ghost and accepted the idea that human beings are these divided selves, binary systems between emotion and reason, and that emotion gets you into trouble and reason is what leads you forward. This is not true.”
Now I like Ron Suskind, and have read 3 of his books, but I have to roll my eyes when he does this “faith-based” vs “reality-based” thing, a litany that many Bush opponents use to put Bush into this charactature of the evangelical camp. This tends to marginalize “Progressive Evangelicals” who don’t buy into the neocon/extreme right wing ideologies that the Christian Right teaches its followers, and turns them into vitriolic echoes of the O’Reillys, Hannitys, Limbaughs, and Coulters.
