During the second half of the second Bush Administration, the word “bubble” gained enough popularity that it flirted with being included in the old “stupid or evil?” debate. I’m not sure when it started exactly, but “bubble” really gained currency with the story about Bush the Younger’s aides having to make a news footage DVD to convince him that New Orleans being underwater was worthy of his attention. He had so perfectly insulated himself from good old “discernable reality” that he lost the ability even to identify real problems, to say nothing of addressing them.
Sadly, the example he set is now being followed by an ever expanding number of public figures, including virtually the entire official and unofficial hierarchies of the Republican Party. The epic of close minded self deception was on full display in the wake of last month’s Tucson shooting, when, in the span of just a few days, the approved right wing narrative of the near fatal shooting of a Blue Congresswoman diverged wildly from what actually happened. In a closed loop of bullshit, it took less than a week for vast swaths of the right to convince themselves that they and the imaginary problems they obsess over were the real victims.
Nor is this mindset limited to recent and raw tragedies. To listen to the right tell things, global warming is a conspiracy, Christians are a persecuted minority in the United States, and Obama is very close to destroying the country. In addition to being contradicted by pesky facts, what all of these things have in common is a shared assumption about how mean, efficient, and dastardly these shadow villains are.
As Adam Serwer noted in response to Glenn Beck’s epic meltdown:
Anyway point is that no one has a higher opinion of their enemies than Beck and the conspiracy-minded conservatives he speaks for.
Precisely. Ascribing godlike foresight and intelligence to one’s enemies is a classic hallmark of conspiracist thinking. Beck sees George Soros as a globe spanning force instead of as a liberal minded rich man who gives away a lot of money. Beck’s audience, and Limbaugh’s, and Alex Jones’s and all the rest, see Barack Obama as a “Godfather”-esque puppet master pulling strings and orchestrating events all over the world with nary a slipup or setback. They do this in spite of the fact that literally sitting in front of them on television and on-line are all kinds of contradictory evidence. These people are gnorons:
A “gnoron” is like a moron, except that where a moron is lacking in intelligence (something they cannot help, of course) a gnoron is someone of decent intelligence whose own willful ignorance has brought them to an equivalent state of incompetence.
Sound familiar? Incompetence through ignorance, making mountains out of molehills while the real problems get bigger. We live in the age of the gnoron.
