Continuing the discussion of Orson Card's Empire. Yes, a copy of the actual novel has been acquired.
I remind you that this is a Serious Analysis, not our more customary snarkmongering. Oh, all right. Just one. In the acknowledgments Card says that "Google Maps took me moment by moment through chase scenes and combat in Washington, D. C., and New York City."
Yeah. We can tell. The chase scenes read like MapQuest with guns. "Pass Western and then jog right on Wyndee, then left again. You're back on Beach but it isn't one-way. Turn left on the East-West Highway." Then explosions. For Chrissake.
The place to begin is with the Afterword, where Card, uh, puts his cards on the table. (*Cough*) Ahem. There he tells us that while the basic idea of the book/video game/movie/whatever wasn't his, a civil war between Red States and Blue States, "my first order of business was to come up with a plausible way that such an event might come about. It was, sadly enough, all too easy."
As Card sees it, we're pretty much on the brink of a new American civil war as it is, because, well, people are mean to each other nowadays. They say mean things and are partisans. Card is smart enough to recognize that the Red/Blue stuff is silly and that the real divide, at least politically, is urban/rural. But essentially what we get in the Afterword is a cri de couer in the general rhetorical mode of the Higher Broderism, only crankier and shallower, and from a less carefully camouflaged rightward direction. In other words, it sounds like a Glenn Reynolds post.
To be sure, Card is at pains to show that he casts his asparagus on both the Left and the Right. The problem with his even-handedness though is... well, this:
So virulent are these responses -- again, from both the Left and the Right -- that I believe it is only a short step to the attempt to use the power of the state to enforce one's views. On the right we have attempts to use the government to punish flag burners and to enforce state-sponsored praying. On the left, we have a ban on free speech and peaceable public assembly in front of clinics and the attempt to use the power of the state to force the acceptance of homosexual relationships as equal to marriages.
Oy.... yes, Orson, it's the savage gays who are the oppressors, always with their shocking intolerance for those who don't believe they deserve the same rights as other Americans. This is of course no surprise from Card, who gets steamed whenever he's called a bigot merely for talking like a bigot.
But the real point here is not that Card has spouted this crap before, but that the "you're intolerant of my intolerance" stuff is such a shopworn conservative rhetorical trope. It's what Bourdieu calls doxa, an irreducible chunk of ideology that tells you all you need to know about where someone positions themselves socially and culturally. And it's Card's doxa that matter here, not his willingness to take a bold libertarian-ish stand on the entirely symbolic issues of flag-burning and school prayer, as opposed to his stands on abortion clinics and gay marriage -- you know, two issues which actually involve how people live their lives.
I mean, look at that paragraph again. Card clearly subscribes to the Doctrine of the Liberal Activist Judges; and indeed, as he says elsewhere in the Afterword, the Left controls the federal bench. Even more tellingly, he is a fervid adherent of the Gospel of the Wicked Liberal Media and Its Dark Concubine, Hollyweird: "the left has control of all the institutions of cultural power and prestige -- universities, movies, literary publishing, mainstream journalism -- as well as the federal courts." By way of contrast, "the Right controls both houses of Congress and the presidency, as well as having ample outlets for their views in nontraditional media and an ever-increasing dominance over American religious and economic life."
Card wants to claim that both sides feel oppressed even though they are both Mighty, and gosh that's ironic don't you think. Which is a nice point, except for the problem that what he says about the Right is true, and what he says about the Left is not. There is no organized "Left" that dominates the areas they allegedly dominate like there is an organized Right that dominates the areas Card allots them. That organization would be called "the Republican party." Sheesh...
Card's Afterword is a fascinating exercise in false balance and self-delusion. Hell, he never even gets around to so much as mentioning the really divisive issue in this low, dishonest first decade of the 21st century -- Iraq. It's a significant omission.
I'll get into that later. But for now, no, you can't take seriously anyone who believes in the fairytale of the "Liberal MSM" who also wants to figure themselves as a Reasonable Moderate. The Afterword is itself extremist, though, in charity to Card, he seems utterly unaware of it...