“You're unfairly insulting, utterly incorrect, and I sense are not a person of good will. I will not engage with you.
“Marty Nemko”
Oh dear.
Well, I did get Marty to come out of his lair, but all he did was snarl and retreat.
So, one might ask, why do you care? Why are you even bothering with this little guy who, more than likely, only a few job seekers and a few more malcontents and some grouchy CHE readers seem to have heard of? Well…
Marty Nemko is a particularly fascinating personality, not so much for his views (which are usually gross, egotistical exaggerations, even when they do have merit) but for what he represents of the American psyche. Specifically, Marty represents a form of hyperbole that has become the norm when Americans have opinions.
Marty is fascinating because he represents the one-dimensional, sound-bite mode of media manipulation (alliteration? assonance? consonance, anyone?) that constitutes 90% of all discourse, inside and outside the home.
To be specific, Americans tend to argue using vague, unsupported generalities, facts and figures cherry-picked from people who already think like they do, and misconstrued paraphrases of what the opposing party has said. We all know these commentators, right and left: Rush Limbaugh and Al Frankin; Hannety and Combs; Ann Coulter and Michael Moore; Bill O’Reily, Mike Savage, Fox News, Conservapedia, Crossfire, Rolling Stone magazine, and Air America. Opinion has the same relevance as hard fact in this world, and a fact becomes “fact” once it is uttered somewhere, whether or not it is, in fact, a fact.
When McCain said of Obama, “He’ll spread your wealth around,” McCain knew full well that was a blatant misrepresentation of Obama’s tax and health care propositions. What McCain hoped was that his misstatement would agitate the higher tax brackets and the working class into a right-wing frenzy. After all, this is how elections are won (remember “flip-flopping”?).
Ultimately, as we all know, Palin’s pall was all too powerful (consonance? assonance? alliteration?) to overcome the clever cleavage of McCain’s anxious camp. Nevertheless, to a large degree “spread the wealth” worked: google the phrase and note how many websites parrot this very phrase as if it is a proven Obama policy stance. Note how often the phrase comes up in “town hall” meetings, in editorials, in news articles, on Fox News, and in blogs on both sides of the election divide.
Whoever it was that came up with the phrase also understood the other central tactic for aggravating the masses: threaten their wallets.
And so here’s Marty. He occupies the minor league dugout and is still small enough to be vulnerable to his critics, yet he sound-bites away about the evils of misandry, reverse discrimination, and the fallacy of higher education as if he is out to change the world – which, of course, he is. And the most interesting thing is that he uses essentially the same tactics as the big boys and girls of misinformatics. If he had more mainstream politics, Marty could very well be one of the major leaguers – one more a.m. talk show radio host predicting the end of civil liberties and the rise of the tax-and-spend welfare state.
Examining Marty Nemko is like watching a petri dish with a colony of discontent growing in it. We can look at Marty Nemko as we would a rare creature captured by science in its pupa state, kind of what the giant squid scientists have been trying to do for years. It’s not that Nemko’s views are any more transparent than, say, Limbaugh or Hannety, but Nemko does not have the vast ideological network that these folks have, so Marty’s views are both more obscure and less obscured by the very fact that he is the main supporter of his own ideas.
Even more interesting, however, is how Marty not only speaks with the parlance of the American politician, but he reifies the American psyche. Marty, in other words, thinks in primary colors, in polarities, in black and white, in one side that has the absolute right and another side that has the absolute wrong.
While I am no historian or social scientist, I think this aspect of the American mind has everything to do with our cultural mythology. Just think about the ways America revisions itself: the Pilgrims "fled religious persecution," the colonists "fought for independence," the Civil War was waged "to end slavery," World War I was waged to "stop the Huns," and World War II was waged to "stop the Nazis." These were complex cultural and geopolitical situations reduced to simple dichotomies in the American mind, and Hollywood stepped in to reify them more completely than any schoolmarm ever could. In this worldview, one side held all the right while the other side manipulated the machinery of oppression. The more complex explanations are lost in the juggernaut of moralistic nationalism (“Archduke” who? “Neville” what?). Then there was the big societal earthquake as Flower Power pushed through the pavement and Civil Rights took to the streets, and the concept of ‘might making right’ (as in the U.S. army freeing hysterically happy Parisians) was replaced by ‘right fighting might’ (as in Civil Rights marchers and Martin Luther King taking on institutional racism), and suddenly the right side was marching against the Viet Nam war, for feminism, for gay rights, for freedom of expression. And the right side was suddenly the underdog, fighting a system which had the money, the bureaucracy, and the authority.
It is the latter pattern that Nemko casts himself into: he is fighting the good fight against a series of systems which oppress the more worthy citizens – you know, the people who have always had it roughest: America’s oppressed white males. Marty’s opponents are all the likely suspects: women who abuse men, minorities who have all the advantages, Democrats who just want to spend your money, and deans who only want to hire women and minorities (who are presumably Democrats). There’s also the obsession with smart people being in charge of everyone – but that’s a strange enough phenomenon that it also deserves its own blog posting.
In the final evaluation, Marty may not be the most influential or famous commentator, or even the best, but his eclectic weirdness presents an interesting arrogance that is, at the same time, like and unlike any other commentator I have ever seen.
I cannot promise that Marty will grace me with his presence ever again, but I can always invite him over for tea.
