When Dick Cheney comes over all smug about the members of the reality-based community, to whom is he referring? The vast majority of Americans who have signed on with one of the Big White Guy in the Sky plans (otherwise known as Verizon and Sprint or Catholic and Protestant)? The Biblical creationists who disdain the findings of Hubble because it can’t locate the firmament?
Probably not, since they all voted for him. But still. What about the people who think that our government killed JFK? What about the people who thought margarine was good for you? (recommendation now reversed by the medical establishment; please forget we ever made it)
Where is this reality-based community?
Or, as a character in a Terry Pratchett book said, “You’re responsible to the truth? Really? How? Does the truth come and slap you in the face if you get it wrong?”
The scary thing about this community is the geographical vagaries and absent infrastructure of the community. There is a certain lack of governance as well…
What Darth Cheney presumably meant to say was that we liberals lack vision because we feel constrained by what “responsible” “experts” have told us, while the merry band of Reverse Robin Hood Neocons set out to refashion what is possible. In the Agincourt fashion of Henry V’s “we few, we lucky few” speech, Cheney seeks to rally the impossible dream.
Of course, Harry actually had a plan (the longbow) and, you know, won. Although there were likewise some gaps in the occupation plan. Cheney isn’t even eligible for the Eternal Honor Merit Badge pioneered by Thomas Beckett’s change-by-martyrdom strategy.
I think what Cheney fails to grasp (and perhaps Harry and Thom as well, though we have subsequently written that tragic edge into their stories for them) is that we would all dearly love for there to be a reality based community to migrate to – however depressing the atmosphere, however eternally partly cloudy the sky, an address in the real-estate would at least relieve of us of this lingering feeling that a good life is something that one gets away with, quickly, before history changes its judgments on our values or the status quo crushes us under it. Humanity is the original source of the idea for built-in obsolescence.
But even the tenuous link with that fairy-land of reality (gripped until dawn by a faithful Janet Reno) is not something that just any Thom, Dick or Harry can conquer.
The thing about overthrowing reality is: it only happens in retrospect, after the next regime of reality is safely established.
Tags: Darth Cheney, Dick Cheney, Henry V, Reality, reality-based community
