Don't Surrender to Dan Fagan

Dan Fagan’s first piece as a regular journalist in the ADN appeared to today. This is part of preserving the ‘diversity’ of opinions offered by the agreement that gave the long defunct Anchorage Times a half page in the Opinion section of the ADN. Of course, that was basically a diversity of right wing opinions, that became an oil industry platform when VECO took it over. Now that the top two people at VECO have pled guilty to bribery, extortion, etc. the ADN finally ended the deal. One wonders how much they were paid to drag that deal out so long. Anyway, I’ve only heard Dan Fagan’s radio talk show a few times, so rather than lean on the opinions of others, I’ll just work from what he wrote today.

Basically his message was:

Surrender has become mainstream.
The school districts teach students to surrender (to walk away from bullies.)
We surrender to the thought police. (Can’t say lots of words or T.P. call you bad things)
We surrender our rights to government to think for us. And pay for it with 1/3 of our income.

We surrender to Muslim terrorists. "War is hell. Surrender is easy."
We surrender to personal vices.

Surrender is the path to bondage, slavery, oppression

This piece is short on facts and long on unsubstantiated opinion. . One of his rants here is against ‘thought police.’ If you’re against redefining marriage, he writes, “the thought police call you a homophobe, bigot, someone who discriminates.” So, is he saying that someone who stands up for what he believes is the ‘thought police?’ Someone who doesn’t surrender to what he sees as injustice is the ‘thought police?’ Why isn’t that free speech? Or is it ‘thought police’ and ‘political correctness’ only when the ideas are those Dan doesn’t agree with?

My idea of thought police comes from George Orwell’s book, 1984.

Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it, moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live -- did live, from habit that became instinct -- in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.

This is a far cry from someone calling you a homophobe. But we do have people working hard to shape how people think today. The best funded and most disciplined attempt to shape thought I know comes from the well organized Republican Party’s Talking Points where right wing politicians and media repeat the same message agreed upon by the Party tacticians each day. Yes, there are now Democratic Talking Points too, as they copied what they see as a too effective form of Republican thought control.

Given Dan’s repetition of the word ‘surrender’ 21 times ('is' 16 times, 'and' 17 times) in this 700 word essay, one has to wonder whether Dan is part of the Republican thought control program, since ‘surrender’ is one of their current favored terms. As in, “Withdrawal from Iraq is surrender to the terrorists.” In this piece he made everything so called liberals believe an act of surrender, then finally writing, "Surrender is the path to bondage, slavery, oppression." If we believe this as an absolute, then, yeah, surrender is the worst thing you could do. If he, along with countless other foot soldiers for the right wing, can get this to stick, then whenever the word ‘surrender’ is used, people will think of Democrats and bondage, slavery, oppression. Now, that is thought control.

The essay begins with the schools teaching kids to walk away from bullies as an example of everyone being taught to surrender. Then he goes on to say that we surrender everything to let government take over our lives and that we surrender 1/3 of our income in taxes for them to do it with. If Dan’s paying 1/3 of his income in taxes, he needs a new accountant. And it seems to me a lot of the tax money is going to fight that war in Iraq he doesn’t want us to ‘surrender.’ But I agree to a certain extent that Republicans generally can’t spend too much on police or national defense and bridges, while Democrats can’t spend too much to help the helpless.

But the whole idea of surrender here is being distorted. First, surrender isn’t all or nothing. But after making it an all or nothing concept, Fagan stretches it to cover all sorts of situations of negotiation and compromise. He seems to live in a world where if he doesn’t get his way 100%, he has surrendered, which leads to bondage, etc. Dan might want to look up game theory and the ideas of zero-sum and variable-sum games as game theory defines them. It’s Dan’s zero-sum type of thinking that has kept the Israelis and Palestinians killing each other rather than starting to move toward peace and security and economic prosperity. If every single insult is returned, there is no end to the feud. But, I understand the reasoning that says you have to stand up to a bully and partially accept it. But there are different ways to take down a bully. While there isn't agreement on bullying, it does seem reasonable that in many cases "[b]ullying is a learned behavior, not a character trait. Bullies can learn new ways to curb their aggression and handle conflicts." And for the cases of psychopaths, the community, not victims need to intervene. One option is the one Dan implies – beat the shit out of the bully and he leaves you alone. But what if he thrashes you? But even if you win, the bully goes on to pick on someone else. Another option is to give the non-psychopath bully some ways to gain respect, be fairly treated, and to have some power over his world.

But let me get back to the idea of thought police. If you read Dan’s piece carefully, it appears that people who disagree with Dan Fagan are ‘thought police,’ but when Dan tries to insinuate 'they' are all surrendering sissies, Dan isn't a 'thought policeman' he's just standing up for what he believes. Neat trick, but it doesn’t work. Nor does the following twisted logic. “Voters agreed and upheld the smoking ban. They said you can’t trust people…Government knows best.” Excuse me? Actually, it is Dan Fagan saying that you can’t trust the people, because they stupidly surrendered by voting for a smoking ban.

This piece is a lot of emotional words strung together in a way that should fire up Dan Fagan’s co-believers and piss off the rest. There’s no cohesive logical argument, nothing you could actually act on since ‘surrender’ is such a vague term. There’s no attempt to understand or explain, rather it is all declarative sentences or rhetorical questions about what Dan generally feels is good and what he generally feels is bad. The Veco Times may be gone in name, but Dan Fagan is now in place to carry on their tradition.