Assigned, must-read reading of the day: Jane Mayer’s amazing article synthesizing the political and “philanthropic” careers for David and Charles Koch. They are basically the funding arm of the Tea Party movement, secular libertarianism, and have their fingers all over global warming denialism. I put “philanthropic” in scare quotes, because while the Koches give lots and lots and lots of money to non-profits, they usually do so with their own self-interest in mind. Their self-interest is, of course, their enormous corporation Koch Industries. They’re oil billionaires, giant polluters, and they really don’t like environmentalists or the little, insignificant non-billionaire portions of the population.
There’s a couple of insights Mayer brings to her analysis of the brothers Koch that I want to pull out and expand a little on. By no means are these the sum total of the article, so please do yourself a favor and read the whole thing. But I want to talk about what I consider a major misunderstanding of the relationship between the peons who show up at Tea Cracker protests and read right wing blogs, and the big money people who spread a lot of cash around convincing the peons to be angry about things like scientists telling the truth about global warming. There’s a tendency amongst liberals to give rich right wingers too much credit, which shows that even as we decry classism, we still fall for some of the prejudicial fallacies, such as believing the rich to be more clever than ordinary people. A lot of liberals spin this story of how big money types like the Koches put together these ridiculous stories that they then feed to the plebes, who regurgitate stuff like signs demanding to see the birth certificate. We see them as puppet masters whose ideas are so silly that they couldn’t believe it themselves. But that’s wrong. While I think there are definitely political operators who are purely cynical, like Karl Rove, in general most wingnuts, even the rich ones, are true believers. And one thing I really get off this article is that the Koches are able to sell their ridiculous ideas to the public not just because they spread money around like it’s cream cheese, but because they themselves believe their own bullshit.
Indeed, the article is an interesting examination in how to create someone whose worldview is so screwed up that he believes he’s doing the right thing by screwing the needy and destroying the planet for future generations. The Koches’ father was a standard issue racist nut who bought into all the John Bircher nonsense, including believing that Eisenhower was a Communist. (No wonder it’s easy to rationalize believing this about Obama!) And he raised his sons in a way that is what I suggest you do if you want to distort their understanding of what life is all about:
Koch emphasized rugged pursuits, taking his sons big-game hunting in Africa, and requiring them to do farm labor at the family ranch. The Kochs lived in a stone mansion on a large compound across from Wichita’s country club; in the summer, the boys could hear their friends splashing in the pool, but they were not allowed to join them. “By instilling a work ethic in me at an early age, my father did me a big favor, although it didn’t seem like a favor back then,” Charles has written. “By the time I was eight, he made sure work occupied most of my spare time.”
He also spent a lot of time indoctrinating them, but I think this is perhaps more important. Depriving someone of a childhood to instill a work ethic in them is a great way to bring someone up who doesn’t understand the value of work or of non-work life. Marc and I were having an interesting discussion on the subway yesterday, about “Mad Men”. (Which I’ll have to post about tomorrow, sorry!) We got to talking about their portrayal of Conrad Hilton, which actually softened the real life man’s uglier, harder edges, if you can believe it. And Marc said that, in his eyes, Paris Hilton is by far the better human being. After all, she knows what money is *for*, which is in service of living. The rich, he argued, are better off being the idle rich than getting sucked into the crazed business of making more and more money just to do it. Is it really a “work ethic” if you start to believe that money is the end, and not just the means to an end? Not that running hotels is somehow evil, but the end game of making money just to make money is purely evil, since it disassociates money from what it exists for, which is in service of human beings. And once you do that—-once you start to see human beings as existing for money and not the other way around—-libertarianism, anti-environmentalism, and general hostility towards government and social services all follow. To call that a “work ethic” is to put a moralistic gloss on immoral behavior.