Muck-rakers and The Timid Who Enable Them

I was browsing through Pete Hammell‘s book ‘Why Sinatra Matters’, and read the following. For all its nastiness, it is but a mild example of the level of mentality that would target dissidents. Not only, of course, that aimed at those who have spoken out about Sathya Sai Baba and the core leaders in the Sathya Sai Organization and those in both State and Central Indian governments who cover up for him, but, as I am often enough reminded, hurled at those from various parts of the world with whom I have corresponded or shared phone conversations who are also exposing an array of corruptions.

Attack, slander, libel distortion, derision, poor ability to argue properly, ad hominem attacks, breakage of e.g., the Aristotelean ‘law of the undistributed middle’ (confusion, which can be deliberate, of ‘all’ with ‘some’, name-calling and muck-raking (whether the muck is real, fabricated or exaggerated) are inevitable. Just as inevitable is the timidity of those who could stand up, and need to be the very ones to stand up, for truthfulness, and who do not. Those who dive for cover are commonly expert with excuses. They resemble, for example, those in the Weimar Republic  who, from the earliest stages, did not stand up to Hitler and his fascists.

Hamell cites the story for the Scripps Howard newspaper syndicate by the writer Robert Ruark, whom Hamell desribes as a “macho right-winger who despised Sinatra’s politics”.

“Mr Sinatra, the self-confessed savior of the country’s small fry, by virtue of his lectures on clean living and love-thy-neighbor, his movie shorts on tolerance and his frequent dabblings into the do-good department of politics, seems to be setting a most peculiar example for his hordes of pimply, shrieking slaves, who are alleged to regard him with the same awe as a practising Mohammedan for the Prophet”.

While reading the Hammel quote, the lines of a Sting’s song “Saint Augustine in Hell” came to mind:

Relax, have a cigar, make yourself at home. Hell is full of high court
judges, failed saints. We’ve got Cardinals, Archbishops, barristers,
certified accountants, music critics, they’re all here. You’re not alone.
You’re never alone, not here you’re not. OK break’s over.

(For Sting’s selection of his work see, “Lyrics By Sting”. Simon and Shuster, 2007)

– and I thinly smiled at the thought that Sting has left out a) muck-rakers and b) the timid who allow them to try to bluff and intimididate their way into a world where we need to strive for as much clarity and cool appraisal as we can muster.

Trying to reason with them is but wrestling in a gutter of their choosing. One has best to trust that there are enough serious, percipient and less easily misled readers, and to focus on one’s own clear purpose. This in itself is demanding of great time and energy. Why waste it attempting to beat back the lava of sludge and in breathing the vapors of the sewer?

By their rotten fruits they shall be known.

As to the timid …. What a heaven of conscience they must already be enjoying.