roger cohen does what they do: just mechanically lobs insults. he doesn't even make them up himself. he calls the tea party "a toddler-tantrum expression of individualism run amok." now first of all i'm just going to say this, and later maybe i'll prove it, that you can be insulted too, roger, and if hurling cheap abuse was an argument, you'd already have been refuted, or would be refuted if you were actually asserting or or arguing for something, and not just choiring out a series of mechanical phrases together with the rest of your demographic. ok. maybe you can't think or actually generate reasons or whatever. but just muttering along with olbermann's writers isn't exactly writing. but it is, we might point out, anti-individualism: a vision of our collective future in which we're all beautifully educated and completely incapable of independent intellection or formulation. at any rate the piece is entirely empty, first because it just re-hashes what everyone else is saying, and second because what everyone's saying makes no sense. so he builds the piece around a contrast between the toilet as a collective technology to cell phones as individual technologies. wait. think that through for a second. and as always when we contrast individualism with whatever these people have in mind, it becomes clear that the correct contrasting term is "coercion." "coercion" also turns out to be the meaning of the term "responsibility" in the pair "freedom and responsibility." cohen and his whole demographic, of course, emphasize "responsibility." this is deeply, deeply ironic, in that coercion is incompatible with responsibility. 'responsibility,' in the hands of these lobotomized weasels, means simply capitulation.

at any rate, these people all say the same thing at the same time in the same way, as they congratulate themselves and one another for their independence, critical use of reason, and so on. if they became aware of who they actually are, they would dangle themselves by the neck from a tree somewhere: they are precisely the opposite of what they believe themselves to be. on the other hand, i suppose that their own incredible unanimity, extending to every shred of their prose and every cell of their personalities, is in keeping with their total repudiation of individualism: they have achieved a kind of mechanical shared consciousness with their fellows simply by chanting the same words together. they really, really want to all believe the same. they form one super-individual, covering the planet like a layer of peat.

that's cool but it's getting repetitive to the tune of billions,. i would suggest destroying all the bodies involved except one. no loss, because the individuals don't exist at all; just leave one person to mutter the collective consciousness off the cue cards all day. if you insist, it could be bill maher.