True North

Last week, I wrote about the left’s rather unimaginative reliance on “Gitmo” metaphors; it’s only gotten worse.  Last week, I was in the Dunn Brothers on Grand Avenue, across from Macalester College (a local far-lefty hotbed).  A rather aromatic twentysomething white boy with dreadlocks and a Che Guevara t-shirt tried to order free-range vegan Guatemalan coffee, but was told that they were out.  The barrista asked the lad if he could wait two minutes while another pot brewed.

“What is this - Guantanamo?” the be-che’d fellow fumed [1]

At any rate, in a comment to that post, someone said:

With the frequency of the Gitmo moniker thrown about to mis-label every perceived wrong against liberal causes, someone should coin a “Godwin’s law”-style statement.

While I do appreciate the idea and take the point, adding another law to the books is, as with most things in the civil arena, not really the answer.  “Godwin’s Law“, [”As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.”] - is a bad one to mimic, since it (like the Nazi comparisons themselves) are most often invoked by people with feeble understanding at best of the history or issues involved, and tends to be used to squelch even the (rare) literate, appropriate comparisons.  The lower 80% of Godwin users tend to employ the law as a rhetorical Daisy Cutter, indiscrimimately mowing lines of conversation good and bad.  Inappropriate reference to Godwin can cause problems in some serious cases.  At one point, I even codified a corollary to Godwin: 

Berg’s Fifth Law of Historical Illiteracy - 99% of the invocations of Godwin’s Law are done by 1% of the online population. Corollary: That 1% understands .000001% of the history required for a literate invocation of Godwin’s Law.

I minored in both History and German; hence, I invoke Nazi references both very sparingly and, when I do, with surgical aptness.  And I get a little peeved when, after coming up  with a thorougly impeccable comparison, some commenter bleats “Godwin’s Law!  Godwin’s Law!” in a perfect duckspeak accent, not really knowing what they’d doing, but fatally hobbling the conversation anyway.

What we have, in summation, is two conflicting problems:

1. Ill-informed, hamfisted use of inflammatory metaphors (Naziism, Guantanamo)
2. Misuse of memes intended to nullify #1.

Being a conservative and free-marketeer (unlike too many Republicans), I believe I have a comprehensive, free-speech-enabled, market-based answer; a certification program that allows internet users to use these memes, while assuring the reader/consumer that the user is qualified and competent to use them. 

I propose the following certifications:

• Certified Godwin’s Lawyer (CGL): Bearer of this certification will have exhibited an ability to discern between apt and inapt Nazi analogies in the application of Godwin’s Law to online dialog.  Hopefully, as technology advances, blog posts, comments, podcasts and even Youtube videos written by non-CGL-credentialled users can be automatically filtered out.
• Registered Totalitarian Analogist (RTA): Registered Totalitarian Analogists have the necessary background in history, ethics and logic to appropriately and aptly employ Nazi, Communist, Maoist, Khmer Rouge, Klan and Fascism-related metaphors.  (NOTE:  Having used unironically, even once, the term “Bushitler” is a lifetime disqualification from this credential).
• Authorized Guantanamo Referrent (AGR): These Authorized Referrants will have sufficient background in current events, the law (especially the actual text of the Geneva Convention as re: combatants who are not members of a military or indigenous partisan group) to competently use “Guantamo” similes and metaphors.  Additionally, AGRs will at least be aware of the irony behind the term “International Law” when referring to it.

I did note that this was a market solution.  I am the market.  To get your CGL, RTA or AGR, send $10 to my PayPal account.  (Limited time offer: all three for $25!).

Thank you.  That is all.

[1] The quote, like the story, is “fake but accurate.”

Cross-posted and comments welcome at Shot In The Dark.