It's been a depressing spectacle. One of the many drawbacks of postmodern political discourse in a mediated age is how quickly and inevitably essentially symbolic "issues" become as real--or even more real, hyper-real--as old-fashioned real issues like tax policy and war. The reason it's so hard to sustain that distinction is that these hyper-real symbolic issues immediately become real just insofar as they move voters. As a result, that becomes the "reality" serious players pay attention to much of the time. And they control the game, so that's what the public gets--the various ways they play the game in an effort to manipulate opinion.
Even when the issues are very real, as with the recent health care and financial reform debates, almost all the energy in the public arena is devoted to "framing" the real issues to that they can be reduced to effective symbols. So, even though the public option on health care was dropped and the bill actually proposed was more or less the same as the one Romney supported as governor of Massachusetts, "socialized medicine" and government "death panels" were still the tropes of choice for its opponents.
Now, there is no question that the Republican/Tea Party Right is way out front when it comes to outrageously misleading symbol-spin. They happily "just make stuff up," as poor Obama once put it when he still thought he could somehow put a stop to it.
But of course, nowadays, you can just make stuff up--and they do, shamelessly. Trust me, they are laughing at the gullible media as they do it, knowing it will get reported equitably as this side/that side. One of the main reason Democrats are in such bad shape is that they still have some respect for truth when they play the game of symbolic politics.
In the case of this purely symbolic mosque issue, for example, defenders of the mosque have nothing to match the disgusting Gingrich and Palin analogies with hypothetical Nazi installations near the Holocaust museum or Japanese installations at Pearl Harbor. A moderate Sufi Muslim is leading the mosque project, for heaven's sake! Gingrich, who fancies himself a serious historian and intellectual, either knows what that means and is ignoring historical fact for the sake of polemic or he's an ignoramus. But he doesn't care which. He has no integrity.
It's disgusting, but oh-so-clever, because for ordinary people with no investment in historical and cultural accuracy--especially people who lost loved ones on 9/11--the comparison seems valid at the level of visceral emotion. They just deal with images because that's all their culture offers. Swastika juxtaposed with Holocaust--Japanese something with Pearl Harbor--mosque with ground zero. That's all it takes. That's how mediated politics works--it has to: there is so much to process and so little time and, for most people, so little interest.
That's why Mayor Bloomberg and Ted Olson and so many others who have courageously taken principled stands in support of the mosque project, at considerable risk to their political viability, are in such a difficult position in this symbolic battle. They are, of course, just plain right as a matter of principle and historical fact. But droning on about principle and factual differences between wars with Nazi Germany and Fascist Japan, as opposed to the fanatical acts of a tiny minority of Muslims--droning on about such matters becomes just that, droning on, if you are up against the power of imagery in the maelstrom of a mediated culture.
And poor Obama has once again been fumbling around this fine line. He tried to split the difference between the right to build the mosque and the wisdom of building it and came out looking like a wimp to both sides. That is such a shame, a perfect coda to this depressing spectacle. Because, of course, there is a difference. Just fantasize for a moment. What would have been the consequences if the good folks behind the mosque project--perhaps after some outreach to 9/11 families, perhaps in a public setting with some 9/11 families--had announced a decision to move the mosque early on? Not based on principles or historical and cultural facts, but based on simple courtesy towards other members of their community (by which I mean New York City), courtesy toward people who would be, as we say, "offended" by a mosque in that location. What would have been the consequences if that decision had been made on the simple basis of consideration for the feelings of those 9/11 families, however irrational? Feelings just are irrational, after all--but we still need to respect them somehow. As a matter of courtesy.
But after the symbolic politics we've been seeing, a simple and humane gesture like that would have to be interpreted as a loss--as backing down in the face of bigotry and etc. And, in a (symbolic, postmodern) way, it would be just that. So that's why, if I had to choose, I would be for hanging tough and building the mosque. But that's also why this whole spectacle has been so depressing. I feel trapped into supporting something that will in fact offend and hurt so many of those people who lost loved ones on 9/11, something I don't want to do from the bottom of my heart. At the same time, I recoil from offending the earnest New York City Muslims who are behind the mosque project, with the best of intentions. So, unless some genius of humane compromise can intervene, it's hard to see how this symbolic issue doesn't end up offending and hurting someone, with all the poisonous consequences, either way.
Whatever the outcome in this particular situation, in the long run we need to get to a saner and more humane politics--a post-postmodern politics. And it might help if we distinguished systematically between courtesy and principle when these symbolic identity issues arise. Courtesy is very deep in human being, after all. Anthropologically speaking, you could argue that principle derives from courtesy. Principle is what courtesy becomes in a mass society composed of people who are strangers to each other. That's why I had to say above that by "their community" I meant New York City--otherwise it would have been read as meaning New York Muslims.
In a postmodern mass society, defined by diversity, we need to recover courtesy when we deal with political correctness issues. If you think about it, the very currency of the term "offended" in these contexts implies exactly that.