I have a deeper point to be made but before I get to it, I have to set up the context. That’s going to be an important thing to remember, so bear with me.
Al Gore has been interested in computers long before the rest of us knew what the Internet was. He had been promoting the ideas of a vast network of computers and telecommunications back in the 70s. In 1988, Leonard Kleinrock (one of the people behind ARPANET, the precursor to the Internet) submitted a report to Congress, Toward a National Research Network, which Gore took to heart. The High Performance Computing and Communication Act of 1991 is commonly referred to as “The Gore Act” and provided $600M to fund the National Information Infrastructure (the “information superhighway” he referred to) that would result in the Internet as we know it today.
On top of that, the Gore Act funded the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois which resulted in the creation of the Mosaic web browser, arguably the reason that the Internet took off as it did from a popular standpoint.
But then came the Wolf Blitzer interview. On March 9, 1999, Gore sat with Blitzer and was asked:
“Why should Democrats, looking at the Democratic nomination process, support you instead of Bill Bradley?”
To which he responded:
“I'll be offering my vision when my campaign begins. And it will be comprehensive and sweeping. And I hope that it will be compelling enough to draw people toward it. I feel that it will be. But it will emerge from my dialogue with the American people. I've traveled to every part of this country during the last six years. During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet. I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be important to our country's economic growth and environmental protection, improvements in our educational system.”
Pretty anodyne, wouldn’t you say? Something you would expect a politician to say. When asked what he has accomplished, he’ll list various outcomes from legislation passed. When we talk about how Eisenhower created the Interstate Highway System, nobody seems to think we mean that Ike was shoveling asphalt onto a graded path outside Albuquerque (and on a side note, it was Gore’s father, Al Gore, Sr., who helped usher the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act of 1956 into being.) No, we all understand that he was working in his capacity as President to get legislation passed that would create the programs and funding needed to get the project done. Hoover Dam was authorized by Coolidge and nobody thinks he laid any brick to construct it.
And indeed, so it was with Gore’s statement. He made it and nobody thought anything of it. Nobody thought he was suggesting that he spent all-nighters coding the TCP/IP stack in Pascal while subsisting on Hot Pockets and Mt. Dew. He was simply talking about his work as a Senator.
Until a few days later when Drudge decided to turn it on its head.
It started with misquoting him. The claim was that Gore had said he “invented” the Internet. But he didn’t. He didn’t come close. “But ‘created,’ ‘invented,’ it’s the same thing!” I hear so many people cry. No, it isn’t. The networking systems that are the foundation of the Internet were not created in 1991. Again, ARPANET existed long before that. As in so many things, the Internet is an evolutionary shift. We had computer networks already. CompuServe, GEnie, Prodigy, they were all around before the Internet and even then, that was merely the commercial side of things. Educational institutions were using BITNET and ARPANET long before you were inundated with an infinite number of AOL CD-ROMs in the mail. Gore knew all this and it is clear to all but the most casual observer that he wasn’t talking about anything but the program to expand the Internet from a niche market of government and educational institutions to the world at large.
But that didn’t matter. Any weapon that could be used to bring Gore down and elect Bush was useful and if that meant misquoting Gore to make him look a fool, then so be it. And despite the fact that everybody had already heard what Gore said and it had been days since he had said it, the media glommed onto this misquote and repeated it ad infinitum. So often was this repeated that it has become a joke and even Gore pokes fun at himself over this “inartful” sentence of his.
Except it’s all bullshit. Gore didn’t say anything wrong. The repetition of the joke that, “Al Gore said he invented the Internet!” is part of the reason that we find ourselves where we are today.
Ilhan Omar didn’t say anything wrong. It wasn’t “inartful,” she didn’t “make a mistake,” she doesn’t need “to figure out how to speak about sensitive topics more carefully.” Let’s repeat it for those who are still trying to understand:
Omar didn’t say anything wrong.
There’s another diary on here (you may have noticed me quoting) that seems to bend over backwards in trying to placate people who might be upset by what she said. It recognizes the context in which Omar made her comments…
...and then completely ignores it in order to slam her (www.dailykos.com/...):
OK, so Omar erred by not using the word terrorist or terrorism to describe those who committed the murders on 9/11, and yes, she could have made her remarks more appropriate simply by adding, for example, “evil” or “murderous” after the words “did something.” She could have done better.
Oh, it’s not as bad as the racists who are sending her death threats, but it concedes the point that Omar said something wrong. But once again for those who still don’t get it:
Omar didn’t say anything wrong.
So take your “She could have done better” and shove it. If you are too stupid to understand that the fact that she didn’t turn into a slathering harpy screaming about terrorists with spittle flying as she railed against “evil murderers” doesn’t mean she thinks what happened on 9/11 was just some tiny thing of no consequence, then you are part of the problem.
You see, it does not matter what Omar says. She is a black, female, Muslim refugee and nothing she says or does will ever be good enough for those who seek to turn this country into the perfect white supremacist nation they thought they had before that “Kenyan” came along. By talking about how she “could have done better,” you have given up any pretense of having anything useful to say on the subject. You have already surrendered the point to the white supremacists. They will never understand how context informs us what it is she meant. The only thing they will ever accept is complete accession to the idea that all Muslims are evil terrorists out to kill us all “because they hate our freedom” and any attempt to talk about what happened on 9/11 that doesn’t start, continue, and end with that level of hatred only means you’re a sympathizer.
And furthermore, they don’t care. They don’t care that she has been misquoted. They don’t care that she literally did not say the thing they are claiming she said. And this goes to the previous outrage regarding Omar: She literally did not say that Jews have “divided loyalties.” There is no confusion. She did not say that.
And yet, everybody seems to think she did. And by conceding that point, you allow it to become reality. Everybody knows Gore said he invented the Internet, right?
Except he didn’t.
Not even close.
If you truly care about the future of “her political career and that of the progressive movement,” then you need to stop giving any ground to the conservatives who will stop at nothing to make people think that liberals are out to destroy everything.
Omar didn’t say anything wrong.
I’m an intellectual and words do matter to me. It is important what we say and how we say it and when and where and to whom and all the other things that affect communication. But when it is clear what a person means, then we do not countenance people slicing and dicing their comments, pulling out a juicy string of words devoid of all the setup that came before, and crowing it from the rooftops with some new interpretation that is completely divorced from reality.
And this gets back to my comment above setting up the context. If you don’t understand the circumstances in which something was said, what on earth makes you think you can understand the meaning of what was said? And if we do understand the context, then anybody who tries to ignore it in order to score political points is not to be coddled. They don’t have a point. It is not reasonable to “hear them out.” It is nothing but a distraction that causes us to talk about the tone of what was said and the parsing of individual words rather than focusing on the actual meaning of what was said.
And Omar didn’t say anything wrong.
We were taught this lesson 20 years ago when it was used to sabotage Gore’s campaign for President.
Let us hope we have finally learned it.