Written by Steve Almond in 2003
Conservatism – Unreconstructed White Male Rage.
What you need to understand about the conservative movement in this country is that it is predicated on fostering the values of angry white men. Those values can be summed up quite simply:
Fuck faggots, dykes, niggers, kikes, spics, chinks, tree-huggers, and, above all, poor people. Fuck you for calling attention to our privileged greed. Fuck you for attempting to awaken our desiccated mercy and for threatening to deliver us into the jaws of class warfare. Fuck you for daring to suggest that the government should play any role in aiding the disenfranchised. Fuck you for opposing the obscene concentration of wealth in our hands, and for suggesting that our relentless hogging of the world’s resources is anything other than our God given right. And, while we’re on the subject, fuck you for suggesting that Christ’s Sermon on the Mount had anything to do with the meek inheriting the earth, or loving the downtrodden. Fuck you for holding us to a standard of compassion that died within us long ago.
If you listen to any of the hate-mongers on AM radio, or the barking fat mouths on Fox TV, this is more or less what you’ll hear, day after day, an uninterrupted river a rage.
And it may occur to you at some point to ask a very simple question: why so angry? This is the same conservative movement that managed to steal the White House in the last Presidential election, with an assist from the Supreme Court. Their candidate lost by half a million votes, but has still managed to push through virtually every major policy aim, from massive tax cuts for the rich to environmental rollbacks. They’ve fucked the state and local budgets for schools and social programs and launched one war after another, on behalf of big business. They have the Democrats kowtowing to their every whim.
Shouldn’t they be happy?
What I’m suggesting here is that we are best to view the rage of the right not with bafflement, but with suspicion.
The truth is that conservatives live in a constant state of terror and guilt-denial – an internal, unconscious state. They know precisely what they’re doing, just like any greedy bully does. And they know how shameful their behavior is, and, more so, how shameful their feelings of hatred and bigotry are. This is the party, after all, that supported McCarthyism, that opposed civil rights, that has attempted to assail women’s rights, that fomented the genocides of Laos and Cambodia and East Timor and Chile and El Salvador, that has happily treated the developing world like a toilet. It is a party for and by the rich, the white rich, the white, angry rich.
And they will never be happy because they will never feel safe. They have chosen to live in a state of perpetual fear, that the masses of this country, or other countries, will eventually rise up and hold them accountable for their blubbering greed. (Hello 9/11)
Us liberals will never be able to muster the brutality required to put these psychos in their place, because we’re simply not pissed off enough, because we’re simply not psychologically damaged enough. And it is for this reason that we find ourselves in such a curious situation, with a minority party (Dems outnumber Republicans by a wide margin) running the show, and inflicting on this country policies that most Americans don’t support. It’s a little like how the South managed to fuck over Reconstruction – they didn’t have the numbers, but they had the pure thuggish hatred on their side.
You can look at the recent political history of this country and see this pattern borne out over and over: in the jihad conservatives launched against Clinton, which crippled his efficacy, in the 2002 election theft, in the steady and not even subtle coddling of the super rich (did someone say “death tax”) and, most of all, in the ideological neutering of the democratic party.
These simpering clowns running for the nomination are going to get their asses kicked sideways, because they simply haven’t the moral courage (or the moral track record) to stand up to the bully, to call Bush out on his white male rage, to question why his entire administrative agenda can be summed up in two words: Kill Towelhead! Or why he lied about going to war. Or why his vice prez got the contract to rebuild the country we bombed into rubble. So that’s why a former coke-sniffing frat boy is running our country into the ground (Bye bye surplus! Bye bye wilderness!) and why his minions are still staging their little electronic klan rallies on a daily basis.
And what’s most pathetic of all is how quietly we’re letting it happen, this great country, with all its wealth and potential for compassion, with all its grand rhetoric of All Men Are Created Equal, with everything we might do to lead not by having more, but by caring enough. We actually have the power to save the world, to save our souls, and instead we’re buying Hummers and talking about whether the Bachelorette gives good head.
If I wasn’t so furious, I’d be crying.
sa
(Note: While cleaning out things I've saved in the past, I thought I'd use my blog as storage of things too good to throw)
What you need to understand about the conservative movement in this country is that it is predicated on fostering the values of angry white men. Those values can be summed up quite simply:
Fuck faggots, dykes, niggers, kikes, spics, chinks, tree-huggers, and, above all, poor people. Fuck you for calling attention to our privileged greed. Fuck you for attempting to awaken our desiccated mercy and for threatening to deliver us into the jaws of class warfare. Fuck you for daring to suggest that the government should play any role in aiding the disenfranchised. Fuck you for opposing the obscene concentration of wealth in our hands, and for suggesting that our relentless hogging of the world’s resources is anything other than our God given right. And, while we’re on the subject, fuck you for suggesting that Christ’s Sermon on the Mount had anything to do with the meek inheriting the earth, or loving the downtrodden. Fuck you for holding us to a standard of compassion that died within us long ago.
If you listen to any of the hate-mongers on AM radio, or the barking fat mouths on Fox TV, this is more or less what you’ll hear, day after day, an uninterrupted river a rage.
And it may occur to you at some point to ask a very simple question: why so angry? This is the same conservative movement that managed to steal the White House in the last Presidential election, with an assist from the Supreme Court. Their candidate lost by half a million votes, but has still managed to push through virtually every major policy aim, from massive tax cuts for the rich to environmental rollbacks. They’ve fucked the state and local budgets for schools and social programs and launched one war after another, on behalf of big business. They have the Democrats kowtowing to their every whim.
Shouldn’t they be happy?
What I’m suggesting here is that we are best to view the rage of the right not with bafflement, but with suspicion.
The truth is that conservatives live in a constant state of terror and guilt-denial – an internal, unconscious state. They know precisely what they’re doing, just like any greedy bully does. And they know how shameful their behavior is, and, more so, how shameful their feelings of hatred and bigotry are. This is the party, after all, that supported McCarthyism, that opposed civil rights, that has attempted to assail women’s rights, that fomented the genocides of Laos and Cambodia and East Timor and Chile and El Salvador, that has happily treated the developing world like a toilet. It is a party for and by the rich, the white rich, the white, angry rich.
And they will never be happy because they will never feel safe. They have chosen to live in a state of perpetual fear, that the masses of this country, or other countries, will eventually rise up and hold them accountable for their blubbering greed. (Hello 9/11)
Us liberals will never be able to muster the brutality required to put these psychos in their place, because we’re simply not pissed off enough, because we’re simply not psychologically damaged enough. And it is for this reason that we find ourselves in such a curious situation, with a minority party (Dems outnumber Republicans by a wide margin) running the show, and inflicting on this country policies that most Americans don’t support. It’s a little like how the South managed to fuck over Reconstruction – they didn’t have the numbers, but they had the pure thuggish hatred on their side.
You can look at the recent political history of this country and see this pattern borne out over and over: in the jihad conservatives launched against Clinton, which crippled his efficacy, in the 2002 election theft, in the steady and not even subtle coddling of the super rich (did someone say “death tax”) and, most of all, in the ideological neutering of the democratic party.
These simpering clowns running for the nomination are going to get their asses kicked sideways, because they simply haven’t the moral courage (or the moral track record) to stand up to the bully, to call Bush out on his white male rage, to question why his entire administrative agenda can be summed up in two words: Kill Towelhead! Or why he lied about going to war. Or why his vice prez got the contract to rebuild the country we bombed into rubble. So that’s why a former coke-sniffing frat boy is running our country into the ground (Bye bye surplus! Bye bye wilderness!) and why his minions are still staging their little electronic klan rallies on a daily basis.
And what’s most pathetic of all is how quietly we’re letting it happen, this great country, with all its wealth and potential for compassion, with all its grand rhetoric of All Men Are Created Equal, with everything we might do to lead not by having more, but by caring enough. We actually have the power to save the world, to save our souls, and instead we’re buying Hummers and talking about whether the Bachelorette gives good head.
If I wasn’t so furious, I’d be crying.
sa
(Note: While cleaning out things I've saved in the past, I thought I'd use my blog as storage of things too good to throw)
posted by Flimsy Sanity @ 7:49 AM
1 Comments:
At 8:29 AM,
R J Adams said…
since I arrived in America it has amazed - no, staggered - me how kittenish and timid the opposition party is towards this administration. Any British politician worth his salt would have dragged them through the mud for their lousy and inept handling of government.
That was the problem with the last election; Kerry was virtually tugging his forelock to the republicans. For me, the final straw was when he went out murdering animals on camera to prove he could be Republican too. Where are the politicians with backbone in this country? It took a Scot, George Galloway, to tell Congress where to stick themselves and their petty accusations - and they never bothered him again - when are we going to see an American politician telling it as it is? Or have they all sold out to Corporate America?
Post a Comment
<< Home