Posted on 11/19/2002 10:41:12 PM PST by Timesink
I’m slipping into bathos at record speed here tonight; a function of happiness, I suppose. So let me explain just why right-wingers hate interracial friendships, and what this has to do with feeling good about what you think, not what you do. This isn’t a screed, but it belongs to the same genus, so if you’re disposed to roll your eyes at this sort of thing, ta-ta; see you tomorrow.
Let’s say you’re a movie reviewer. You’re writing about a war movie, and you say this: “Indeed, the love that the soldiers feel for one another has no erotic component whatsoever, which is probably why left-wingers hate these movies.” If you had an editor who cared, he or she would advise striking the line, because it would make you look stupid. It would make you look like someone who dealt in the laziest form of archetypes - why, them lefties is all homo-lovers!
Let us turn to the current issue of the New Yorker (the cartoon issue, and the worst such issue in memory). David Denby is reviewing “8 Mile,” the new Eminem movie.
“People who are convinced that Eminem is destroying America might want to consider the delicacy of the white-black friendships in ‘8 Mile.’ (Perhaps the specter of such friendships is what right-wingers actually hate the most.)”
This is what happens when your sole contact with the “right wing” consists of descriptions in New York Times editorials and “West Wing” episodes. In Denby’s mind, the “right wing” is inherently disposed to segregation in all forms, including social - in fact, social integration is the worst, and it is not only hated, it is what the “right wing” actually hates the most. They seethe to this day over “I Spy.” They regard the downfall of jazz as beginning the moment Benny Goodman asked Charlie Christian to join his band. The fact that the attacks on Condi Rice (brief, strange side note: the other night I dreamed I was at dinner with Cap Weinberger, and he asked me who I wanted for veep in 04, and we both said “Condi Rice” at the same time and high-fived. Do I dream about Heidi Klum wearing only three shots from a Reddi Whip can? No, I dream of high-fiving Cap. Pathetic.) Anyway - the fact that explicitly racial attacks on Rice and Powell from the left - be it Belafonte or the radio host in Florida - are irrelevant, since the left at its heart believes in goodness for Blacks in general. The “right wing” puts up with Rice, but when they get together to sew sheets and pre-soak the cross wood with lighter fluid, you have to know her name comes up.
The other day I was talking with a Democrat friend about the election. She’d remarked, with equal amounts of sarcasm and good-natured ribbing, that the GOP had two years to build utopia. I thought about that later while walking Jasper around the block, and thought, no; they’re not about building utopia. Personally, I’m interested in keeping other people from building Utopia, because the more your believe you can create heaven on earth the more likely you are to set up guillotines in the public square to hasten the process. But we were exploring her opposition to the GOP, and she mentioned “Home schoolers, the religious right. They drive me nuts.”
The home-schooling part I didn’t quite get. There seems to be some who believe that this is a typical day in a home-schooling classroom:
“Alright, Ezekial, Rebecca, Simon, Mary, put away your snakes and come over here for natcheral science. Ezekial, how old is the earth?”
“It’s six thousand years old!”
“That’s right. Rebecca, did the dinosaurs come afore man, or at the same time?”
“Uhh . . . at the same time?”
“No, Rebecca, there were no dinosaurs. You’re going to have to get a paddlin’ for that, and remember: God wants it to hurt.”
As for the “religious right,” they are utterly irrelevant to me. I’ve been told for 20 years that they will bring a miserable double-knit Pat Boone theocracy, but the evidence seems lacking. There is nothing I want to hear, read, or see that I cannot hear, read, or see. Now and again they get a book banned from a school, just as the Grievance-American community succeeds in banishing Twain because he uses the N word, but no one can look at the American popular culture in the last 20 years and tell me it’s been moving in a direction that gladdens the heart of Jerry Falwell. I have my hell-in-a-handbasket moments, but they’re not about sex or bad language or violence. They’re about the vulgar, grunting, brainless way in which these subjects are handled. I lament the loss of the gentle innuendo, the graceful aspects of old pop culture, but would I want to live in a society that put the screws on so tight that artistic invention was the only way to express certain human necessities? No. It’s a matter of degrees, of context, of intelligence. I can applaud the Victoria’s Secret catalog that shows up in the mailbox, and decry a culture that wants to tart up 12-year olds and sell thongs to little girls. There’s no contradiction. It’s not an either-or. If the religious right has any effect, it’s prodding people like myself to stand up and get pissed instead of letting it roll over us without comment. And if I find common ground with them on nipple-piercing parental notification laws, then that’s how it works. If they’re on the other side of the barricade when it comes anti-sodomy laws, then that’s how it works.
So they organize. So they vote. So what. To hear some speak, though, this society is bound by the constricting bands of puritanism and repression, and we are but two laws away from confining pregnant women to the kitchen and denying them footwear, and this god-bothering cabal will now repeal the 20th century.
Look. One of the most popular movies of this season is “Jackass,” in which a guy shoves a toy car up his butt and goes to the doctor for X-Rays. And one of the most popular movies is the VeggieTales version of the biblical tale of Jonah. You got your yin, you got your yang. You want to censor my books and mags and movies, well, I got your yang right here, but I’m really not worried. The recording industry and the movie industry showed last year that they pose a far greater threat to my ability to see and hear what I want when, and where, I want than the much-feared “religious right.”
Some people can’t enter any tent that has these people in it. Fine; as you wish. This means that some people who are themselves deeply religious find themselves aligned with people who have an acidic animus to religion - and this I can’t understand. I don’t know how you can be a believer and be comfortable as a confederate of people who despite believers. Numerically the latter segment may be small, but their influence is great. I think most on the left support gay rights, for example, but are uncomfortable with the denomination of the Boy Scouts. Yet they acquiesce. There’s an aspect of ideological purity at work, the notion that doing what you perceive as the Right Thing must be balanced against who else wishes the same outcome, for reasons you find abhorrent. If some on the right support the Boy Scouts because they hate gays, then defending the Boy Scouts on grounds of freedom of religion and association becomes a low priority item. Heads down. Keep mum. Let it all shake out.
The right panders to its religious base, uses it, gives it lip service; the left seems genuinely afraid of the consequences of confronting its irreligious base. Maybe that’s the big difference.
I am not religious myself, but people who are don’t bother me in the least. Sometimes I envy their conviction; sometimes I wish I could lend them my doubt, and I flatter myself to think we would each profit from the exchange. I’m more comfortable on this side because the people who take emotional satisfaction in trashing religion just annoy the piss out of me, and I want nothing to do with them. I’m not talking about atheists - at least they believe in something. I’m talking about those preening sneerbots who lack the capacity for spiritual contemplation, and think that anyone given to theosophical disquisitions is akin to a small boy expecting Superman to fly through the window and help him tie his shoe.
I’m not the first to note this, but: for some, politics has taken the place of religion. As usual, this basic observation has been inflated to cover entire groups, and lazy writers will say that the ENTIRE LEFT has replaced religion with politics. Nonsense. There is a religious left in this country - they’re the ones holding prayer vigils, asking God to keep the United States from removing Saddam. There are the religious liberals, who may take issue with the positions of their church, but are devout believers, and vote Democratic because they believe this is the best way to achieve a certain set of objectives; they are motivated by their conceptions of justice and compassion, and regard liberal policies not as the only way to achieve them, but the surest and the best. But with many there is a belief that liberalism itself is not just a superior method for achieving certain goals, but an idea that is inherently nobler, and bestows on the believer a moral advantage not available to people who believe otherwise. I’ve never thought that people who don’t share my views on national security or economic policy are morally inferior. I’m not fighting Nazis or Soviets here. I’m dealing with fellow Americans about tax brackets.
But when I read comments like Denby’s, I am struck again by the idea that my position on a few issues makes me a bad man.
How, then, can I redeem myself?
Well, there’s an old religious analogue here. I can redeem myself not by acts, but by faith.
My colleague Steve Berg at the Strib had an interesting piece in our new expanded editorial section. It’s his account of what it would mean if joined the new Republican Hegemony. See, he lives in the suburbs, surrounded by Republicans, and they give him gentle jibes about being the sole lib in the land of the elephants. His response to the ribbing was to publish this, which and reveals them for the smug, self-interested, morally stunted dolts they are. It contains some remarkable insights into Republicanism - apparently, taxation is voluntary when you join the Dark Side.
. . . A second sensation is one of relief. I no longer feel guilty about my relative wealth. I'm able to retain my sympathy for the less fortunate. But my compassion is now voluntary. I can choose to serve in a soup kitchen or donate to a charity. But I'm not forced through taxation to help those who might actually try harder to help themselves.”
Um . . . okay. Stupid me, still signing checks to the IRS.
This part stuck out:
There's a bounce in my step. It occurs almost in a flash that I no longer need to worry about my city, whether it's pleasant enough or up-to-date. If my city needs something -- new buses or a ballpark or a museum or affordable homes -- the market will provide it. If the market won't provide it, then we don't really need it. Once I've reached this simple conclusion, I feel much better. A weight has been lifted.
I get the picture. Being a Democrat who lives in the suburbs is de facto morally superior to being a “right winger,” who by definition doesn’t care about the core city in which he lives. Well, to quote an old revolutionary: here I stand. I didn’t leave. I love this city, which has far more problems than any suburb, and could certainly profit from a thousand dozen more Democrats happy to open a vein for the taxman instead of moving to the suburbs. I’ll grant that I’m unwilling to hike taxes on Minneapolis bars and hotels to fund a stadium for millionaire players - but you know what? If they pass it, I’ll pay it. I’m not going anywhere. When I’m old and can’t make it up the stairs you can stick me in one of those condos downtown that overlooks the ancient river.
You won’t find me whining about money for museums, either - in fact the opposition to the expansion of the Institute of Art has come from city residents themselves in a highly Democratic neighborhood who don’t want their living-room picture-window view changed. Fine; they can bitch; they get to do that. You will not find me whining about tax money to restore downtown theaters, or rebuild the riverfront, or revive the milling district, and among my Republican friends who live in the city these are regarded as investments in the place where they live, where their children will play. We live here. We don’t want to see the city surrender. Yes, we could fight every levy, howl with rage over every penny lavished on an ancient theater; we could die pure behind a locked door with bars over the window. We gnash and wail over waste and largesse, yet here we are. We actually care about the city - and we support a reduction in the capital gains tax! How is such a thing possible?
Of course this mulish inability to understand the other side characterizes elements in both parties; duh. But when it pops out in movie reviews and mainstream editorials, when it has the casual conversational tone of received wisdom, I wonder how much it permeates the entire intellectual apparatus of modern liberalism.
As a persuasive tactic, it lacks.
When I was an angry little lib in college, I wrote a piece called “Diary of a Bad Conservative,” and I really don’t want to read it again - the wince factor would be too high. I know it's smug beyond belief, which is why I remember it. In short: contradiction in the enemy is a sign of hypocrisy, which invalidates everything they believe in; contradiction in one's comrades is a sign of humanity, which validates their higher beliefs. That was me in a nutshell. I can’t speak for others, but I know that my shift in opinions over the last few years did not cause me to lose respect for folks who think differently, unless they profess a particularly fluorescent brand of idiocy. What they think now I thought then; I don’t think I was eeeevil then, and I don’t think they are now. I wasn’t completely comfy on that side; I’m not completely comfy over here. So it goes. But I don’t ascribe an moral inferiority to friends and neighbors who have a different path to common objectives - unless they insist on proving they're willfully stupid, and live in an ideological exoskeleton that dictates which way they must move regardless of new data.
An old friend who still believes what we believed in college took me to task the last time we met, and wondered where Mr. Middle Ground had gone, why I no longer seemed interested in finding commonality. The simple answer is that there is no common ground with people who think you’re a political leper, a winged monkey in the service of a green-skinned Nancy Reagan in a witch’s hat. Respect works both ways, and if it’s not returned, then something changes. There’s a difference between thinking someone’s strategies are wrong, and thinking them a knave who acts from ignorance at best, and more likely acts from malice. If that’s what you think, I am not interested in changing your mind. I am not interested in working together. I am not interested in suffering your insults or your condescension or any other form your preconceptions take. I am interested in defeating you, and getting down to work with the people who come in your place, and grant me the respect I’ll give them.
Unless they turn out to be florid Commie wankers, too. Then I’m just going to stay home and watch Sopranos reruns. Sure, Tony's a womanizing criminal thug, but you mess with his family and he'll have you whacked.
See? There's always common ground, if you look for it.
zzzing! Sure wish I could write like this.
-ccm
Ding, ding, ding. From libertarians, to moderates, to liberals, there is this unsupported fear of the religious right. They really believe that the religious right is on the verge of legislating what goes on in bedrooms. The only thing close in the last 20 years was when Alabama (a Democratic governor, I migh add) tried to outlaw vibrators. Fortunately, such stupidity was overturned.
Yep... but furthermore, I've become convinced as I get older that I can not change the minds of someone unless they have already come to the uncomfortable place that they know something is wrong with their world view. Only then can I attempt to communicate with them. Fortunately for those of us who are conservative, people become wiser as they become older, and thus more conservative (in general) so we have the constant pleasure of younger folks joining our ranks. It must be very disheartening for those liberals who just can't figure it out as they get older and older as they watch their ranks get thinner. (I made the switch in my early 20's, so never experienced a friend's conversion away from liberalism... must be a bummer.)
No matter, though. All I'm interested in now is defeating them.
I don't think that fear is altogether without merit. Bowers vs. Hardwick was only 16 years ago and hasn't been overturned.
I'm not against any state or community defining what it's local standards and laws are, but I think selective prosecution is inherently unjust.
Back in college I had a roommate that was as liberal as I am conservative. Despite that, we got along great because we each respected each other's opinion and didn't think of each other as brainwashed idiots.
A Free State Robespierre Project bump!
Their misplaced their fears of God (Someone they should fear) are projected onto His followers, who are simply bond-slaves of Christ.
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