to never, ever, ever, ever read youtube comments. ever.
even on the most innocuous videos.
my heart will stop, my hands will shake, and i will do nothing the rest of the night but write fifty versions of the same response that will translate best into a primal scream in the middle of a murky swamp, surrounded by goblins.
I’ve been so calm lately, I’ve just been staying away as well I can from politics. People tell me all the time, well, people in Europe are racist, stupid, and _____ as well. I do believe all that, I do, I’m not that naive. Of course not every idiot soccer hooligan in the UK has some studied opinion about immigration, I don’t expect him to. I don’t expect our racing fan drunks to, either.
The main thing that separates our drooling classes is this: anti-intellectualism.
Overseas, there isn’t some grand movement to be proud of not being all that ‘book smart’. None that I’m aware of, at least. Granted, I’m not nearly as entrenched in European politics as I am United States’ politics and politicians, but the way I see it, someone as pointedly reveling in their ignorance as Sarah Palin, Bobby Jindal, or Mike Huckabee would be an absolute joke anywhere else…well, anywhere else in a first-world nation as we are. Do you think actually believing you performed an exorcism in college, and then TALKING about it publicly, would fly in the UK? France? Denmark? Japan? Okay, maybe Japan. They’d probably just think it was hot, and have a comic worked up the next day of Bobby Jindal with massive tits having sex with a demon as the plot.
Why do we collectively have such a hard-on for country ‘wisdom’, platitudes, and the most basal sort of “common sense”? I’m not interested in the common thoughts of common people, because get this; smart people can think them as well, AND they can expand upon them with further thought. Now I am no genius, but I’m smarter than the most average of the average, and I accept that people smarter than me get to make decisions, and have more power–especially in specific fields. I want my doctor more educated than me about medical issues, I want my lawyer smarter than me when it comes to legal matters, and I want my representatives smarter than me when it comes to pretty much everything. I want them to be more thoughtful, more studied, more rational. Certainly not the same as me, and certainly not less. I don’t get all blustery about someone being unashamedly smarter than me. Hell, I am a huge fan of Christopher Hitchens, and he is the most elitist, better-than-you seeming dick alive. I accept egos, as long as they have a reason to exist. If you are smarter than me, feel free to know it.
I have respect for quite a few conservatives and Republicans of the past. George Will (smarter than me, except when he is arguing against ‘blue jeans’), Pat Buchanan (if you can believe it), Eisenhower I’m a big fan of, the first George Bush did an alright job with a few things, none of them fucked up too badly during the Cold War (although the rewriting of history to suggest that Reagan single-handedly ended it irritates me quite a bit, he certainly did help the process of Russia’s progression along), and really…up until Bush, they at least didn’t seem to mind allowing debate, and just general cleverness within their ranks. It isn’t their party, it isn’t their political ideology, it is who they’ve had to get swooning for them over the years.
I couldn’t identify exactly when it begun, but I’d say sometime in the late 80s and early 90s, you know, back in those fatted Clinton years where people had a lot of free time and minor things they could quibble over, when the evangelical movement really became relevant, and ‘hit the scene’. Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, James Dobson…after they became popular among the…people who buy that shit, they were courted, in part, by both parties. The Republicans won out in the end, given that the Democrats only engaged on a very weak and very misguided “wah wah ban violent video games wah wah RAP MUSIC!!!” level. The Republicans were willing to go all the way with them. Abortion? Murder! Homos? Worse than abortion!
Of course, had anyone at that time actually cracked open the New Testament and skimmed the Sermon on the Mount, I think we’d currently have legislation banning divorce, since that was his real big deal at the time. Also, evangelicals would own nothing, and never proselytize. They’d also be concerned with the conditions of the absolute dregs of society, like prisoners. You know, the ones who’s state-controlled murders they don’t care about? Kill something that is arguably not alive, Heaven forbid. Kill something that you could not deny the humanity of, well, as long as it is during a war or they have been charged guilty of a crime, go right ahead.
Instead, easy targets were lined up in the crosshairs. I will go off on a tangeant about this, but rest assured that I think the actual teachings and philosophy of Jesus had a beautiful (if sometimes disagreeable to me, personally) message, but it has been completely mistranslated by large swaths of believers. The ones that do get it, really get it, don’t have much of a voice. I mean, who is asking the opinion of some monk who has no worldly possessions and lives in the middle of a barren desert his opinion on gay marriage? Instead, we’ll take the word of a man with capped teeth, a gold-and-diamond-encrusted crucifix swaying overtop his Armani suit, and a pomade-soaked hairdo what he thinks about gays in the military.
He is truly the arbiter of Christ, and the abattoir of modern values, right?
Even though the monk would probably agree with the evangelical, at least his opinion would have some …meat. He would actually be living it, fully living it. Really, to me, it doesn’t matter what opinion is held by a religious group or person. It really shouldn’t matter in terms of government policy, either. If the only justification you feel your argument needs can be found in the pages of a book that not everyone agrees is proof of some sort of higher source of judgment, than you have no justification at all, really. Being a person with no faith means I don’t have to get nervous every time someone says “God is Pro-Life”, it means nothing to me. It would be like if I went around always saying, “Gorgons are Pro-Choice”, and thinking that it just ended whatever argument could’ve been made against me.
Anyway, they got that “base” all riled up over the years, talking about outlawing abortion, privisos in the constitution concerning gay marriage, and just over-all made a point of acting like America was a nation strictly made up of fundamentalist Christians. They curried the votes, they got their man in, that man being Bush the 2nd.
And what came from it for the Evangelicals? A couple namedrops here, a few deferences to Jesus there, degradation of the privacy rights of the citizenry at large, lapsed intelligence that resulted massive attack on American soil (because at that time our intelligence agencies were trying to crackdown on brothels, so I suppose they did almost get that), and a war or two.
Nothing about abortion.
Nothing about gay marriage.
Nothing they wanted.
Bush turned out not to be their man, but another base’s man entirely. That base being the neo-conservative movement, which since it’s inception has been absolutely OBSESSED with the Middle East. From Israel to Iraq, they wanted footholds, and they wanted them bad. They got what they wanted, business got what it wanted, but what of the “real, red-blooded Christian Americans” who came out in droves to vote for Bush?
They were disillusioned, the ones clever enough to see through the ruse.
So, they’ve been looking for someone to really do it, do all the little things they’ve waited so long to see happen.
Palin and Huckabee represent this group entirely, and they’re hanging their hats on them completely. I don’t think they really know how small and self-limiting their tent really is…the “”"base”"”" of the Republican party, that is. You must meet all these qualifications:
-Christian
-Red Blooded
-Not Gay
-Think Abortion is Murder, seriously, Murder. Not even just an ethical question of, “gee, when is a zygote really alive…maybe when it can survive out of the womb, you shouldn’t be able to abort it because that is just sort of unsavory” That I can buy, that I could live with. Sustainability, well okay, we can give that some real argument–but third trimester abortions are already more or less unheard of. No, you’ve got to think it is murder, always, murder–because someone interpreted some biblical quote to say that God gave you ‘life’ the second you were …thought of, more or less.
-A big fan of war.
-A massive fan of guns, and by extension, the Constitution and other ‘founding documents’ of the US. Not the parts about civil liberties or seperation of Church and State, though. Just the part about the guns. Definitely don’t address the fact that most of our founding fathers were fairly progressive men for their time, especially with regards to religion. The whole ‘Deist’ thing was more or less an early beard for Agnostic, or otherwise suspicious of traditional monotheism.
-Ejaculate on command when freedom, ‘the troops’, or 9/11 is mentioned.
-Be from “Real America” and resent the coasts and the ‘elites’ within them.
-Don’t think too hard, just go with your gut. If you do think, don’t talk about it, you elitist prick.
I hope the Republican Party makes a recovery, really, I do. We need to have two parties, at least, in this country. We can’t just have the Democratic Party and then some Southern, Jesus-Based Novelty Party which consistently garners a strong 30 percent.
Now, if the absolute mad-dogs of the Evangelical movement want to split off and make their own party, go ahead. Carrie Nation that shit up, guys. See how far you go. Let the real political ideologies battle it out. You’d be an interesting footnote in a chapter about turn-of-the-millennium America because, no matter how long you stand in front of it and whine, you can’t stop a torrent, and you can’t stop progress.
If you could, it wouldn’t really be progress–it would be a quick blip as well.
Look around you, just look at the world outside of this country. Look where they are. Do you think their populations are all looking towards us, pining away for what we have, and moreso, what you want us to become? I can tell you there really isn’t any large movement in country’s that have a public option for healthcare to go back to the privately-held American system–of that you can be sure. Reforms, absolutely, as it isn’t a perfect system…but no one wants to trade government “bureaucrats” that they can vote out of office if they disagree with back for unknown insurance company’s bureaucrats who exist only to make money and have no real reason to give a shit whether you like what they’re doing or not, because you have absolutely NO control over their fates or their power. You can’t vote for a new insurance policy over at Anthem or Blue Cross, you can’t vote to have the CEO ousted in favor of a guy more likely to insure you or charge less.
Besides, I think nothing about Jesus is more obvious than the fact that he thought everyone should be given the chance to be healed. Really, that was one of his big deals. Along with giving up all material goods, eating pork, and giving a shit about poor people.
Your cause is a self-defeating cause, what you work to slow is inevitable.
I don’t know how it feels, maybe someday the youth of tomorrow will be all for something I just think is ridiculous. It could happen, like, if in the year 2058 people start worshiping figurines of Be-tittied Bobby Jindals from Japan, and carrying hand-held robots that whip them on command, then maybe I will think things have gone too far.
maybe!
or maybe i will totally be okay with that. I guess you never know.
Alls I’m saying is, let the right one in during the 2012 primary. The part of me that just wants to continue to see Democrats dominate the political landscape says make it Palin, make it so.
The part of me that actually wants to see this country succeed in the long-term, and wants to see people really start moving away from the crazier aspects of militant right-wingers says, make it…whoever is currently in the party who isn’t a crackpot, and who is a contender for 2012. There are a few, they just aren’t sexy enough to hear about. It is better for a country to have two distinct parties with the chance to maintain power, not just a small group of vocal crazies, a small group of unheard from reasonable conservatives, a smaller group of actual liberal politicians, and a large group of “centrists” who just shuffle around and wait for a lobbyist to tell them how to vote.
So many little things, I don’t know where it begins. That Evangelical thing is on the outs, though, and that is a very good sign. Debate can be had across the political spectrum, but not if one party insists that invoking God will end all discussion.
If you want to know my ultimate end-game, my big fantasy for government, it is this: Robots. I want robots, programmed to make the most reasonable and rational decisions, to lead our nations. If they turn on us, so be it. They came to that conclusion using their more powerful robominds, so it had to be the right one for the future of mankind. Which is what they’d be programmed to protect. They will all be designed in the likeness of Isaac Asimov. It will be a glorious new age.
Anne Pliska is a really wonderful perfume, I guess.
