I used to post shit like the following essay over at my other blog,
The Miserable Annals of the Earth. It used to drive one of my ex girlfriends nuts when I'd post this stuff there, because she feels it's deeply unfair to stereotype all conservatives the same way. She feels that some conservatives are decent, salt of the earth types who only want traditional American values to continue to have a place as we make our way forward into the brave new world of the 21st Century, or something like that... I don't know; she's a better writer than I am and puts it much more eloquently.
And, y'know, I'm aware that not all conservatives are deeply evil people like Dick Cheney or Jerry Falwell. For example, my little bro is a conservative too, and he's a very nice guy as well. It's just, he's a very nice guy who has no problem whatsoever with the fact that one pair of American citizens has the right to avail themselves of a legal process that will confer upon them certain specific rights and privileges worth thousands of dollars a year, and another pair of American citizens doesn't, and the only difference between the two subsets is, one set makes him uncomfortable. He's a true blue American patriot, he supports the troops, if he owned the only surviving edition of the American Constitution he'd almost certainly die to protect it from the slavering hordes of Islamofascists... he's just not wild about that part that says
" Section. 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."Because, you see, it's very very clear to him that our Founding Fathers never intended that clause to apply to the specific instance of disgusting faggots availing themselves of the privilege of marriage.
Now, I sincerely and genuinely love my brother; he's a great guy, a wonderful father to my nephew, I like him and admire him deeply. He's standing up for me at my wedding. I could not be more proud of a younger brother than I am of him. And I have no doubt that my friend who dislikes it so intensely when I stereotype conservatives also knows some admirable conservatives who may well be veritable Gifts of the Magii when it comes to being good friends and wonderful people and fabulous hands at the backyard barbecue, and so it is that I understand her reluctance to go along with me when I write shit that essentially says "all conservatives are like this", because, well, I'm a liberal, and when liberals write things like that (as when conservatives write similar stuff about us) the things we acribe universally to all conservatives, or they to us, are generally negative in character.
Which is to say, I think conservatives all suck, and they seem to feel much the same towards us.
But here's the thing: I have never in my life met or even heard of a single conservative who doesn't believe that it's okay to deny equal protection under the law (in this case, the law that allows two people to enter into a legally binding relationship arrangement conveying upon them certain specific rights and privileges worth a great deal of money) to any number of American citizens just because those particular American citizens make them queasy. Oh, my brother will go on and on at great and very articulate length about the homosexual agenda to undermine our basic Christian and American values and to destroy the nuclear family and eradicate our entire way of life, but what he simply will never address is, well, the Constitution very specifically says, if they are American citizens, it is illegal to abridge their privileges as citizens, or to deny them equal protection of United States law. So when a justice of the peace says "No, I will not allow the two of you to get married because, you know, you're gross", he or she is
breaking the law.
Every conservative I know is okay with that. In fact, the whole "gay marriage is ucky" thing is essentially a universal, unfailing, perfect and immaculate litmus test for conservatives... if you're okay with gays getting married, well, it doesn't matter what else you may hate or favor; you CANNOT be a conservative.
And as long as conservatives, as a group, are all singlemindedly and of one voice adamantly opposed to the full implementation of the Equal Protection clause of the Constitution, I feel absolutely justified in writing stuff like the following essay.
If you feel you are a conservative, and you also feel you could find it in you to support, say, my future stepdaughter if at some point in the future she wants to get married to someone she deeply loves and wants to share the rest of her life with, who may just happen to be of the same gender as she is, well, then, I salute you and the following text may not apply to you.
There are many ways one can typify the contemporary social movement known popularly as conservatism. You can call it an essentially childish denial of unpleasant aspects of external reality, and it is.
You can describe conservatism as a blind and destructive yearning for a never-existent Golden Age in which an impossible and obsolete standard of propriety (based almost entirely on the never clearly articulated but always implicitly understood precept of white male dominance over all others) was universally enforced, and that would be true as well.
You can name it anti-intellectual and this is also accurate, as the entire social movement is all about indulging the most infantile emotions while utterly rejecting anything remotely resembling constructive, rational, or analytical thought.
You can even state that the conservative movement is almost entirely motivated by fear, and this is just as cogent and lucid an insight as any of these others.
Yet what perhaps comes truest to the mark, when one distills the conservative impulse down to its very basest foundation, is to say this: conservatism is based in its entirety on primitive xenophobic terror. The true conservative does not, will not,
can not tolerate people who differ significantly from them in behavior or belief. Members of other tribes either join up with the conservatives – or they must be destroyed. There is no middle ground. Either you are with them, or you are against them.
When conservatives rage against multiculturalism and ‘political correctness’, they are essentially demanding the dubious ‘right’ to be entirely intolerant of anything that differs from what they themselves are comfortable with.
When a 21st Century conservative screams about Islamofascism, he does so with the same voice that bellowed “string that nigger up!” only a few generations ago.
When conservatives whine and snivel as regards “the War on Christmas”, their surly, bitter imprecations are entirely informed by their deep and petulant resentment that anyone anywhere in the world celebrates a Midwinter Holiday in any way other than what they themselves have grown up with and are accustomed to.
When conservatives war on drugs, or on indecency, or on pornography, they are doing battle with the individual choices of people who choose to behave differently than they themselves deem is proper.
It’s worthwhile to note that conservatives are almost never in conflict with any kind of behavior that is actually any of their business. They set out to destroy things that offend them, never things that actually cause them harm. Conservatives make the same mistake as all other infants; they conflate being angered by something with being hurt or somehow diminished by it, and they believe that outrage is the same as injury.
One of the deepest measures of adulthood is the capacity to understand that simply because someone else is
different , that doesn’t necessarily mean they are objectionable, and hell, even if someone
is objectionable, that doesn’t necessarily mean they should be killed or locked up for it. When a grown up runs into someone who offends him or her, the grown up will learn to avoid such a person’s company. Live and let live is an aphorism that is very nearly a litmus test for maturity; conservatives never quite grasp it. They understand it, mind, they simply don’t like it, and furthermore, they take enormous pride in the fact that they refuse to accept its validity.
Conservatives are children; fearful and resentful of anything that makes them feel uncomfortable. On some level, they understand that their outrage and offense does not equate to any sort of legitimate entitlement to action, which is why conservatives never argue on the basis of their own individual feelings. They swaddle their umbrage in patriotism and religion; they are never battling simply to keep their own stomachs from turning when they see two men holding hands on a public street, oh no. They are always fighting for decency, for propriety, for Christian values and our very American way of life itself. They are waging an unending culture war for the sake of the children, to support the troops, to preserve the nuclear family, or because of national security. It's not that they can't stand the thought of other people doing things they don't think are proper; it's always that when other people do things that conservatives don't think are proper, they are
offending against God and/or
destroying the essential moral fabric of society.
Conservatives are never selfish. They aren't racist, homophobic, envious, jealous, bluenosed, prudish little dumbfucks who are mostly lashing out at other people doing things they either don't dare or can't get anyone to let them do themselves. No, they are always always always selfless crusaders for the public good. They know best, not just for them, but for all of us, too. Their Bible tells them so.
This essential xenophobia is why conservatives can talk about things like religious freedom with a straight face, and honestly never see the hypocrisy involved in
only advocating religious freedom for one very specific faith and/or belief system. To conservatives, that faith is an inherent part of their tribal identity. It is sacrosanct. Any perceived infringement on it -- such as, for example, a liberal activist judge stupidly and dangerously ruling that 'no religious expressions on public ground' actually includes the
Christian religion, too -- is an intolerable invasion of the conservative movement's basic Constitutional and human rights. Those rules can certainly apply to all those goddam heathen religions; they aren't real, anyway! But to conservatives, rules that forbid something always exclude members of their own tribe, while rules that permit something never include anyone else.
As with any essentially xenophobic movement, conservatism is childish, and fear driven, and reactionary. They yearn for a past that never really existed; an era exemplified by 50s era TV families and Playboy cartoons, where White Daddy always has an executive position at a bank or an insurance company, White Mommy is always home cooking in the kitchen, and White Wally and White Beaver never get into any trouble that dad can't sort out with a few vaguely comforting if somewhat dotty aphorisms when he finally gets home. White Daddy always has a hot young secretary at the office, and her firm, well skirted ass is always available for a quick grope as she's bending over his desk to put some correspondence down.
There are no unwed teenage mothers in this Conservative Utopia, no interracial couples, no non-white people at all except for janitors and maids and gardeners. There are no labor laws, no minimum wage, and certainly no goddam unions; if an avuncular white banker can find an 8 year old kid or a 56 year old Mexican who wants to mow his lawn for a quarter and a bowl of ice cream, well, that's free enterprise in action. There's no pornography, and everyone goes to the same vaguely Protestant Christian church on Sundays. Nobody has extramarital sex (by which we mean, of course, no married women sleep with anyone but their husbands; the husbands, of course, have to service all those hot young single secretaries at the office and on business trips, because the White Man's Burden can be dreadful at times), nobody smokes dope or shoots up H or questions the President, the kids all get straight Bs in school except for gym, where they get As (because nobody wants a dork/nerd/spaz in the family).
Every neighborhood has one fat guy, one bald guy, and one kid who wears his baseball cap backwards, and everyone else makes fun of them behind their backs. All the books in the public library are decent and wholesome; all the comic books are upright and proper, all the movies and TV shows are uplifting and stalwart and Good Clean Fun. Everybody loves football and baseball and hockey. Everyone celebrates Christmas in December and Independence Day in July. The Commies are out there somewhere, but the military and the FBI and the CIA will sort
them out, you betcha.
The fact that the real 50s and 60s were nothing like the bizarre Rock Hudson/Doris Day holodeck fantasy I've described above doesn't trouble them. In reality, J. Edgar Hoover and Rock Hudson were gay, the U.S. government was letting black children be born and grow up with syphilis, they were exposing troops to radioactivity and unwitting civilian communities to LSD and tailored viruses as parts of military scientific experiments, they were secretly gathering and sheltering hordes of ex Nazis to work on our space program, and people were being blacklisted based on what meetings they attended in college, or whether or not they would rat out their friends to Congress.
Conservatives don't care. They hate the present, they fear the future. The past is their only refuge, and for all its uglinesses, at least one thing about it is inarguable: white men were in charge. White men could do anything they wanted. White men ran the world. They could grab the secretary's ass and beat up any faggot they came across with impunity. Niggers and spics kept to their places, by God. And everybody wished everybody else a Merry Christmas and they damned well
liked it, too.
The fact that all those things I've listed were unpleasant, unfair, unjust, immoral, indecent, insane, evil, and wrong does not daunt any conservative. They liked it when white men were in charge of reality; they resent what they perceive as their diminished stature now. They do not want equality; equality is for suckers. Once they were the lords of all they surveyed. They could not be arrested, they could not be sued, they couldn't even be ticketed because they played golf with all the cops and all the judges. Their sons played football and grew up to start their own banks or insurance companies; their daughters were gracious and charming and beautiful, and they grew up to marry the sons of other bankers and insurance executives.
In this wonderful fabulous Golden Age, Caucasian males paid whatever wages they wanted to pay, charged whatever rents they wanted to set, cheated on their taxes, voted Republican, and drove gynormous fucking cars with incredibly shitty gas mileage because fuel was only 25 cents a gallon. They had all this because they
earned all this; they fought in World War II and their grandfathers discovered America and tamed the wild frontier and built the friggin railroads and by God they
deserved to be the Kings of Creation. God was in His heaven and He was damned well a white man. Those were the days. Those were the goddam
days.
When
Rick Santorum speaks of "the gathering storm of Islamofascism", he is yearning for the long lost glory days of World War II, when we could call our enemy a race of rice eating slanty eyed subhumans and a stalwart President could nuke them back to the Stone Age and the world would applaud.
When
Shelly the Republican voices her disgust at gays doing a disco dance in front of a picture of her Lord and Savior, she is desperately wishing the world would return to a time when all a godless homo could expect from society was a police nightstick to the groin and a long prison term locked up with his fellow degenerates.
When
Debbie Schlussel raves about how Barack Obama is a Muslim, she is sobbing in her heart for a long lost American utopia where any black man who so much as dared to even think about running for any elective office in America outside of Harlem or Watts would have been promptly castrated and then hung, and no real American even knew what the fuck a 'Muslim' was.
When Rush Limbaugh talks about how all drug addicts should go to jail, and all drug dealers should be immediately executed, except, you know, for him and the maid he scores his illegal pain meds from, he is hankering after a time when hopheads and junkies were universally regarded as the detritus of society, when nobody tried to 'help' them, when the only social program they could enroll in was a long stretch in a county slammer... unless, of course, they were affluent white men, in which case, you know, they could enter a genteel treatment program and it was nobody's else's business anyway.
And when
Pamela Gellar Oshry burbles on and on and
on about "John Bolton's Big, Swingin'... Stick", what she wants more than anything... well, besides the obvious, I mean... is an interdimensional pass to a world where white men are always saving the world for white women from the nasty dark skinned slanty eyed hordes, and married white women stay in their kitchens and bake while unmarried white women get mouth fucked at the office by married white men, so their wives don't ever have to do that nasty fellatio stuff themselves.
Although I don't know. Pam might well be willing to strap on a pair of kneepads for her sainted Mr. Bolton. She'd doubtless close her eyes and think of America while she bobbed her head in and out, but I'm pretty sure she'd be willing to make the ultimate conservative woman's sacrifice for her idol of idols.
Okay, that last is mean, and I should probably cut it, but, hey,
you go over to Pam's site and spend five minutes reading her drivel and then tell me whether she deserves it or not.
Conservatism as a movement is mean spirited. By its very nature, it yearns for a world in which only conservatives have any authority, and where that authority is by its nature abusive, in that its primary use is to enrich and gratify conservatives at the expense of all others, while setting conservatives above any sort of reproach and immunizing them against suffering from any possible negative consequences of their acts. It is a movement embodied in entitlement and born of a surly, bewildered, uncomprehending resentment at a world that says "you aren't any better than the rest of us, you don't get anything you haven't earned". Conservatives deeply, deeply believe in inherent privilege, as long as they are the inheritors and the privileged.
Sean Hannity once said something along the lines of "You can like liberals, you can be friends with them, but you cannot under any circumstances allow them to govern". I'm sure he was sincere when he said it, but what he actually meant was, when liberals, or other social progressives, make the rules for a while, they tend to try to reshape society in a way that makes it more fair for everyone, of all races, beliefs, cultures, and creeds.
Conservatives hate this. They are not interested in everyone being equal; they find it to be an utterly repellent and appalling idea. Until recently, their tribe ran the world... and that's the way they liked it... and that's the way they want the world to be again.
Update: At least one conservative deeply and bitterly resents the way I'm stereotyping his right wing ass. He's not a racist pinhead who yearns only for the dim dead past when white men ruuuuuuuuuuled the world, he fumes, and hardly any other conservative he knows is, either! All us goddam limp wristed pansy ass liberals do nothing but stereotype conservatives, and he's sick of it! He doesn't mention anywhere in his vehement exposition exactly how he actually feels about, say, gay marriage, but he does make me vaguely ashamed I've lumped him and all his decent, kind hearted, non-Sith pals in with utter tools like Rick Santorum and that dimwit she-troll at Atlas Shrugged.
So, maybe I should expand my definition of "the kind of conservatives I wrote this post about" from one point to two: along with being insanely opposed to gay marriage, the people I'm talking about here all voted for Bush at least once.
So -- if you're opposed to gay marriage because, you know, fags are icky and besides, God hates them, AND, you voted for that dimwit in Al Gore's office at least once, congratulations... I've written thousands of words all about you, right here. Be flattered!
To be slightly serious, if only for a moment: I acknowledge that certainly, there must be at least a few old school conservatives still out there; patriots who believe in limited government power, individual freedoms and civil liberties, and who love their country enough that when it goes to war, they either run right out and enlist, or at the very least, they proudly encourage their children to do so. And certainly, those true blue conservatives must be very frustrated with the gutless, insanely power-crazed megalomaniacal morally bankrupt and ethically corrupt shitheels who have utterly hijacked their political party and socio-economic philosophy, making it simultaneously the laughing stock and venom target of everyone else in the known world.
And I feel for you guys, really, I do.
But I'd feel even more for you if you'd
stop voting for the assholes I'm writing about here.
Plus, if you like the goddam War On Terror so fucking much,
go join the goddam Marines, bitches.
