by Joe Bageant
www.dissidentvoice.org
January 10, 2005
The hardest thing for garden variety American liberals to grasp is what a truly politicized and hateful place much of America has become -- one long mean ditch ruled by feral dogs where the standards of civility no longer apply. The second hardest thing for liberals is to admit that they are comfortably insulated in the middle class and are not going to take any risks in the battle for America’s soul . . . not as long as they are still living on a good street, sending their kids to Montessori and getting their slice of the American quiche. Call it the politics of the comfort zone.
Ever on the lookout for free food and brand name booze, I slipped over into the comfort zone on New Year’s Day, 2005 to a lovely literary party of urbanites who’d flown in from upper East Coast. They all seem to have country places down here in the Shenandoah Valley these days. So as I minced over fresh salmon with a chic liberal book editor, she said: “I am coming to understand how Karl Rove drove so many of the American people to vote for Bush during the election.” (pronouncing “people” in that way of overeducated urban liberals everywhere, indicating that she did not consider herself one of them.) And I am thinking: “JESUS CHRIST LADY, IT’S NOT AS IF IT WERE A LONG DRIVE!”
That chic editor may spend her time waiting to see another Dorothy Parker $10,000 martini at the Algonquin Hotel, but my vantage point on America is less lofty and certainly a helluva lot cheaper. When I look around America’s barrooms, church suppers, swap meets and strip clubs, I see that “the American people” like the way things are going. Or at least half of them do. They like World Championship Wrestling and Confederate flags and flat screen television and they like the idea of an American empire. “The people” don't give a rat’s bunghole about social programs or the poor or other races or the planet or animals or anything else. They LIKE cheap gas and making life tough for queers. They LIKE chasing Thanksgiving Day Xmas sales. And when fascism comes, they will like that, too.
That is reality. It is all around us and only the liberals, in their noble but blind egalitarian efforts, deny this. “The people” however, do not deny reality -- they create it from the belly of their perverse ignorance, even as the left speaks in non sequitur and wonders why the hell they cannot get any political traction. Meanwhile, it is football and NASCAR and guns and a republic free from married queers for the people. That's what they want. That's what they voted for -- a moral republic.
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more here:
http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Jan05/Bageant0110.htm
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