One would think that from the cries of (feigned) indignation and calls for repentance arising from conservatives regarding Move-On.org's ad in the N.Y. Times that the liberal-leaning group had not simply questioned the insights and intentions of a public servant, promoting, in a public forum, the policy of an illegal and immoral occupation of a sovereign nation; rather, the folks of Move-On.org had committed blasphemy against the holy name of some revered saint -- General Mary Petreus, Mother of God.
The false outrage of perpetually offended conservatives serves as cover for the true outrages of our era, including: truncated civil liberties, rising levels of social and economic inequality and injustice, and foreign wars of aggression waged by an insular and secretive executive branch and fought by a permanent underclass. The outrages keep arriving, because the collective imagination of the citizen/consumers of the US, arbitrated by a careerist media elite, has been, for decades, in the thrall of false narratives that serve the interests of the elite of the corporate/militarist classes.
Concurrently, a sense of unease and despair, due to a sense of personal and collective powerlessness before exploitive power, has created the tone and tenor of the times, and begot the phenomenon of supine liberalism and Viagra conservatism. (In this way, liberals stand fecklessly by, as the public is, time and time again, screwed by the decrepit schemes of the right.)
In this way, liberal paternalism is insufferable; worse, it is dangerous. This has been the right's craftiest accomplishment: inducing "reasonable" liberals and "sensible" centrists to enable their crimes, from stolen elections to their present preparation for a massive bombing campaign of Iran, by intimidating them with the fear that any protest on their part will cast them among the ranks of America-hating, lefty moonbats, who wish to see the terrorist win, dumpsters piled high with discarded fetuses and metro-sexuality made the official state religion.
Moreover, these assaults upon both reason and the republic (what's left of it) will persist until progressives begin to effectively counter the narratives of the predatory right. Some call it shameful demagoguery; although, conservatives call it career advancement. This is not a novel situation. Throughout history, these kinds of pernicious mindsets have always been with us; it is our tragedy that they have been allowed to prevail.
Conservatives are eager to embrace false narratives: The surge is working; the terrorists hate us for our freedom; Fred Thompson is Ronald Reagan incarnate, but with a touch of Jed Clampett "folksiness." Accordingly, when the times are roiled with uncertainty, when thoughts of the future are tinged with dread, conservatives, like a character in Southern Gothic literature, will fall into a swoon, longing for the return of an imagined, purer past that never was. One can picture these rightwing sorts wandering the streets, wearing a faded prom dress and a broken, prom queen tiara, twittering and cooing, while repeating over and over again, "the surge is working; Anbar Province is now a beacon of freedom unto the world...") in an imaginary dialog with the ghost of their long lost beau, Ronald Reagan.
Ronald Reagan, an ungifted actor, by means of playing the role of a "resolute" Cold Warrior, was able to gain the approbation and wealth that had alluded him as a contract player in Hollywood. In truth, Reagan's greatest accomplishment was convincing himself of his own sincerity.
Constantin Stanislavsky, who is considered the father of modern acting technique, is reputed to have said that when an actor starts to believe he is the character he's portraying it is time to escort him from the theatre. Withal, Fred, Rudy, Rush, Hannity, O'Reilly, et al., can you find the exits on your own or will you need to be medicated, strapped to a gurney, and wheeled from the public arena? Rather than being candidates for President of the United States, most of the Republican field seems to be vying for the title of National Crazy Uncle -- the kind of guy who corners you at a family gathering and rants that the PTA is a terrorist front group and gangs of illegal aliens are engaged in a vast conspiracy to steal single socks from his washer-dryer.
The Republican candidates for president and their fantasy-prone constituents wish to set the Way Back Machine to the golden days of the 1980s when Ronald Reagan was impersonating a man just arrived via the 1940s. This phenomenon is known as the Law of Republican Special Relativity, which states: When events begin to accelerate forward, the conservative mind will be cast, at an equal rate of speed, backwards in time. But the paradox is: they arrive in a parallel universe, an alternative past that never existed on this earth -- a low probability dimension, comprised of platitudes and false pieties, where white male privilege is sacrosanct, only for the reason (according to their reality-proof perspective) that it serves to provide all mankind with all things good and holy.
This law can be tested by performing the following simple exercise: Engage a conservative true believer in a dialog regarding the manner by which "state's rights" was misused in the Jim Crowe dominated Deep South of the pre-Civil Rights Era in order to propagate and maintain segregation, and your conservative-minded test subject will respond as if those realities transpired long ago and far away on a planet that he has never visited.
Yet, paradoxically, rightists have manage to create a Time Retrieval Device, a device that has summoned from the past wonders, such as the following: a reversal of many of the rights of working people; the return of unsafe and unsanitary practices in the food industry; widening gaps of wealth, health and privilege between social, racial and economic classes; in short, many the excesses of plutocratic rule inherent to unfettered capitalism.
As a result, a generation has inherited power who are devoid of the concept of causation and consequence. Ergo, we have developed a political class who rule by narratives of denial and shallow self-justification. An example of this is the blaming of the people of Iraq for the blood-drenched debacle that has resulted from the illegal and immoral invasion of their nation. As well as, an enabling cadre of media elitists who served as cheerleaders for the invasion, because they deemed it to be good for business, and, to this day, are unwilling to admit their complicity.
All of the above leads to the question: What are present day conservatives striving to conserve? Historically, conservatives gave their utmost to conserve institutions such as slavery, Jim Crowe, child labor -- and, of course, the use of leeches for medical purposes. (Perhaps, they simply couldn't stand the thought of a fellow blood-sucker being deemed dangerous, and they feared the start of a trend.) At present, the central paradox of contemporary conservatism is this: How does one practice conservatism within an all-encompassing economy based on disposability? This is analogous to establishing a brothel devoted to the goal of abstinence.
When engaged in a dialog with many conservatives, the question becomes: Are their reactions and responses evoked therein simply borne of plain ignorance, willful ignorance, or outright lying? Or are their responses the result of a group hallucination? All progressives have experienced the following nonsensical encounter of the conservative kind. Present a reasoned argument to a conservative -- and, all at once, completely ignoring the tenet, tone and thrust of the point, they begin hallucinating a creature, only known to exist in the rightwing bestiary, known as a "moonbat" -- a mythological beast that, ironically, seems to appear when a conservative is confronted with reality.
Accordingly, the time has come for a study of political zoology and to posit who are the true moonbats now making their habitat in the United States. Case study: Unregulated, wish-fulfillment-based conservative economic policy has created those suburban arrays of mold-incubating petri dishes known as products of the housing boom. Moreover, the bursting of the whole bubble-prone Ponzi scheme has sent shock waves throughout international economies and is surging the economy of the US towards recession. Furthermore, conservative anti-regulatory policies have rendered us babes in a cheap, plastic Toyland.
What has an era of conservatism wrought? Answer: a culture that has all the value, integrity, sustainability and safety as a toy manufactured in China. Apropos, contemporary life, as conceived and manufactured by conservative "values", is shoddily made, toxic and not a lot of fun.
Phil Rockstroh, a self-described, auto-didactic, gasbag monologist, is a poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living in New York City. He may be contacted at: phil@philrockstroh.com Visit Phil's Website
I have found enough so-called ideological purity to go around among both left and right. In any dialogue between the two protagonists, left v right, one finds formulaic pap on both sides. Both (master) debaters appear glazed eyed and mouth the same one sided platitudes and neither actually listens to the other, merely awaiting the chance to jump in.....
Nobody is right when everybody is wrong.....
by
ardee D. (6 articles, 4 quicklinks, 1 diaries, 2388 comments)
on Thursday, September 20, 2007 at 8:55:01 AM
Modern conservatism is beyond wrong: It is flat-out toxic.
Have you not left the house since Nixon resigned? It would explain your use of tired Rock & Roll cliches in your comment. That CSN&Y quote only sounds deep to first time pot smokers.
by
Phil Rockstroh (26 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 43 comments)
on Thursday, September 20, 2007 at 9:11:55 AM
You write a cheesy piece claiming that right wingers are incapable of dialogue but those who share your own beliefs are solons of wisdom and political purity. Then, when confronted by a dissenting opinion noting that left and right tend towards the same inabilities you immediately take umbrage and prove my point.
What a maroon!
by
ardee D. (6 articles, 4 quicklinks, 1 diaries, 2388 comments)
on Friday, September 21, 2007 at 7:37:41 AM
Sadly, as your somewhat less than cogent comments suggest, you mistake merely being an annoying pest with being an individual positing an intelligent or even interesting point of view.
by
Phil Rockstroh (26 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 43 comments)
on Friday, September 21, 2007 at 2:43:52 PM
Thanks for your article. The "moonbats" are primarily name-callers who cannot respond point-by-point to a rational argument. The issue is there are quite a few of them in our society and, as blind followers of the government, they are the seedcorn of a totalitarian state. Rather than denounce them, it behooves humanists to show them how their support for the Bush Administration has done them dreadful injury--- economic reversals, unfair tax burdens, absence of equal educational opportunities, loss of jobs to overseas exploiters, the killing of their children, etc.
Sherwood Ross
by
Sherwood Ross (161 articles, 0 quicklinks, 1 diaries, 97 comments)
on Thursday, September 20, 2007 at 11:28:17 AM
This definition of a moonbat (from the introduction to the article) needs to dive bomb, zoom, swoop and flit through comments on progressive Websites. “{Conservatives} begin hallucinating a creature, only known to exist in the rightwing bestiary, known as a "moonbat" -- a mythological beast that, ironically, seems to appear when a conservative is confronted with reality.”
by
Christie (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 149 comments)
on Thursday, September 20, 2007 at 2:43:16 PM
When engaged in a dialog with many conservatives, the question becomes: Are their reactions and responses evoked therein simply borne of plain ignorance, willful ignorance, or outright lying? Or are their responses the result of a group hallucination? All progressives have experienced the following nonsensical encounter of the conservative kind. Present a reasoned argument to a conservative -- and, all at once, completely ignoring the tenet, tone and thrust of the point, they begin hallucinating a creature, only known to exist in the rightwing bestiary, known as a "moonbat" -- a mythological beast that, ironically, seems to appear when a conservative is confronted with reality.
A rather strange way to protest what you see as the right calling you names, don't you think?
by
Dana Pico (5 articles, 0 quicklinks, 4 diaries, 142 comments)
on Thursday, September 20, 2007 at 7:26:43 PM
Fighting back is a strange responce for far too many liberals who would be advised to cease mooning over their "fair-mindedness" and learn to counterpunch.
Did you happen to notice what took place in The Senate, today?
Wake up and smell the jackboot.
by
Phil Rockstroh (26 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 43 comments)
on Thursday, September 20, 2007 at 7:47:38 PM
. . . in which we can find liberal commentary which simply dismisses conservative arguments out of hand, as crazy, stupid or bigoted, and perhaps you see that as combative, but I have to ask: do you think that such persuades anybody who isn't already on your side?
As a fairly hard-right conservative, I think that my friends on the left are wrong about most things, but my thinking that they are wrong does not mean that I believe they must be evil, insane or stupid; it simply means that I think they are wrong.
by
Dana Pico (5 articles, 0 quicklinks, 4 diaries, 142 comments)
on Thursday, September 20, 2007 at 8:08:48 PM
This author is trapped in his own distorted vision, is guilty of exactly what he claims the right to be, and blunders on unaware of his own ridiculous position. In a nutshell we find the reason that compromise and honest dialogue is impossible in todays political climate.
You are far, far to the right of my own positions on most things yet we find common ground here and perhaps could elsewhere as well. The author conflates conservatism with neoconservatism without a clue as to the nuanced differences, but then Ive read his stuff before and clueless is his watchword. I find true conservatism to be an honest political stance and also see merit in some of its tenets. But then honesty is also a missing ingredient these days, like in your recent defense of the Presidency in another thread here.....(here we go again, huh?!) :-)
by
ardee D. (6 articles, 4 quicklinks, 1 diaries, 2388 comments)
on Friday, September 21, 2007 at 7:45:31 AM
Your every post, article included, is a veritable paeon to your own blindness. In screed after hyperbolic screed you claim that the right is exactly what you are, unbeknownst however to yourself. There are no black and whites, especially in politics, only shades of grey, like it or rail against it.
The vast majority of this nation is smack dab in the middle, most , unfortunately, do not engage in politics at all, leaving that to their elected officials. Many of them dont even vote. The only way to accomplish anything is via compromise and dialogue. The only way. You choose to act like a foolish child, believing in a Darth Vader and a Luke Skywalker approach to politics that I find unbelievably immature and unproductive.
That you rant against the right, using the same tactics that you so vehemently object to in them, is more than a bit silly. That you fail to see objectively that most elected officials care not one whit for you and me, that both sides, both parties, are guilty, not just the side you do not support.
There is no merit to your argument and there is no path to success in following your sophomoric rants.
by
ardee D. (6 articles, 4 quicklinks, 1 diaries, 2388 comments)
on Saturday, September 22, 2007 at 9:50:22 AM
If I live in my own little world, why do you keep obsessively visiting it?
You remind me of person who was not invited to a party, but who, none the less, shows up at the event, bitterly telling all concerned that he came simply to say that he didn't want to be invited to this stupid party, anyway.
ardee D., I think you're a bit obsessed here: You should really try to get out of the house more often.
by
Phil Rockstroh (26 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 43 comments)
on Saturday, September 22, 2007 at 12:19:41 PM
you silly little twit. Have you absolutely no value whatever? Or any intellect, insight or shame? You are simply a childish little fool. I do not reply for your benefit but for those who read your screed and might consider it to have any merit whatsoever.
Both sides, once again as you appear to ride the little yellow school bus, have their flaws, foibles and truths. Both sides are as guilty of hyperbole and distortion, complicity and stupidity. To write crap that villifies one and ignores the flaws of the other contributes only more confusion, delays the solutions from coming to fruition and encourages mouth breathing morons to continue to fail to think things through.
The only purpose you article serves is to see your own name in print and get a woody..congrats you are a part of the problem.
by
ardee D. (6 articles, 4 quicklinks, 1 diaries, 2388 comments)
on Saturday, September 22, 2007 at 8:26:41 PM
AH! The Gila Monster, last-worder, wolf-pack, stalkers, have you by the Achilles-heel. Shake them loose.
Their frail motivation? Envious ragging, jeremiad, comic-book, idiosyncratic, confrontationalismatic, revisionist, imprecise, Beavor Cleaver surrealists, of 1950's-never has beenisms, psycho-babbling, with undertones of abysmal, subjacent-tones.
I've witnessed them stalk, bite, and clench-mouthed, hang-on until sundown-these pernicious, indocile, lastworders, who because they have nary a polyandrium task, they thus, must needs the denouement, nag word. I'm surprised your head has not been cursed with the Wikepediac gods. Say something scientific and watch Wicki-URL pop.
The uncongenial suffrage from reading comprehension lag-remorse, impoetic gaggle-flake, and lexicon-envy, is wreaking great havoc, impelling and converting, self-congratulatory, hysteria into wide-broadcast, for all academics to watch their all too publicly, embarrassing, self-conflagration.
by
Agatha Payne (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 2 diaries, 50 comments)
on Friday, September 21, 2007 at 2:13:33 PM
