"It would be part of a strong strain of conservatism, now getting stronger, that wants to wreck our social protections . . ."
And so it is with the current ooga-booga over how Medicare For All is SOCIALISM!!!!111! And we all need to be terrified of SOCIALISM and giving Medicare to everyone is SOCIALISM.
To be followed shortly by "Well, you know, if Medicare For ALL is socialism, isn't Medicare for SOME also socialism? And all you Fox News viewers, you all hate Hate HATE socialism. So you need to start voting for people who will end the scourge of Medicare once and for all!"
And so it comes to pass that tens of millions of Americans find themselves retired, uninsured, and uninsurable, spending every dime they have to stay alive. And then spending every dime their offspring have to stay alive. And then, finally, dying anyway because neither they nor their kids can afford the medicines that kept them alive ("Why, $500,000 a year for insulin is just the marketplace at work! Stop whining, you socialist!").
Yeah, no, arguably what's causing some of the loneliness in America is the elimination of public spaces by people the conservatives idolize, namely corporate "persons", who then re-brand places like Wal-Mart (!) as the new American gathering point.
It’s amazing how conservatives (mostly christian ones) constantly make the argument that marriage and lots of white babies provides the remedy for, well, everything wrong with society. Planet burning up? More white babies. Not being paid a living wage? More white babies. Got diabetes and no health insurance? More white babies.
They’re like Jesus-y underpants gnomes: more white babies ---> ??? ---> healthy society.
This is OT but I’ve got to tell on myself because it’s just too funny. I’ve been a subscriber for about six months but I just now figured out how to comment using my online handle rather than my real name. This is what a four year undergraduate degree in the humanities plus a graduate degree has done for me. I should have learned to code, LOL.
It never ceases to amaze me just how utterly insular and removed from the real world the reactionary conservatives are. We face an existential climate crisis. Every year, worse and worse natural disasters are exercising a tax on the economy far in excess of the amounts liberals have been asking for to combat the impacts. We face an extreme unequal society of incomes and wealth, unsurpassed in modern times - one has to go back to the Gilded Age - and major problems with our electoral system. But the cultural reactionaries are apparently completely unaware and uninterested in any of this. Much of this is the submerged part of the iceberg but the visible part of course is the all-out war on women and their reproductive health. The War that Never Ends. Because ending Roe vs. Wade is only the beginning of the war, of course. Liberals need to swamp the polls in 2020 or the war is over.
I used to teach a short-short story called "The Chaser" by John Collier (highly underrated writer, some of whose stories you may know from adaptations by Twilight Zone and Alfred Hitchcock Presents). Anyway, it's basically an Evil Genie tale in which a man named Alan wants a love potion to win the devotion of his dream girl, and the genie/salesman "assures" him that he has such a potion, and it will will cause her to be utterly obsessed with him, monitoring his health every minute, always "protecting" him from the attentions of other women, etc., etc. Alan is enraptured at this prospect, and the salesman mentions that he also happens to sell another potion, an undetectable and infallibly fatal poison, and he operates on the business model that if you please a customer with one product, they will be likely to come back for another. Alan is appalled at the idea, but gladly pays for the love potion. "Goodbye," says Alan. "Au revoir," says the salesman.
So (I'm getting to the point now) when I teach the story, most of the class recognizes that the unspoken implication is that Alan will end up coming back for the poison to kill his true love, because he will find her obsessive devotion intolerable. And there will always be at least one student who asks, "but why doesn't he just divorce her?" At which point I need to explain to the young ones that once upon a time, when the story was written, there was no such thing as "just divorce her/him," and it might actually have seemed to some people trapped in an intolerable marriage that the only alternative open to them was not to bravely suffer, but to knock off the intolerable spouse.
Maybe we should just tell Geraghty that for this and other reasons, using our divorce laws as a tool for the furtherance of the Greater Good would be an act of hubris which risked the retribution of Nemesis in the form of the law of unintended consequences; that's good, Conservative wisdom, isn't it?
Their infighting is kind of hilarious and kind of surreal. It reminds me of two other things - Kremlinology when I was a youngster during the 80s, and the brief time I served in Saudi Arabia in the foreign service and was bemused at all the energy spent on which princes' wives were on the outs with which other princes' wives and why. The whole thing seemed so irrelevant, but it mattered in some sense, just not mine.
"It would be part of a strong strain of conservatism, now getting stronger, that wants to wreck our social protections, not just so their corporate donors can get the money, but because it will render us impoverished and helpless and thus recreate the feudal order that they think was the real intention of the Founding Fathers.
I keep saying these aren't conservatives, they're pseudoconservatives. I grew up with pseudoconservatives. Yeah, they were racists. Yeah, they thought queers were gross. Yeah, they thought Medicare and Social Security were the End of Civilization and FDR was the Devil. They went to work for advertising agencies and pharmaceutical companies and General Electric and they got screwed. It started off well, the house in the 'burbs, the spouse and 2.5 kids, the commute, the health insurance, the affordable college and then it went to shit. They got fired when big company A bought out big company B. They woke up one morning to discover they didn't know their kids, who were off to college or San Francisco or Canada or Vietnam. Their spouses divorced them or they lived together in misery. And as they approached their 70's they had a new appreciation of how they, the Greatest Generation, the ones who went to war to save the world from Nazis and the Japanese, were disposable in the eyes of the new masters of the universe. So they took that racism and homophobia and misogyny and used it to deny the real cause of their misery, the metastasis of corporate capitalism and the suffocating growth of the American military empire. Corporate capitalism, which is as far removed from true conservatism as a death camp from a health spa. The American military empire which drains our coffers of the wealth that isn't sucked up by corporate capitalism. Now we have a second and third generation of pseudoconservatives bathed in the same soup of fear and acquiescence and there's just enough of them to take power and fuck up everything decent and compassionate and sane - the things a real conservative would want to protect.
I wish they'd start a Fight Club and bash each other for real.
Roy, by "forward once in a while" could that include using it, with attribution of course, in a discussion board. I'd be so happy to smack the rightwing "contributors" on the one I frequent with this conservative culture warrior piece you put up yesterday (June 7). It is so on the nail.
Back in the Reagan years, I was pitching Feudalism: An Idea Whose Time Has Come...Again. Ye must be born again in the feudal order! Of course that was the original intent! Up next, Original Sin: Emancipation or Women's Lib? Both Maybe? Let's start by burning bras instead of flags. It smells like...Mom?
This is a very, very, late, comment but here it goes:
The last point is crucial. Never forget that conservatives hate Statist welfare, medical, and health-and-safety schemes because to some extent they work, and anything that makes us less willing to dance for pocket-change diminishes the power of the Good People whom can be identified as such by all the money they've got.
"It would be part of a strong strain of conservatism, now getting stronger, that wants to wreck our social protections . . ."
And so it is with the current ooga-booga over how Medicare For All is SOCIALISM!!!!111! And we all need to be terrified of SOCIALISM and giving Medicare to everyone is SOCIALISM.
To be followed shortly by "Well, you know, if Medicare For ALL is socialism, isn't Medicare for SOME also socialism? And all you Fox News viewers, you all hate Hate HATE socialism. So you need to start voting for people who will end the scourge of Medicare once and for all!"
And so it comes to pass that tens of millions of Americans find themselves retired, uninsured, and uninsurable, spending every dime they have to stay alive. And then spending every dime their offspring have to stay alive. And then, finally, dying anyway because neither they nor their kids can afford the medicines that kept them alive ("Why, $500,000 a year for insulin is just the marketplace at work! Stop whining, you socialist!").
Which, of course, is just how God intended it.
Yeah, no, arguably what's causing some of the loneliness in America is the elimination of public spaces by people the conservatives idolize, namely corporate "persons", who then re-brand places like Wal-Mart (!) as the new American gathering point.
It’s amazing how conservatives (mostly christian ones) constantly make the argument that marriage and lots of white babies provides the remedy for, well, everything wrong with society. Planet burning up? More white babies. Not being paid a living wage? More white babies. Got diabetes and no health insurance? More white babies.
They’re like Jesus-y underpants gnomes: more white babies ---> ??? ---> healthy society.
This is OT but I’ve got to tell on myself because it’s just too funny. I’ve been a subscriber for about six months but I just now figured out how to comment using my online handle rather than my real name. This is what a four year undergraduate degree in the humanities plus a graduate degree has done for me. I should have learned to code, LOL.
“how many Buckleys can dance on the head of a pin” = sublime.
It never ceases to amaze me just how utterly insular and removed from the real world the reactionary conservatives are. We face an existential climate crisis. Every year, worse and worse natural disasters are exercising a tax on the economy far in excess of the amounts liberals have been asking for to combat the impacts. We face an extreme unequal society of incomes and wealth, unsurpassed in modern times - one has to go back to the Gilded Age - and major problems with our electoral system. But the cultural reactionaries are apparently completely unaware and uninterested in any of this. Much of this is the submerged part of the iceberg but the visible part of course is the all-out war on women and their reproductive health. The War that Never Ends. Because ending Roe vs. Wade is only the beginning of the war, of course. Liberals need to swamp the polls in 2020 or the war is over.
I used to teach a short-short story called "The Chaser" by John Collier (highly underrated writer, some of whose stories you may know from adaptations by Twilight Zone and Alfred Hitchcock Presents). Anyway, it's basically an Evil Genie tale in which a man named Alan wants a love potion to win the devotion of his dream girl, and the genie/salesman "assures" him that he has such a potion, and it will will cause her to be utterly obsessed with him, monitoring his health every minute, always "protecting" him from the attentions of other women, etc., etc. Alan is enraptured at this prospect, and the salesman mentions that he also happens to sell another potion, an undetectable and infallibly fatal poison, and he operates on the business model that if you please a customer with one product, they will be likely to come back for another. Alan is appalled at the idea, but gladly pays for the love potion. "Goodbye," says Alan. "Au revoir," says the salesman.
So (I'm getting to the point now) when I teach the story, most of the class recognizes that the unspoken implication is that Alan will end up coming back for the poison to kill his true love, because he will find her obsessive devotion intolerable. And there will always be at least one student who asks, "but why doesn't he just divorce her?" At which point I need to explain to the young ones that once upon a time, when the story was written, there was no such thing as "just divorce her/him," and it might actually have seemed to some people trapped in an intolerable marriage that the only alternative open to them was not to bravely suffer, but to knock off the intolerable spouse.
Maybe we should just tell Geraghty that for this and other reasons, using our divorce laws as a tool for the furtherance of the Greater Good would be an act of hubris which risked the retribution of Nemesis in the form of the law of unintended consequences; that's good, Conservative wisdom, isn't it?
Their infighting is kind of hilarious and kind of surreal. It reminds me of two other things - Kremlinology when I was a youngster during the 80s, and the brief time I served in Saudi Arabia in the foreign service and was bemused at all the energy spent on which princes' wives were on the outs with which other princes' wives and why. The whole thing seemed so irrelevant, but it mattered in some sense, just not mine.
"It would be part of a strong strain of conservatism, now getting stronger, that wants to wreck our social protections, not just so their corporate donors can get the money, but because it will render us impoverished and helpless and thus recreate the feudal order that they think was the real intention of the Founding Fathers.
Good weekend, guys, see you Monday. "
Never go into sports coaching , Roy.
I keep saying these aren't conservatives, they're pseudoconservatives. I grew up with pseudoconservatives. Yeah, they were racists. Yeah, they thought queers were gross. Yeah, they thought Medicare and Social Security were the End of Civilization and FDR was the Devil. They went to work for advertising agencies and pharmaceutical companies and General Electric and they got screwed. It started off well, the house in the 'burbs, the spouse and 2.5 kids, the commute, the health insurance, the affordable college and then it went to shit. They got fired when big company A bought out big company B. They woke up one morning to discover they didn't know their kids, who were off to college or San Francisco or Canada or Vietnam. Their spouses divorced them or they lived together in misery. And as they approached their 70's they had a new appreciation of how they, the Greatest Generation, the ones who went to war to save the world from Nazis and the Japanese, were disposable in the eyes of the new masters of the universe. So they took that racism and homophobia and misogyny and used it to deny the real cause of their misery, the metastasis of corporate capitalism and the suffocating growth of the American military empire. Corporate capitalism, which is as far removed from true conservatism as a death camp from a health spa. The American military empire which drains our coffers of the wealth that isn't sucked up by corporate capitalism. Now we have a second and third generation of pseudoconservatives bathed in the same soup of fear and acquiescence and there's just enough of them to take power and fuck up everything decent and compassionate and sane - the things a real conservative would want to protect.
I wish they'd start a Fight Club and bash each other for real.
Roy, by "forward once in a while" could that include using it, with attribution of course, in a discussion board. I'd be so happy to smack the rightwing "contributors" on the one I frequent with this conservative culture warrior piece you put up yesterday (June 7). It is so on the nail.
Back in the Reagan years, I was pitching Feudalism: An Idea Whose Time Has Come...Again. Ye must be born again in the feudal order! Of course that was the original intent! Up next, Original Sin: Emancipation or Women's Lib? Both Maybe? Let's start by burning bras instead of flags. It smells like...Mom?
This is a very, very, late, comment but here it goes:
The last point is crucial. Never forget that conservatives hate Statist welfare, medical, and health-and-safety schemes because to some extent they work, and anything that makes us less willing to dance for pocket-change diminishes the power of the Good People whom can be identified as such by all the money they've got.