Friday November 30, 2012

HERE COMES A REGULAR. Having been interested in conservatives who appear to have been driven mad by the election, I haven't spent enough time on conservatives who were quite mad beforehand. So I went and looked at The Anchoress. Here's what she thinks happened November 6:

Faced with a challenger whose most daring political strategy was to cultivate vagueness in his relentless pursuit of all things beige, and an incumbent gleefully willing to launch a daily barrage of splattering, oozing color bombs heedless of what or whom they hit–or whether their tints were environmentally toxic or even true–the voters chose “sound and fury” over “nothing.”

I think by "color bombs" she means Obama attacked beige Romney with his toxic coloredness. Actually I don't know what the fuck she's saying. Nor did I have much luck with this:

For many, and for me, the election signaled the crossing of a Rubicon of sorts: twin-towering notions of Exceptionalism and Indispensability toppled for less conspicuous walk-ups of Isolationism and Nanny Statism; the running out of a clock, all illusions lain aside.

My best guess is: Once America was butch and ruled, but now it's self-involved and doesn't want to engage the world at all, sort of like Ferdinand the Bull. Also, twin-toweredly, 9/11 Changed Everything, slightly used and yours for 90% off. (She said something similar shortly after the election, too -- that "for young adults and the generations coming up the backbone of conservative theory—rugged individualism, privacy, minimal government—is a complete non-sequitur"; now we were no longer right with Reagan, and so must reap the whirlwind.)

We begin, I think, by giving simple thanks to God for the election—without conditions or sly assumptions that we know anything or are somehow colluding with Providence. 

Here I was on firmer ground. From experience I knew that whenever our Mean Fake Nun puts on the wimple of piety, as surely as Gomorrah follows Sodom there will follow some viciousness. Sure enough, in the very next line --

That sounds counterintuitive, I know, but whenever I think a circumstance precludes gratitude, I remember the story of two sisters offering prayerful thanks for the fleas that infested their barracks in a Nazi concentration camp...

One of the benefits of well-drawn villains is that they spur us to examine ourselves for their flaws; when I am mindful enough, and I catch myself being passive-aggressive, I take the example of The Anchoress to warn me off it. Next I'll try taping a picture of Jonah Goldberg to my fridge.