Monday June 18, 2007

WE SHALL OVERCUM. James Poulos calls himself a "Post Modern Conservative." What's that mean? A quick glance at his recent stuff offers a few clues. First, Poulos sees discontent among young liberals and young conservatives, and proposes a basis on which accomodation between the two tribes can be reached:

The only major gulf between these two groups is defined by the third vector among them of cultural libertarianism, which as I keep repeating is basically the question of sexual ethics. As young leftists recover a wounded common sense about the putative benefits of getting into an S&M relationship with the price-tagged, pleasure-pimped System in exchange for a golden ticket to being Sexually Active, they will grow more truly toward the Right...

If you're having problems navigating the metaphors, he means young liberals will stop wanting sex and then everything will be hunky-dory.

Oh yeah, and there's this:

Well, maybe semen suppressant is still a ways off, but now that we've conquered the period, delaying menopause is the 'natural' next step toward the complete and utter inversion of our sexual natures. Teenage slutpuppets that can't get pregnant and weepy cougars who want to be mommies after all, dammit -- I absolve you, I absolve you. Yes, this is Progress.

I think he's trying to be funny, though maybe in the postmodern world "funny" and "creepy" are synonyms.

This sort of thing actually makes me happy I didn't go for a postgraduate degree.