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Blasphemy against the holy name of General Mary Petreus
A Conservative's Garden of False Narratives: Who are you calling
a moonbat, anyway?
By Phil Rockstroh
09/21/07 "ICH" -- -- 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.
In addition, it has spawned a culture ridden with public
relations fabulists and media-savvy confidence artists who tell
us that the taste of corporate ass-suck is the ambrosia of the
gods. The locked-down, stultifying mindset and ideological
barbarianism of present day conservatism is directly linked to
the steep decline of the quality of life in the United States.
The recent revelations regarding the "I'm-not-gay-I-simply-engage-in-same-sex-encounters-in-puplic-restrooms"
wing of the Republican Party are instructive in understanding
the rightist's worldview and its effect on our times. Covert sex
in a public bathroom stall is an apt metaphor for how
contemporary conservatism limits and restricts the possibilities
of human life. In the same way that a closet-case gay
conservative stunts the possibilities of his love life, the
conservative mindset limits the scope of a culture's
possibilities. Accordingly, economic life must be ruled by
ruthless, unregulated competition, and the nation's meaning can
only be found in war. Hence, under the Bush Junta, we are told,
as far as international relations go, that the nation has few
options other than its present policy of predatory capitalism
and "wide-stance" militarism.
Regarding perma-fools such as these, Ernest Becker wrote: "Once
you base your whole life striving on a desperate lie, and try to
implement that lie, you instrument your own undoing."
Accordingly, the republic is dead; it's ghost howls online only
in pixelated protests such as this one. This grim reality will
remain, until we rise up and repudiate the false narratives that
have created and continue to comprise these tragic times.
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 philangie2000@yahoo.com.
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