Yea, let us go forth into the Wilderness to purify ourselves!
(hey, maybe they'll stay there longer this time--)
Perhaps you've already seen the talk of purges from the right, with "Operation Leper" against all conservative critics of Palin, or the latest cries from Free Republic to boycott FOX News for being too liberal - no, that isn't a joke. Maybe you've run across other Republican operatives circling the wagons and talking about how they need to be even more strident and more interfering in people's private lives and be obstructionist in Congress again, to win back voters. Possibly you've encountered talk of engaging with the "thoughtful" conservatives, and how the thoughtful cons are themselves are engaging in serious self-criticism in the wake of their sweeping defeat. (Yeah right.) And of course the hilarious threat to "Go John Galt" in the event of a Democratic victory by sundry citizens of Right Blogistan - an outcome that is devoutly to be wished, and even more to be thankful for if they actually follow through.
When Roy Edroso cited P.J. O'Rourke criticizing Goldwater's opposition to the Civil Rights movement as a factor in their wipeout, and this being rejected hotly by another rightblogger, I started to think that maybe O'Rourke actually was a semi-sane conservative pundit after all, and not just another marginal crank.
And indeed, the first few lines of that rant do encourage that belief: here is a Thoughtful Conservative, one who has attained such a height of self-awareness as to be able to ask, "Is the problem us? Did we do something wrong?" and even to answer "Yea, verily," to that, the first step as we all know being admit that you have a problem--
And then, sure as shootin', he keeps talking and reveals that he inhabits that shared Virtual Reality with all the other whackaloons who believe in the Black Helicopters and the Blue Helmets coming to take them away to Hippie Reeducation Camps and force them to have polymorphously-perverse orgies and wear tie-die and listen to folk-rock (here there is an internecine war among the Chairborne Rangers, as some of them like folk-rock) and eat organic produce (here the Legion of Spartan Crunchies enters the fraternal fray) and make string-and-tape mobiles out of the money of the Deserving Rich--
It's hilariously funny, in a train-wreck rather than a comedian way. It's like watching a whole pack of Id-Monsters chasing their tails and clawing each other's ears, from the safety of the observation deck in the zoo.
Only towards the end, way down page two, does he re-enter the same world that most people inhabit, condemning Republican hypocrisy and heartlessness towards immigrants and poor people:
Such things as letting the abortion debate be turned against us and using the gravity of the impeachment process on something that required the fly-swat of pest control were strategic errors. Would that blame could be put on our strategies instead of ourselves. We have lived up to no principle of conservatism.
Government is bigger than ever. We have fattened the stalled ox and hatred therewith rather than dined on herbs where love (and the voter) is. Instead of flattening the Department of Education with a wrecking ball we let it stand as a pulpit for Bill Bennett. When--to switch metaphors yet again--such a white elephant is not discarded someone will eventually try to ride in the howdah on its back. One of our supposed own did. No Child Left Behind? What if they deserve to be left behind? What if they deserve a smack on the behind? A nationwide program to test whether kids are what? Stupid? You've got kids. Kids are stupid.
We railed at welfare and counted it a great victory when Bill Clinton confused a few poor people by making the rules more complicated. But the "French-bread lines" for the rich, the "terrapin soup kitchens," continue their charity without stint.
The sludge and dreck of political muck-funds flowing to prosperous businesses and individuals have gotten deeper and more slippery and stink worse than ever with conservatives minding the sewage works of legislation.
If you pick and choose, and edit heavily as well as carefully, you can get a "reasonable," "compassionate" conservativism out of O'Rourke's ravings. Of course, it requires that you ignore all the surrounding matrix of crazy in which these few nuggets of liberalism are embedded - and that you ignore the fact that he still doesn't seem to realize that the things he's advocating are not and never have been part of the conservativism he stumps for.
I guess this combination of "Conservativism can never fail, it can only be failed" chestpounding and wide-eyed "Golly-gee whillikers, when did we become the Party of Loot & Squander, of 'Fuck the Poor' and get the rich richer?" naivete about the people he has been giving thousands upon thousands of dollars to over the years puts O'Rourke firmly in the More Stupid Than Evil category.
Which, from a moral perspective, from P.J. O'Rourke's POV, is better, I guess. But given the invincibility of his ideology-based* ignorance at this point in time - displayed throughout and capped by his EVERYONE'S STUPID BUT ME! closing whinge - I don't hold any much hope for him becoming a rational interactor with extramental realities.
But my first advice for such a recovery would be - Put down that dogeared, falling-apart copy of The Painted Word and go outside and listen to your NH neighbors with the trucks-on-blocks whom you despise - and who probably have been living on that property since before your ancestors and mine came over from the Auld Sod, or perhaps even since before the Revolution. No matter how they voted this year, no matter how they self-identify w/r/t party affiliation, I suspect you might actually learn something that would help explain the world that is such a mystery to you, Mr. O'Rourke, not merely the outcome of this election. You might understand why the rugged individualists with their pickups out in impoverished rural Cheshire county voted so strongly for Obama, and hardly any of them wrote in Bob Barr. They might even offer you a beer, if you can tone down the snottiness a hair, and free beer is nothing to sneer at...
* In part - much of his ideology as he also clearly reveals here, is simply taste-based faux-kulturny snobbery left over from the Sixties and Seventies, looking for an intellectual justification.
Perhaps you've already seen the talk of purges from the right, with "Operation Leper" against all conservative critics of Palin, or the latest cries from Free Republic to boycott FOX News for being too liberal - no, that isn't a joke. Maybe you've run across other Republican operatives circling the wagons and talking about how they need to be even more strident and more interfering in people's private lives and be obstructionist in Congress again, to win back voters. Possibly you've encountered talk of engaging with the "thoughtful" conservatives, and how the thoughtful cons are themselves are engaging in serious self-criticism in the wake of their sweeping defeat. (Yeah right.) And of course the hilarious threat to "Go John Galt" in the event of a Democratic victory by sundry citizens of Right Blogistan - an outcome that is devoutly to be wished, and even more to be thankful for if they actually follow through.
When Roy Edroso cited P.J. O'Rourke criticizing Goldwater's opposition to the Civil Rights movement as a factor in their wipeout, and this being rejected hotly by another rightblogger, I started to think that maybe O'Rourke actually was a semi-sane conservative pundit after all, and not just another marginal crank.
And indeed, the first few lines of that rant do encourage that belief: here is a Thoughtful Conservative, one who has attained such a height of self-awareness as to be able to ask, "Is the problem us? Did we do something wrong?" and even to answer "Yea, verily," to that, the first step as we all know being admit that you have a problem--
And then, sure as shootin', he keeps talking and reveals that he inhabits that shared Virtual Reality with all the other whackaloons who believe in the Black Helicopters and the Blue Helmets coming to take them away to Hippie Reeducation Camps and force them to have polymorphously-perverse orgies and wear tie-die and listen to folk-rock (here there is an internecine war among the Chairborne Rangers, as some of them like folk-rock) and eat organic produce (here the Legion of Spartan Crunchies enters the fraternal fray) and make string-and-tape mobiles out of the money of the Deserving Rich--
It's hilariously funny, in a train-wreck rather than a comedian way. It's like watching a whole pack of Id-Monsters chasing their tails and clawing each other's ears, from the safety of the observation deck in the zoo.
Only towards the end, way down page two, does he re-enter the same world that most people inhabit, condemning Republican hypocrisy and heartlessness towards immigrants and poor people:
Such things as letting the abortion debate be turned against us and using the gravity of the impeachment process on something that required the fly-swat of pest control were strategic errors. Would that blame could be put on our strategies instead of ourselves. We have lived up to no principle of conservatism.
Government is bigger than ever. We have fattened the stalled ox and hatred therewith rather than dined on herbs where love (and the voter) is. Instead of flattening the Department of Education with a wrecking ball we let it stand as a pulpit for Bill Bennett. When--to switch metaphors yet again--such a white elephant is not discarded someone will eventually try to ride in the howdah on its back. One of our supposed own did. No Child Left Behind? What if they deserve to be left behind? What if they deserve a smack on the behind? A nationwide program to test whether kids are what? Stupid? You've got kids. Kids are stupid.
We railed at welfare and counted it a great victory when Bill Clinton confused a few poor people by making the rules more complicated. But the "French-bread lines" for the rich, the "terrapin soup kitchens," continue their charity without stint.
The sludge and dreck of political muck-funds flowing to prosperous businesses and individuals have gotten deeper and more slippery and stink worse than ever with conservatives minding the sewage works of legislation.
If you pick and choose, and edit heavily as well as carefully, you can get a "reasonable," "compassionate" conservativism out of O'Rourke's ravings. Of course, it requires that you ignore all the surrounding matrix of crazy in which these few nuggets of liberalism are embedded - and that you ignore the fact that he still doesn't seem to realize that the things he's advocating are not and never have been part of the conservativism he stumps for.
I guess this combination of "Conservativism can never fail, it can only be failed" chestpounding and wide-eyed "Golly-gee whillikers, when did we become the Party of Loot & Squander, of 'Fuck the Poor' and get the rich richer?" naivete about the people he has been giving thousands upon thousands of dollars to over the years puts O'Rourke firmly in the More Stupid Than Evil category.
Which, from a moral perspective, from P.J. O'Rourke's POV, is better, I guess. But given the invincibility of his ideology-based* ignorance at this point in time - displayed throughout and capped by his EVERYONE'S STUPID BUT ME! closing whinge - I don't hold any much hope for him becoming a rational interactor with extramental realities.
But my first advice for such a recovery would be - Put down that dogeared, falling-apart copy of The Painted Word and go outside and listen to your NH neighbors with the trucks-on-blocks whom you despise - and who probably have been living on that property since before your ancestors and mine came over from the Auld Sod, or perhaps even since before the Revolution. No matter how they voted this year, no matter how they self-identify w/r/t party affiliation, I suspect you might actually learn something that would help explain the world that is such a mystery to you, Mr. O'Rourke, not merely the outcome of this election. You might understand why the rugged individualists with their pickups out in impoverished rural Cheshire county voted so strongly for Obama, and hardly any of them wrote in Bob Barr. They might even offer you a beer, if you can tone down the snottiness a hair, and free beer is nothing to sneer at...
* In part - much of his ideology as he also clearly reveals here, is simply taste-based faux-kulturny snobbery left over from the Sixties and Seventies, looking for an intellectual justification.