Saturday, November 27, 2004

The Civil Culture War

*Note to the reader: Sincere, though easily lableled as

elitist-pseudo-intellectual-bullshit, commentary ahead!

Hi,

Just thought you might like a little laugh. It's so rare that a lefty

actually gets it right, as in this cuture war screed.

http://fuckthesouth.com

It's a little unnecessarily profane (kinda like the chit-chat at

dinner with Ann Coulter and Sean Hannity), but after all the years of

libel and slander I guess this guy just couldn't control his fingers.

Probably death throes at this point. After the November 2

hornswoggling the lid's nailed down pretty tight on the Dems. Now if

some reasonable (I know The Enlightenment is totally passe, but can't

I dream?) Republicans could locate their balls and put the screws to W

and his neo-con braintrust before Greenspan's (I figure he's the

epitomy of elite, intellectual snobbery. How the hell does he keep his

job in Philistineville?) lipflappin plumb drives all the international

debt-carriers out of our value-depleting market, we might not have to

actually re-enact (not that ritual where all the Bubba's drag out the

stars-n-bars, and force the short-straw-drawers to dress in blue for a

day, but the real thing with boomin uzis and spewin blood) the Civil

War.

As bad as I'd hate to have to go through customs at SAT, I think this

guy might be onto something.

I could use some clarification from the conservative perspective. Once

Norquist gets really close (2007, perhaps?) to drowning the government

in his bathtub who's gonna be crying the loudest, the givin blue

states or the takin red states? (BTW, who's idea was it to coopt the

color of international communism for the American right? I mean, you

guys are the masters at creating a purely symbolic reality, but this

really takes the cake! What's next? Barbara and Jenna sporting a Mao

jacket/Che t-shirt/Kim Jong Il hairdo ensemble? That's the look

that'll make the new K-Mart Sears a smashing success.)

The Blue State Bother,

Robert

P.S. I appreciate how you avoid the culture war in your column. How

long can you hold out as it's clearly becoming the only thing (I

hesitate to call it an issue, as it's hardly a point of debate.) that

moves the truly, though unnecessarily, frightened, angry masses?

David Blackmon to me

Well, I guess that guy is one of the Kerry fans who had to seek psychiatric

help following the election. It is pretty funny, though.

But the South is far from the Democrats' only problem here, brother. Take a

look at that Red/Blue map you mention (I don't know who picked the color

scheme, but frankly, I'd rather have blue, thanks) - especially the

county-by-county version, which is most instructive.

The South is solid, sure, but so is the Midwest, the Southwest, and the

Rocky Mountain states. Not only that, but Bush won about 75% of the

counties in "blue" states like Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and even

New York. He also won most of the counties in California.

So basically, this guy pretty much needs to fuck everybody who lives outside

of a major metropolitan area on the East or West coasts. That's what it's

boiling down to for the Ds. Not a pretty picture, especially when one

considers that they will almost certainly put up yet another Northeastern

liberal senator (Hillary) as their nominee in 2008.

Now, Hillary will no doubt spend the next four years pretending to find God

(I can just see her now, getting dunked in the river by an evangelical

preacher with James Carville, Paul Begala and Big Bill standing on the

banks), and getting to the political right of the Republicans on as many

major issues as she can (she's already doing this on military spending and

immigration), but pretty much everybody outside of the major coastal metro

centers already recognizes the Clintons for the frauds they really are,

which is why everyone they campaigned for in 2002 and this year lost.

I see the "Culture War" differently than most folks do, apparently. IMO,

it's not a breakdown between different races, or different sexual

orientations, or different views about God, it's a far more comprehensive

breakdown between rural/suburban areas and the big cities.

Sure, the Gay Marriage issue was voted down in 11 states, but I believe

Janet Jackson's bare breast brought far more people to the polls than those

ballot items did. I believe Michael Moore and Whoopi Goldberg and all those

leftist airhead movie stars who think their opinions should matter more than

some poor slob working as a welder's helper in Crystal City cost Kerry far,

far more votes than any racial or religious tensions did.

The Democrats, rightly or wrongly, have come to be identified by these Red

County voters as the party that supports the "Hollywood" culture. They have

only themselves to blame for this. They will continue to lose election

after election after election until they do something to change this, and

frankly, I don't know what they can do.

I saw one of these mini-debates on Chris Matthews' show last night that I

thought perfectly symbolized the real nature of the cultural divide in this

country, though probably unintentionally. The topic was the "Desperate

Housewives" promo that led into Monday Night Football last week, and the

furor that has caused.

Representing the political "right" in the segment was this 40-something year

old, chubby but pretty housewife from Wisconsin who represents some

"concerned parents" group whose name I didn't get. Representing the

political "left" was a loud, obnoxious white guy from the Communications

School at USC who kept calling the woman names, shouting her down every time

she tried to make a point, and just couldn't understand why it is that

parents of small children might have been a little upset that they thought

they were tuning in to watch a football game, and got 60 seconds of nudity

and sexual innuendo instead.

The point here is not to judge who is correct and who is not on this

particular issue (Terri and I watch Desperate Housewives every Sunday night)

- the point is that there are a hell of a lot more of those 40-something,

chubby but pretty housewives in this country than there are loud, obnoxious,

sanctimonious communications professors, and all of their votes count

exactly the same.

That's the basic problem the Democrats have - they've become a party

dominated by the communications professors of the world. That Party is run

out of three places: New York City, Washington, DC, and Hollywood. That's

the truth. The Republican Party is run by people from Midland, Texas,

Butte, Montana, Casper, Wyoming, Cincinnati, Ohio and Memphis, Tennessee.

That's why the Rs relate far better to the housewives than they do the

communications professors.

That's why the guy who wrote that screed has a whole lot more people to fuck

than just those who live in the South.

David

Robert Blackmon to David

Hard to disagree with any of this. Not that I would want to. The

Democratic Party is practically irrelevent to my concerns. I hope

they do nominate Hillary and that she goes through the 'spiritual'

machinations you describe. This process will hold a mirror up to those

sanctimonious partisans cashing in on their debased Christianity whild

demanding (c)(3) status.

Anyone who believed Kerry could beat Bush, with or without Diebold

delivering Ohio, should have sought psychiatric care in the spring.

The inevitability of simplicity is the right's greatest intellectual

achievement. The reductive nature of the propoganda allows everyone to

claim part of this triumph of real-man reality over effete theory, as

surely as a momentary lapse into spiritual ecstasy gets you the E

ticket to Heaven. It doesn't matter what your vote brings, or how you

tend to your morality, as long as you can crow about your two great

salvations.

There's something a little ironic (the liberal's favorite vice) in

writing this today. As the Longhorns beat the Aggies, it makes me

wonder if all those conservative Texas Exes know just how truly hated

they are by all the super-conservative Former Students. Wearing their

cosmopolitan Orange apparel, redolent of fall - a season so weak its

only purpose is to usher in winter, the Exes with their affinity for

Austin's (a tiny spot of blue in that sea of red) drug-addled,

hippified culture still begging to 'Keep Austin Weird', is the

greatest proof to an Authentic RealTexan of the work still to be done

to purify the state's soul. Don't get me wrong, I'm really glad UT

won, and I'll be lifting a few brews if they get a bowl bid, but every

year they defeat A&M it's just adding fuel to the backlash bonfire all

the Exes will eventually suffer through.

UT isn't just a football program. It is the official Texas outpost of

the East Coast Liberal Establishment. It is exclusive, even with

50,000 students. It brags about its number 15 ranking in The Times of

London's recent list of great world universities, even if it is still

second to Cal Berkeley in US public schools that made the list. The

average SAT score for entering freshmen is 46 points higher than at

A&M. It is the home of at least 4 Nobel laureates. While I'm sure the

breezy 40 Acres are roiled regulary by conservative hot air, at least

three of my favorite radical professors are still there brainwashing

the undergrads. And, it is still the place where young people from

hundreds of Beevilles will meet their first real live Jew, homosexual,

nihilist or homeless person. Hell, they might even befriend a couple

of these heathens!

From the Aggie perspective it is as plain as day that anyone who

cheers on the Longhorns is an inauthentic Texan - read Communist. The

best these traitors deserve is a never-ending stream of baseless, ad

hominem attacks. If that doesn't bring them to their senses, baseball

season is coming and with it a handy tool for beating some sense into

em.

On our current course it won't be long before we face a

peddle-to-the-metal-NASCAR-styled economic race to the bottom and a

justice system meting out Biblical sentences. At that point all the UT

poseurs are gonna wish they'd actually learned to ride a horse and

shoot a gun rather than simply magpieing their devotion the 'realness'

of it all. The really RealAmericans' ears are fine-tuned to

distinguish the difference.

Sure, the Dems don't speak to the welder's helper. Neither do the

Republicans, really. Soon enough, just as he was deluded into

believing that the welfare state was the cause of all his misery, he

will realize that his unquestioning devotion to hollow

corporopatriotism has left him just as miserable. He is legion, and

loopy liberals will be lucky to have been consigned to the dustbin of

history when he figures out that, once again, the joke's on him.

When will someone on the right spill the beans on the big plan? What

is the big payoff hidden in mass impoverishment? Who ultimately

benefits? When the opposition has been vanquished, their socialistic

apparatus destroyed, and the nation is still bankrupt, who do you

blame?

As the Democrats are held in thrall by University Communications

Departments, so the Republicans are the creators of the most

sophisticated professional communications apparatus the world has ever

known. Hell, they've managed to make the NFL promo and Janet Jackson's

breast into major cultural transgressions, giving the chubby (though I

absolutely believe well-meaning) housewives the ability to deny what

they really were: crass, calculated events to create interest in, and

income for, giant entertainment corporations. These 'degenerate'

Hollywood corporations, despite the political leanings of their

producer clients, operate from the same free-market pathology as

RealAmerican companies like ConAgra, Halliburton, Caterpillar, Bank of

America, ExxonMobil, ADM, Enron, etc. Viacom, Time-Warner, Disney-ABC

are just as pushy at the public trough. Their employees might tend to

vote for Democrats, but that doesn't mean their boards don't

understand, and participate in the construction of, the great public

disadvantage that is their bottom line.

Anyway, hope you had fun at the game. Best to Terri and the kids.

Robert

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