Sticks and stones

[mqbush]

The right calls us socialists or communists, meant not as a
descriptive but as an insult, because the concept of community
sickens them.  Empathy they see as weakness, kindness and
mutual aid they see as suspect and contemptible.  Their god is
individualism, which absolves them from the burden of caring,
and makes it easy to be intolerant, inflexible,
uncompromising.  They don’t HAVE to get along with people,
which “frees” them.  (This is the “freedom” they’re trying to
bring to the world.)  They don’t have to be humbled by someone
else’s spirit and grace, because they are spared such
uncomfortable intimacy.  They don’t have to humanize their
ideological stance, because their ideologies don’t pertain to
people, but to power and profit alone.

Morris Berman, in his book DARK AGES AMERICA, is pessimistic
about Americans being culturally capable of developing a
humanistic civilization.  We will remain, in his view, more
and more eccentric in the world, akin to the much-studied Ik
culture (totally selfish, totally devoid of empathy.)  We will
remain stridently proud of ignorance and cluelessness as we
slip lower and lower in the regard of the world in “the final
phase of empire” (the book’s subtitle).   I could list my
criticisms of Berman’s scholarship (eg, basing an essential
point on uncited opinion surveys that directly contradict
easily citable and plentiful surveys), but  nattering about
details does not interest me as much as does asserting
optimism and hope.  

The rhetoric of the right is, I’m convinced, a minority
aberration that can succeed only while fear-mongering and
deceit dull and confuse the shrewd sense that the people
retain despite the dumbing-down of America.  I’m braced by the
talk of articulate exceptions to this dumbing-down rule. 
Their voice,- “Sweet sounds, oh, beautiful music, do not
cease!”  I echo Millay’s words every week at the end of Bill
Moyer’s Journal.  “With you alone is excellence and peace,
mankind made plausible, his purpose plain.”  As long as such
people stir and speak then I know I’m alive in a place of
hope.

On the right, meaning in life is derived from battling an
enemy.  Commies, gays, Arabs, bleeding hearts, neighbors, the
poor,- anyone will do, anyone is fair game for demonizing and
moralistic absolutism and destruction.

On the left, a life well-spent believes that “we do not
inherit the Earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our
children.” (Native American saying) What do we want to do to
our children’s world, and consequently, to our children?  The
left is life-based, which of late is radical, extremist.  And
“what radicals need right now” according to Thomas de
Zengotita (“Common Ground,” Harper’s Magazine, Jan 2003, p44)
“isn’t action, but theory.” (!) What should be a civilization
as obvious to achieve as breathing will take, instead, lots of
thought and work and hope.

The right, meanwhile, believes it has mastered its arts of
destruction, and so will be left behind, all by itself, one
fine day. 

[lonestarnot]

1. Would that be today or tofuckingmorrow?

Oh... and I can do without the RP, but the rest was great.