Politics

It was always the conventional wisdom when I was growing up that you got more conservative as you aged. I, myself, am in fact getting a bit older (though nowhere near as fast as the rest of you), and I suppose I might fall victim to the trend myself, were it not for just a few minor niggling details.
Number one, to be a Conservative (and I mean every pixel of that capital C) nowadays means something rather different than it used to. To me, at least, to be a conservative in this day and age means that you are preoccupied with religion, money, and appearances. To clarify: by religion, I mean imposing your beliefs on people who do not share them. I don’t mean this in the tired old sense of “everyone’s beliefs are morally equivalent,” because I don’t think that. Jeffrey Dahmer believed it was okay to kill (and eat!) young men as part of his pursuit of the perfect sex partner. Obviously, even people who are not fans of his chosen victims’ lifestyle are pretty much opposed to this belief. No, I mean beliefs like the commonly held conservative tenet that stem cell research/cloning/genetic engineering science is immoral because Pat Robertson or James Dobson said so. To further clarify: by money, I mean the worshipful pursuit of same, and the requisite withering contempt for anyone who doesn’t have any. I don’t remember who said that ‘greed is good,’ but it might as well have been their holy icon Reagan, because they’ve made it a personal maxim ever since he first held office. And, to finally beat the clarification horse to death, by appearances I mean that the conservatives are still holding to the same old biblical injunction that it’s bad to be different, and to be creatively different is punishable by death, preferably via stoning at the hands of an angry mob.
In sum, that is why I will never be a capital-C Conservative. Now, this is not to say that I still agree with everything I so passionately felt as a teenager. Not so much because I think I was wrong back then, but more because I think the world is just too damned ugly and hopeless for any of those bright dreams to ever come to pass, at least here on this planet. The human race just has too many shortcomings to ever put forth anything better than the confused, half-good/half-bad gestures we’re so familiar with today.
As an example, I would cite the war in Iraq. No, I don’t think that going to war to liberate an oppressed people is a bad thing. Yes, I do think that going to war because the President is still miffed about an assassination attempt on his beloved daddy IS a bad thing. No, I don’t think it’s a bad thing that Hussein has been deposed, and yes, I do wish that someone would do the same (via a democratic election, natch) for George Bush. I don’t like him; I thought he totally railroaded his way into office with that whole electoral college/hanging chad debacle, and I’m not ready to let that go no matter how many times Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly tell me I should. Then, he made the most of his under-reaction to 9-11 by using it as a pretext to go to war. Yes, that is not just how I feel, but what I believe actually happened. Tell me I’m a victim of liberal spin, tell me that the media have misled me, tell me that I should start wearing a tin-foil hat because the Martian mind-control rays have me under their sway, I still think what I think based on the facts in evidence. Want me to change my mind? Show me some new evidence, such as… Oh, I don’t know, how about a dozen nuclear missiles in Iraq? Some kind of proof that Iraq was behind al-Qaeda, instead of Bush’s asshole buddies the Saudis, perhaps?
But let me just be totally, unabashedly honest before I put this post to rest. The total bottom-line reason I still don’t like Bush is his obvious distaste for anyone who isn’t at least comfortably upper-middle class. Really, he’s made it obvious in a thousand ways, with his policies and his pronouncements and just the general sneer in his voice and on his face when he speaks about anyone who’s poor in America. I get the sense that Bush would prefer we didn’t exist, and if that meant that we all quietly starve to death because we can’t find jobs, why, that’s fine with him. It’s obviously Osama Bin Laden’s fault, anyway. If I had only one opportunity to say anything that mattered to our President, it would be simply this: America lives on the labor of the working poor, and deciding to exploit the working poor of other countries while leaving Americans to starve is NOT a patriotic act.
So there. And (as far as politics goes) that’s all I have to say about that.