In his 1988 State of the Union address, President Reagan said: “. . . can they [the pro-choice liberals] deny that now medical evidence confirms the unborn child is a living, human being entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness?” Like a stage magician, hatless Reagan fished this paper rabbit straight out of his head. No fetus in a womb is at liberty to pursue happiness. Entitlement to life is strangely uncharacteristic to hear from anti-entitlement conservatives. They seem to be more liberal toward the unborn than toward those who carry them or who they grow up to become.
Conservatives are insecure, half-born adults who unconsciously identify themselves that way. That’s why they so fear “partial-birth abortion”! That is what they are! Add them all up, they haven’t got here, yet. They’re afraid to be born all the way, so they get re-Unborn in mythic delusions, placentas of limited community called churches, temples, synagogues, mosques, country clubs and gated preserves of pristine, penthouse anti-populism in high, social circles. They like to get high so they can go low with hookers and make slimy deals unseen from home. They may practice religion in public but what they actually believe in practice is ridiculous. They talk like they believe in children and the unborn, acting as if no child or fetus must be lost. Why?
God needs fully tithing worshippers. War profiteers need ignorant armies, cheap, pliable workers, gullible voters, obedient citizens, an uncritical public that buys anything new and sexy. We’ll save all the world’s children except those that get in the way of maximizing corporate profits. “Never mind India and Africa, it’s already too late to care for all those millions of scarcely human starvelings.” Simplify issues, tilt fields, narrow all benefits, wreck democracy and raise efficiency to serve only a few. Call it Progress (for yourselves!) “Unborn children” is unconscious code. It projects what con-servatives really are in terms of human spirit: PRE-SOCIAL. Not yet real. Dependent on everyone else for status, for instituted support by law and media, yet hiding those facts behind aggressive individualism and indepent-Ism. Just plain phony.
Surely, fetuses are tomorrow’s presidents, ambassadors, cynical preachers, muggers & rapists, tricky bankers & drunks, sold-out legislators, homeless car-burglars, cat-burglars, dog thieves, literary thieves, dopers & street panderers; unscientific researchers, pedophile priests; poets who can’t imagine what do do about why they’re alive in a world they can’t reach or let see they can say things without believing in more than the tonic effects of their statements (in effort to promote honest beauty and powerful brain stimulation for the sake of a better world.) Oh, yes. Fetuses can grow to become good people. But, isn’t it surprising how many crooks come out of “society’s” upper-crust never having experienced “community” or gained a good sense of it?
Look at how such people like to brand as “socialist” or “communist” those who have sociable experience and generous outlook. They can’t even imagine as meaningful a word like “communitarian.” The upper-crust keeps itself free of socio-psychological knowledge except to misuse it, as does Karl Rove, for self-enrichment from public relations and clever advertising. See how quickly they applaud snide attacks on Barack Obama’s community service? To them, “service” applies only as to tennis, water polo and fancy banquets.
Many self-styled conservatives are uneasy with truth. They prefer a comfortable wrapping of fiction around a tight ego rather than first-hand, transpersonal experience of vision into self-knowledge. (“Exploration” never seems like a sure thing unless several “wildcatters” are lured in!) Neo-Conservatives are not conservative, but a radical new breed of pretenders. Of someone thus identified, we need to ask, “Conserving of what? Of whom? When, for how long, and why?” Chances are, the person you question will start blowing smoke for every kind of goodness and the necessity of Empire. Maxims and catch-phrases appear in place of explicit criteria or reasoned argument from sound premises. They hate “liberal” truth and facts other than their own. They build ladders for us up into Cloud Cuckoo Land. Hard pressed, they shift ground and attack, dredge up old stuff against Clinton, act abused. Cry get real!
Probably much less than thirty percent of the U. S. population actually has any sensible place in the GOP, the rest are victims of tribalism, family custom or wishful misreading of their real status and opportunities in the world. Some join the GOP through unconscious identification with ancient Romans who were rather like fascists and nazis. Those who can be said properly to “belong” in the party have financial interests and status advanced and supported by legislation which they shaped by pressure on selfish, weak or gullible legislators. Shifty lawmakers form cabals with wealthy scoff-laws to practice politics against the public interest in favor of private interest. Due to deficient numbers in the electorate, ‘Publicans cannot often win an election honestly. They use four tactics: (1) they buy votes, (2) they fool voters, (3) they disgust or scare people away from the polls, or (4) they interfere in a voting process to fake the results. The GOP “ethic” is, win at any cost. Say anything, do anything you can get away with. Be as underhanded and sneaky as you can, secretly. If caught, deny all and spin the world around you like a rat in a dry fishbowl.
‘Publicans imagine they are not mixed up. Ask one, you find he knows everything on principle. He has a truistic maxim to support whatever he intends to say or do. His notion is, you don’t know anything worth attention or discussion. He will argue from simple, foregone conclusions all day, pretending perfect civility. His assumptions march out from the maxims that express them. Talking points. His premises and conclusions are identical, so his reasoning consists only in making you see his premise, his fixed view of the facts, or else, in wearing you down by circular argument and tautological claims to shut you up. His fixed views are the facts. He is always right, which leaves you being left. He is lost in the floor plan of the British House of Commons. Facts are nothing. Power, status and appearance are money. Family values mean the market value of one’s family property and adherence to religious morals in public. A ‘Publican relies on the tactful support of his own sort, and demands it from the public whenever his family falls apart or members are exposed in compromising situations. Real discussion finally throws him into a huff.
‘Publicans use traditional, family and religious ideals of ordinary folks to get into power by getting their votes for GOP front people. You little, old-fashioned Republicans who think you will get power and that all will be better with “your” politicians running things, you are the prime victims of disinformation from people not totally unlike those who let Hitler come to power. Cultivating irrelevant “hot button issues,” Republicans work to split electorates and lead enough voters astray to swing elections.
DISINFORMATION: Ill-informed, gullible, uncritical people accept screened and twisted information that deforms perception and understanding. “Give us this day your daily, dumb trust. We give you smoke and mirrors, we give you divisive malice.”
HEALTH, EDUCATION & WELFARE: Only for the rich who can privately afford them and for corporations that can buy legislation and hidden favors. They think that’s a good, smart way to stay healthy, secure and well off. Privatize knowledge and skill. Ruin public education. Distract us with television which they monitor, control and stuff like a ballot box with big lies until all accept disinformation and sell out for nothing. Pack all media with voices that appeal to the basest voters in their base and confuse wobbly heads.
DEPREDATION: Ecological systems, landscapes and public health are ruined by private greed through corruption. For “our country’s best interests” read corporate profit. For “resource development” read land-rape or wrongfully legalized piracy.
CORPORATION: The legal imitation of an individual person was created by congress and courts under the pressure and initiative of wealth without need for humanity. It evades responsibility for harm to nature and people by staving off law suits and sheltering culprits from public view and correction. It pretends to serve public values by offering products which its advertisers paint as desirable to revved-up consumers and by supporting stock price by rake-off profits from which too much is spent on PR for a nice image. They insist that the benefits of their actions and output justify and outweigh any damage they do. All that harm has other causes, right?
CORRUPTION: Public resources get sold secretly for tokens of personal promise or given away sympathetically, to crassly uncaring and destructive profiteers, by political hacks and administrators who should be serving public interests instead of private and personal concerns. Trickle Down Economics: “Give us your timber, we’ll sell you cheap lumber, send the best out of the country, bleed you and the Third World while we trade with the rich.” It’s Trickle Up Economics and Bidness As Usual.”
DEPRIVATION: The poor and their unprotected children along with the ill and the old can just take a back seat. Let them take economy aspirin, eat dog food, work at low pay till they drop. They deserve nothing but our blandest consideration and barriers to all service. They should have spent their days cramming money into banks planning for rainy days, no matter that there never were enough decent jobs to go around, or time to get educated, improve work skills or power to go back in time three or four generations to find better genes or wiser people for ancestors. Let them be slowly sacrificed, for it is socially Darwinian Justice that they fall by the way and leave us to tyrannize so wisely over the earth that all life may be extinguished.
DEFENSE: “Our key to everything.” Single-payer Defense to keep us securely in power to invade little people’s privacy and subvert the Constitution through our Supreme Court. Everyone pays for the military while we profit big from “your” defense contracts with revolving-door Pentagon officials and corporate agents who hop in and out of government. Our defenses include the defense industries, the insurance game, federal banking, pharmaceutical and news-media “business,” the “drug war”, our “owned” people in Congress, administrative departments and agencies. Try to get something past us, we’ll reject or criticize what you write and tarnish your reputation by assigning our “stink-tank” experts to “your case.” We’ll sue you and win if you can’t afford to defend yourself and prove your case before our honestly con-servative judge. If that doesn’t work, we’ll find a really slick way to nail you. If you evade the hit and complain, it’ll just prove you’re paranoid.
BRAIN DAMAGE: “This we have in abundance and will give it to you, whether you want it or not. Our fancy ‘Anti-think Tanks’ will pump it to you, through us. We have them study you, learning how best to take power from you, no matter that we’ll never know what to do with it besides more of our same, stupid trickery, and that none of us will ever question the insane certainties from which we finance and urge our stinkiest think tanks’ foregone conclusions upon you to rule your lives.
HOMOSEXUALITY: The general idea of family which Rightists hold requires a strict, all-wise father, dutiful and caring mother/wife and obedient children, each member doing the job and punished in some way for infraction of rules or failure to perform rightly. There is no place for womanly men or manly women. They threaten the “good order” of Rightist mentality which rationalizes endlessly on why they are bad and must be denied coupling, legal or otherwise, by legislative suppression.
LIBERALITY: Rightists tend to view acts of charitable generosity not directly benefitting the giver as silly unless rewarded by public kudos, raised status and reputation for philanthropy rather than for public irresponsibility in avoiding taxes. If all conservatives paid their fair share of taxes, our government could exercise its full duty to protect and empower everybody equally! But, Rightists are foolishly embued with antipathy toward government in general, no matter that governance somehow happens, and that it is better for the nation to be ruled publicly by democratic representation than privately by corporate “trustees” whom we trust first to take care of bottom lines and their own long-term prospects.
PROVIDENCE NATURAL OR DIVINE: We’re put here to rule as we please. It won’t matter what we do. We can kill the planet, it’s okay, it won’t die, it’s too big to fail! We can feast on the corpse until new technological invention or scientific discovery and future entrepreneurs fix everything. God will bail us out. Get rich quick and easy! Grab first and most! New idea? Steal it, copy it. Party time! Down with the regulators. We love freedom! Don’t you understand what freedom is all about? FREEDOM? F-R-E-E-D-O-M ?
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