OT: The Last Necessary Column on Politics (By Fred)

[Guest guest]

Hi y'all,

 

Humorous this is .. and though it embellishes a bit .. its but a tiny

bit. Americans will see why there will never be a meeting of minds

betwixt Liberals and Conservatives .. and our European cousins can see

why they are being told which natural products they can or can't use ..

clearly all of us can see the relationship to our particular societies

if we aren't too polarized in our own beliefs. ;-)

 

Y'all keep smiling. :-) Butch http://www.AV-AT.com

 

Fred Explains Practically Everything .. Particularly Why We Should Avoid

Being Identified With Either of These Odious Groups. ;-)

 

In my capacity as Western Civilization's principal moral compass and

intellectual lighthouse, I thought I might explain politics once and

forever. There are altogether too many television shows about politics,

too many books by people who would better pass their time in drinking.

Newspapers have gotten above themselves. They are full of columnists. A

final explanation of all things political will allow the papers to

concern themselves entirely with coverage of ghastly murders, divorcing

celebrities, and the incursions of space aliens into Puerto Rico.

 

In America, politics breaks mostly into two groups, both of whom

probably do not have enough to do: Liberals and Conservatives. I will

explain each.

 

The Liberal believes that the group has a right to control every aspect

of everyone's life. He may permit many freedoms, but only those of

which Liberals approve. Abstract or general freedom holds no appeal for

him. The limbic instinct of the inveterate Liberal is to harry,

regulate, and stifle the individual, of whose penchant for independent

action he is profoundly distrustful.

 

Of course he does not think that he is stifling and imposing, but

improving and instructing. For the unwilling he has no patience. The

Liberal is a creature of the homiletic herd, like a gnu wielding tracts,

and believes in the " the masses, " in their infinite plasticity and

potential for uplift and betterment, guided by him. Particularly he

wants to uplift those who do not want to be uplifted, as their

independence might be infectious. He sees himself in the capacity of

the patient mother of a society of wayward two-year-olds who must be

diapered, formed, and taught.

 

Thus his love of government in all its meddlesome intrusiveness,

pedestrian witlessness, and unrestrained drive for dominion. He, or

rather more often, she, knows that without coercion, some people will

not do as they ought: that they will besot themselves, behave

wrongheadedly, teach their children heaven knows what, and march off in

all different directions. They must be restrained. And since the

restrained usually find ways of evading the constricting tentacles, ever

more and more-detailed laws must be enacted to thwart each new escape.

Thus the government will eventually come to dictate the altitude,

material, color, shape, texture, and compressive strength of toilet seats.

 

Liberalism is a feminine creed, embodying the kindness, short horizons,

modest familiarity with reason, and placidity of the sex. It wants to

buy people nice things without reflecting on how to pay for them. It

believes in goodness but doesn't often get much further, being

benevolent while falling short of beneficence. As good mothers will, it

tries to protect everyone from everything.

 

This is why the Democratic Party unrelentingly promotes security.

Children must wear helmets while riding bicycles, swimming pools must

not have deep ends, canoeists must wear life preservers, we must outlaw

guns, and smoking, and drinking while driving, and we should all wear

sunscreen so as to avoid melanoma. We must worry about safety until

there is nothing left in life but its preservation.

 

With the seldom recognized totalitarianism of the female, Liberals seek

to impose happiness, whether desired or not, by therapy and

mood-altering drugs, whether desired or not. People must be happy, must

be safe, must be forcibly socialized to a life of orderly boring routine

whether they want it or not. The herd will provide for all; the price

is that all must yield to the herd. Thus the Liberal aversion to any

form of self-defense, whether conducted with a gun or a baseball bat.

Self-defense is distressingly individual.

 

Conservatives by contrast believe that the individual has a God-given

right to rob others. As the Liberal has good intentions without

rationality, the Conservative has rationality without good intentions.

He worships at the shrine of personal freedom, by which he means only

his prerogative of making money regardless of damage done to others. He

dislikes government as he dislikes anything that might inconvenience the

pursuit of private rapine. He believes in the sanctity of private

property, unless someone buys the lot next to his and builds a

hog-rendering plant, when he will see the merits of zoning.

 

Conservatism is a masculine faith, hard-eyed, coldly logical, frequently

bloodthirsty, and typically out of touch with any reality beyond the

commercial. The Conservative has no concern for the less fortunate, who

he believes probably deserve it anyway. There is in Conservatism a

strong streak of social Darwinism.

 

Conservatives are fond of war, partly to be sure because of the

consequent flow of contracts but also because war is an age-old,

genetically mediated hobby of males. A robust Conservatism embodies all

the brainless pugnacity of the male. Note that history is chiefly the

record of armed bands of men poking each other with sharp objects, after

which the survivors drink mead and tell themselves how glorious it was.

The Iliad, Beowulf, the Song of Rolland, and the Old Testament for

example all read like the annals of teenage gangs in Chicago.

 

In the Conservative mind, martial derring-do is wrapped like a birthday

present in notions of glory, valor, sacrifice, virility, and

transcendence. Women and most Democrats seem to see it in terms of

deeply rooted and intransigent idiocy.

 

Conservatives conspicuously lack esthetic sensibility, a love of beauty

being a concern of women and homosexuals. Show the Conservative an

Arcadian idyll of rolling fields and ancient oaks and he will see a site

for several garish hotels, a parking lot, and a Wal-Mart. Like a

congenitally deaf man watching the inexplicable sawings of a symphony

orchestra, he is puzzled by conservationists. A dolphin, an elephant, a

panda he calculates in terms of cans of dog food at thirty-seven cents

per, and, for an additional three cents a can to cover legal

contingencies, he would pack his grandmother. He sincerely has no faint

idea why anyone might object.

 

He is likely to be a Christian, though not to the extent of letting his

faith moderate his misbehavior. For him faith is a justification, not a

limitation. While Conservatives generally do not engage in herd

behavior (note that they seldom hold demonstrations, while Liberals

seldom stop) they do believe in military aggression. Christianity

provides moral cover as he does things that might otherwise raise

nagging doubts, such as dropping large bombs on other people's cities.

I was only following orders, from on high.

 

The solution to the conflict between the two groups should be obvious to

all thinking people, if any: Drop them down an abandoned oil well, pump

large amounts of potassium cyanide after them, and stuff Oprah into the

hole as a plug. A cap of cement couldn't hurt. The silence alone would

justify this wise deed. All correspondence regarding the foregoing

luminous insights should be sent to General Delivery, Tierra del Fuego,

Argentina.

[Guest guest]

Very funny, and now I finally understand

why the word " Liberal " has become a pejorative

in some circles.

 

In my mind the word still has its original meaning

of " live-and-let-live " , like this:

 

" Sir, I disagree with every word you are

saying, but I will defend to the death your

right to say it. "

Voltaire

 

I suspect most people of opposing sides

want more or less the same things out of life.

They just have different ideas about how to

go about getting them.

 

Ien in the Kootenays

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" The means of defense against foreign danger

historically have become the instruments of

tyranny at home "

~ James Madison, 4th president of the USA

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