Death of a liberal

My last post was a more than usually misanthropic snarl-rant which in retrospect might deserve a little explanation. I have long and rather proudly borne the banner of a curmudgeon and have even compiled a list of 102 pages of “Curmudgeon quotes,” most of it a meta-compilation of other lists compiled and published in The funny times by Jon Winokur. A curmudgeon is generally defined as a bad-tempered, stubborn, cantankerous, usually old person, and, although rarely mentioned in the definition, one often sharply critical of humanity. It is, of course, possible to be critical of humanity without hating it, but I’m afraid I’m increasingly tending toward the latter. I’ve gone downhill from the famous line of Lucy in “Peanuts”, “I love humanity, I just can’t stand people”; nowadays I can’t stand either one. Hence my statement in the last post that I no longer give a cent to any of the social welfare agencies I used to support philanthrop-ically. I’m no longer trying to make the world a better place; I’m getting more enjoyment out of watching it collapse in anarchy, chaos, and eco-catastrophe.

Now that we’re in the terminal spasms of that quadrennial zoo-circus we call, usually without the slightest trace of irony or sarcasm, “democratic elections” (one of the major spectacles of which will be staged in Denver this week; I can hardly wait to miss it), perhaps it might be useful to discuss what the above “death of a liberal” means. At first it meant the death of a member of the Dummycratic Party, which used to be considered liberal and is now nothing more than the center-right branch of the Republicrat-Demoblican Party. I deserted the Dummycratic Party (or officially recognized its desertion of me) back in 1997, after that treacherous scumbag Clinton (think of NAFTA and “don’t ask, don’t tell,” just for starters) won his second term. So, if one gives up on both of the two “mainstream” parties, what alternatives are left, in terms of so-called “third parties”? I blush to admit that in 1997 I changed my affiliation to Green. It sounded good at the time because I was just faintly more idealistic and naïve then. But after they ran that equally idealistic and totally unelectable clown Nader, who arguably made it easier for the Mad Emperor to steal the throne in 2000, I got fed up with them as well. So, what are the other alternatives? Libertarian? Not bloody likely. They’re in favor of minimally regulated laissez-faire economics, and I think all Big Bidness, particularly multinational corpse-orations, should be not only regulated, but chained, muzzled, and castrated. Socialist? That’s not even a viable party in the Divided States, and while I’m all in favor of the state taking care of such things as health care and retirement and unemployment compensation and social welfare generally, I’m also acutely aware of the hopeless incompetence of government bureaucracies to do anything right, and the danger of Government-as-Nanny deciding it has the right to interfere in everyone’s private lives and tell them how they should behave. All in all, the political landscape in the Divided States is a desert.

So my official death as a political liberal qua Democrat dates back to 1997, but my death as a cultural liberal is more recent. I share with my mentor Joe Bageant a withering scorn for all politics, politicians, and political processes in the D.S., but my death as a political liberal considerably pre-dated my acquaintance with his work. (Perhaps our scorn is more withering toward the Dummycrats because we feel so betrayed by them. More traitors in my history: In 1992 I voted for Ben Nighthorse Campbell as a Democratic Senator for Colorado, and in 1995 the asshole converted to the Republican Party. And more recently, even Mark Udall has turned out to be a gutless eunuch as a Democratic Representative for my district.) But I’ve also more recently joined in Bageant’s contempt for what might be loosely called the liberal life-style. Although philosophical liberalism—progressive ideals of reform and personal freedom and social tolerance and all that—still sounds good in theory, I’m getting increasingly disgusted with the kind of people who espouse it. Once again I’m indebted to Bageant, who has frequently railed against liberals as a social class, pointing out that the party which historically supported and represented the working poor now either totally disregards them or regards them with a sort of elitist disdain, and doesn’t even try to communicate with them about their needs and concerns. Even the Great Brown Hope of the Dummycrats committed the incredibly stupid faux pas of denigrating (pardon the pun) the fondness of the working poor for “God and guns,” two of the solidest pillars of redneck identity; I’m not sure he’ll ever recover from the damage he did to himself with that one. And the “party” of latté-sipping, brie-eating, Porsche-driving elitists is notoriously fragmented by warring “single-issue” factions—feminists, environmentalists, abortion-rights zealots, LGBTs, blacks, etc. (note the absence of organized labor in that list)—who pursue their own agendas with monomaniacal and uncompromising obsession and make little or no effort to unite with each other to form a stronger party, or with the rest of the country to form a more perfect union. But none of that matters much anyway. Regardless of which puppets of which branch of the Republicrat-Demoblican Party get “elected,” they’re all controlled by the corporate masters who own the government; some of them just conceal their thralldom more cleverly behind pseudo-liberal rhetoric. We hoped for improvement in 2007 after the party affiliations of the puppets changed, and look what happened. Nothing is ever going to change except the façade, and behind the façade things are only going to get worse.