brotherhood, goodwill, and guns
I love Joe Bageant’s blog, and am shamelessly reposting his reply to a woman who was annoyed with another writer’s stereotyping of “liberals”. I’ve emboldened the lines at the bottom that I find priceless, and I’m right there with him. Enjoy!
If every liberal in America fit that latte sucking, chard chewing stereotype (though a large number in places such as Manhattan and San Francisco and many metropolises seem to fit, from my experience) our election results would not be so close (even discounting for GOP vote theft of recent years).
But in all fairness, I must say that Americans of every political stripe — including me — suffer under their own political hallucination, 100% of which is created by the media. One of course is the neocon “every man for himself” in a (rigged) free market whereupon a man or woman’s destiny and prosperity is supposed to be available to anyone with the “initiative” to beat his neighbor in some sort of national competition for material productivity (wealth). The other hallucinatory promise is one of kindness, equality, charity and justice.
Neither party now delivers on those hallucinatory promises.
But nevertheless, the choice citizens make between the two speaks volumes. Not about the person’s goodness or meanness of heart and spirit, but about their level of fear. Conservatives tend to be somewhat fearful to start with (which is common sense — the world ain’t no bubble bath in Eden). And the new breed of ultra conservative Americans are terrified deep inside, despite their bluster and aggressiveness, their grab at every material opportunity — materialism being the only terms in which they understand security. Mainly because fear reduces homo sapiens to fall back on our deeply seated reptilian survival brain. To my mind the choice one makes, even if the offering is a state sponsored hallucination, represents at least to some degree the humanity with which one chooses to view life and live life. Some of us have a natural revulsion of choosing to be lizards, preferring peaceful, kind, non-aggressive lives pursuing the currently much sniggered at path of “truth and beauty.” The lizards of course see such people as their natural prey.
In the end, like you, I choose the legion of kindness, equality, charity and justice. Even if we do seem to be marching off the cliff of destiny, as all civilizations and super powers of any era inevitably do.
When I hit the bottom I will be in good company. And when we look around we will see ole Mike and the rest who made the opposite choice right there beside us. The calamities of national folly and hubris play no favorites.
And if we are truly people of mercy and charity, we will not harbor blame or revenge. Because the “great game” being played, the game in which we were always pawns, is bigger than all of us. And the solution, to the degree that there is one, is not national, not political, but rests in universal humanism, which is mightier and more enduring than any nation or its politics.
Meanwhile, because we must live our beliefs in order to claim them, I extend the hand of brotherhood and good will to all others who have made different choices than I, including Mike, right up until the time his tribe comes knocking on my door to take me to “the camps.”
Then I start shooting.
We truth and beauty types have a lizard brain too.
In art and labor,Joe
photo credit: lincolnblues
