A
Conservative's Garden Of
False Narratives
By Phil Rockstroh
23 September, 2007
Countercurrents.org
One
would think that from the cries of (feigned) indignation and calls for
repentance arising from conservatives regarding Move-On.org's ad in
the N.Y. Times that the liberal-leaning group had not simply questioned
the insights and intentions of a public servant, promoting, in a public
forum, the policy of an illegal and immoral occupation of a sovereign
nation; rather, the folks of Move-On.org had committed blasphemy against
the holy name of some revered saint -- General Mary Petreus, Mother
of God.
The false outrage of perpetually
offended conservatives serves as cover for the true outrages of our
era, including: truncated civil liberties, rising levels of social and
economic inequality and injustice, and foreign wars of aggression waged
by an insular and secretive executive branch and fought by a permanent
underclass. The outrages keep arriving, because the collective imagination
of the citizen/consumers of the US, arbitrated by a careerist media
elite, has been, for decades, in the thrall of false narratives that
serve the interests of the elite of the corporate/militarist classes.
Concurrently, a sense of
unease and despair, due to a sense of personal and collective powerlessness
before exploitive power, has created the tone and tenor of the times,
and begot the phenomenon of supine liberalism and Viagra conservatism.
(In this way, liberals stand fecklessly by, as the public is, time and
time again, screwed by the decrepit schemes of the right.)
In this way, liberal paternalism
is insufferable; worse, it is dangerous. This has been the right's craftiest
accomplishment: inducing "reasonable" liberals and "sensible"
centrists to enable their crimes, from stolen elections to their present
preparation for a massive bombing campaign of Iran, by intimidating
them with the fear that any protest on their part will cast them among
the ranks of America-hating, lefty moonbats, who wish to see the terrorist
win, dumpsters piled high with discarded fetuses and metro-sexuality
made the official state religion.
Moreover, these assaults
upon both reason and the republic (what's left of it) will persist until
progressives begin to effectively counter the narratives of the predatory
right. Some call it shameful demagoguery; although, conservatives call
it career advancement. This is not a novel situation. Throughout history,
these kinds of pernicious mindsets have always been with us; it is our
tragedy that they have been allowed to prevail.
Conservatives are eager to
embrace false narratives: The surge is working; the terrorists hate
us for our freedom; Fred Thompson is Ronald Reagan incarnate, but with
a touch of Jed Clampett "folksiness." Accordingly, when the
times are roiled with uncertainty, when thoughts of the future are tinged
with dread, conservatives, like a character in Southern Gothic literature,
will fall into a swoon, longing for the return of an imagined, purer
past that never was. One can picture these rightwing sorts wandering
the streets, wearing a faded prom dress and a broken, prom queen tiara,
twittering and cooing, while repeating over and over again, "the
surge is working; Anbar Province is now a beacon of freedom unto the
world...") in an imaginary dialog with the ghost of their long
lost beau, Ronald Reagan.
Ronald Reagan, an ungifted
actor, by means of playing the role of a "resolute" Cold Warrior,
was able to gain the approbation and wealth that had alluded him as
a contract player in Hollywood. In truth, Reagan's greatest accomplishment
was convincing himself of his own sincerity.
Constantin Stanislavsky,
who is considered the father of modern acting technique, is reputed
to have said that when an actor starts to believe he is the character
he's portraying it is time to escort him from the theatre. Withal, Fred,
Rudy, Rush, Hannity, O'Reilly, et al., can you find the exits on your
own or will you need to be medicated, strapped to a gurney, and wheeled
from the public arena? Rather than being candidates for President of
the United States, most of the Republican field seems to be vying for
the title of National Crazy Uncle -- the kind of guy who corners you
at a family gathering and rants that the PTA is a terrorist front group
and gangs of illegal aliens are engaged in a vast conspiracy to steal
single socks from his washer-dryer.
The Republican candidates
for president and their fantasy-prone constituents wish to set the Way
Back Machine to the golden days of the 1980s when Ronald Reagan was
impersonating a man just arrived via the 1940s. This phenomenon is known
as the Law of Republican Special Relativity, which states: When events
begin to accelerate forward, the conservative mind will be cast, at
an equal rate of speed, backwards in time. But the paradox is: they
arrive in a parallel universe, an alternative past that never existed
on this earth -- a low probability dimension, comprised of platitudes
and false pieties, where white male privilege is sacrosanct, only for
the reason (according to their reality-proof perspective) that it serves
to provide all mankind with all things good and holy.
This law can be tested by
performing the following simple exercise: Engage a conservative true
believer in a dialog regarding the manner by which "state's rights"
was misused in the Jim Crowe dominated Deep South of the pre-Civil Rights
Era in order to propagate and maintain segregation, and your conservative-minded
test subject will respond as if those realities transpired long ago
and far away on a planet that he has never visited.
Yet, paradoxically, rightists
have manage to create a Time Retrieval Device, a device that has summoned
from the past wonders, such as the following: a reversal of many of
the rights of working people; the return of unsafe and unsanitary practices
in the food industry; widening gaps of wealth, health and privilege
between social, racial and economic classes; in short, many the excesses
of plutocratic rule inherent to unfettered capitalism.
As a result, a generation
has inherited power who are devoid of the concept of causation and consequence.
Ergo, we have developed a political class who rule by narratives of
denial and shallow self-justification. An example of this is the blaming
of the people of Iraq for the blood-drenched debacle that has resulted
from the illegal and immoral invasion of their nation. As well as, an
enabling cadre of media elitists who served as cheerleaders for the
invasion, because they deemed it to be good for business, and, to this
day, are unwilling to admit their complicity.
All of the above leads to
the question: What are present day conservatives striving to conserve?
Historically, conservatives gave their utmost to conserve institutions
such as slavery, Jim Crowe, child labor -- and, of course, the use of
leeches for medical purposes. (Perhaps, they simply couldn't stand the
thought of a fellow blood-sucker being deemed dangerous, and they feared
the start of a trend.) At present, the central paradox of contemporary
conservatism is this: How does one practice conservatism within an all-encompassing
economy based on disposability? This is analogous to establishing a
brothel devoted to the goal of abstinence.
When engaged in a dialog
with many conservatives, the question becomes: Are their reactions and
responses evoked therein simply borne of plain ignorance, willful ignorance,
or outright lying? Or are their responses the result of a group hallucination?
All progressives have experienced the following nonsensical encounter
of the conservative kind. Present a reasoned argument to a conservative
-- and, all at once, completely ignoring the tenet, tone and thrust
of the point, they begin hallucinating a creature, only known to exist
in the rightwing bestiary, known as a "moonbat" -- a mythological
beast that, ironically, seems to appear when a conservative is confronted
with reality.
Accordingly, the time has
come for a study of political zoology and to posit who are the true
moonbats now making their habitat in the United States. Case study:
Unregulated, wish-fulfillment-based conservative economic policy has
created those suburban arrays of mold-incubating petri dishes known
as products of the housing boom. Moreover, the bursting of the whole
bubble-prone Ponzi scheme has sent shock waves throughout international
economies and is surging the economy of the US towards recession. Furthermore,
conservative anti-regulatory policies have rendered us babes in a cheap,
plastic Toyland.
What has an era of conservatism
wrought? Answer: a culture that has all the value, integrity, sustainability
and safety as a toy manufactured in China. Apropos, contemporary life,
as conceived and manufactured by conservative "values", is
shoddily made, toxic and not a lot of fun.
In addition, it has spawned
a culture ridden with public relations fabulists and media-savvy confidence
artists who tell us that the taste of corporate ass-suck is the ambrosia
of the gods. The locked-down, stultifying mindset and ideological barbarianism
of present day conservatism is directly linked to the steep decline
of the quality of life in the United States.
The recent revelations regarding
the "I'm-not-gay-I-simply-engage-in-same-sex-encounters-in-puplic-restrooms"
wing of the Republican Party are instructive in understanding the rightist's
worldview and its effect on our times. Covert sex in a public bathroom
stall is an apt metaphor for how contemporary conservatism limits and
restricts the possibilities of human life. In the same way that a closet-case
gay conservative stunts the possibilities of his love life, the conservative
mindset limits the scope of a culture's possibilities. Accordingly,
economic life must be ruled by ruthless, unregulated competition, and
the nation's meaning can only be found in war. Hence, under the Bush
Junta, we are told, as far as international relations go, that the nation
has few options other than its present policy of predatory capitalism
and "wide-stance" militarism.
Regarding perma-fools such
as these, Ernest Becker wrote: "Once you base your whole life striving
on a desperate lie, and try to implement that lie, you instrument your
own undoing." Accordingly, the republic is dead; it's ghost howls
online only in pixelated protests such as this one. This grim reality
will remain, until we rise up and repudiate the false narratives that
have created and continue to comprise these tragic times.
Phil Rockstroh,
a self-described auto-didactic, gasbag monologist, is a poet, lyricist
and philosopher bard living in New York City. He may be contacted at
[email protected].
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