So I've been thinking about philosophy and politics and all of that. It's
Saturday, 26 April 2003. Not often I get a moment or in this case hours, to
think. Projects off and going, but today nothing pressing; the rest is busy
work with no motive, which I abhor. Questions—why is or rather what is the
difference between liberal and conservative, I mean why do they think that way?
To be sure I believe in the power of the media to divide us into two major
factions—left and right. I was playing with the idea of not empathy but rather
justice, and how people do and don't value them. Vague enough? A burglar
breaks into your house and threatens your family. You happen to have a uranium
tipped bullet in the barrel of an automatic Colt .45 and the safety is off.
What do you do? Conservatives seem to have less of a problem with
self-survival, it seems to me. They'd shoot first; ask questions later. As in
they're more than ready to fend for themselves. Of course I do that too; I'll
defend my own way of life to the point of wielding a knife in someone's face or
whatever…I guess. I mean if I was cornered and couldn't run away. I've always
been one for flight.
OK, maybe more. A terrorist group levels your native city (Seattle) and you're
out of
town; when you return you find only ashes, your friends are all dead. By a
coincidence or miracle you know where the leader is hiding out (alone), and you
still have your Colt with uranium tips. Say you bust down his front door, aim
at his chest, and right then his wife and three daughters throw themselves in
between you to shield him. Now you know that those spiffo bullets will pierce
every one of those children, including Angela, who just happens to deliver
your newspaper every morning
1
.
And you know they will as easily pass through
the wife and kill this murderer. By the way in the driveway you noticed a
Ryder truck loaded with fertilizer, hydrochloric acid, aluminum cylinders, a
map of Portland, Oregon, and yes, uranium tipped bullets. Also crates of
Pepsi. Now the question of course is do you shoot the Sonofabitch? What if
the terrorist was born and raised in Miami or Denver and you happen to be
Pakistani, or Chinese? I happen to think that last question makes no
difference
2
.
A bit about my belief system. Throwing out the miracles of Jesus was pretty
much essential for me; what happened was I finally had to say 'no' when it came
to Revelations. I'd lived with the good and the bad in the Old Testament. In
college I'd accepted Jesus Christ as my personal savior, etc. But I wound up
throwing that all out after getting a visual one day of people being dipped
like fondue into the Lake of Fire. I mean since the Bible is after all a
single book, you can't really keep Jesus and then dump Revelations and the
whole cranky Omnipotent One in the Old Testament. Well I can't anyway; call it
my Cross of Consistency. That whole voice out of the burning bush bit…what was
that? Whoever's behind that voice--not the author
3
, but you know, the
voice—sees fit to endow one of his children with the power to get up and
walk/fly away a few days after being hung up overnight like a slaughtered cow.
That is after also endowing Him
4
with the ability to feed a thousand people with
six fish, just for instance. And this is the same Omnipotent One that leveled
Sodom. Because of their rotten hospitality or rampant homosexuality, you be
the judge. Jesus' teachings would seem to contradict the Old Man.
I'd shoot them, of course. C'mon, he leveled Seattle! He's going to do it to
Portland! So where does that get me? It seems to me that everything value
based is so, in terms of degree. That's my fundamental answer, so to speak, on
the definition of Fundamentalism
5
.
But that's another topic.
Another thing about my alleged consistency. Is it consistent to both reject
Fundamentalism on the basis of wanting no part of a black and white life, while
at the same time insisting that consistency itself should hold up a standard
with at least as sharp an edge
6
?
Probably not. If it were I'd be insane. Its
not like I've accepted Consistency as my personal savior. It's a virtue,
nothing more. It won't get you a blowjob on a Saturday night. So for me, life
is a variation in hue, sorta like that color wheel that pops up in Photoshop.
You know, you can drag your mouse over all those ranges of color and lighten or
darken or tint to your heart's content. Black and white are there too, only
there's so much more in the middle. On the other side of black and white,
well, there's an edge; and beyond that, unknown reaches and emptiness. With a
range of color though, as on the surface of a sphere, there is no edge, at
least not in our faculty. Were there depth, well then again we have the
unknown. Paint black and white on a sphere, however, and there's the unknown,
and there's black and there's white. Seems a lot less interesting to me. So
never mind the Fundies.
If the diff between liberals and conservatives comes down to degree, and
everybody on the planet is found between the extremes, then most people are in
the middle, if the bell curve principle holds. So I must be one with the
masses after all. Anyway, leaving social diversity (and my own apparent rife
everydayness) aside for a bit and looking only at America, one would think the
country would be evenly divided on each side. Yet even if true, and I suspect
it isn't—Bush is changing the world. Into an opulent hospitality suite for
paying
guests, or ashes, you decide. In high school I couldn't make up my
mind to save my life. And at my worst I feel a queasy familiarity with that
time. Certainly events that pass before our eyes on news television these days
are out of our control, and I'll bet a lot of people wouldn't or couldn't do
any better. But how far the cultural pendulum can swing toward preserving our
own wasteful, selfish, circle-jerk of a culture at the price of little kids'
lives and limbs and in the midst of so much righteous (and right) condemnation
from around the world—takes my breath away. What little good there still is of
old America is scrubbed clean and soon gone. But with All Temperature Cheer,
your kid's whites have never been brighter! All temperature Fear you mean.
Conservatives want to preserve the way they live; they wish to protect what
they've worked for; they hoard for the future. We all do, but never mind the
'to a degree' thing for now. Looked at in this way, selfishness can become a
virtue, in that in order to maintain your current lifestyle, you agree to
protect it, even if it means forcing out the hypothetically less fortunate who
want what's yours
7
.
Herein is another departure between liberal and
conservative. I submit that conservatives are less empathetic; they care for
other people but to a lesser extent than their own. Same with liberals, but
liberals in general, care more
8
.
At worst, conservatives represent to me that which is
fundamentally and shamefully selfish. And at the extreme, these days,
selfishness extends not only to shooting the burglar that threatens your
family, but to shooting the Terrorist and taking out his family also if need
be, in his own home no less. Now a days in this country, this is called
Patriotism.
Fine. So I'm coming out against all this misguided racist vengeance after the
World Trade Center came down. Nobody even denies now that invading Iraq has
everything to do with 9/11. And at the same time I'm agreeing that there is a
hypothetical time to murder a family in cold blood. This thing about degrees,
about shades of gray—its so very cold. This is no hypothetical war; Baghdad is
no hypothetical city. Good hypotheticals never happen. Our logic, if unwed to
compassion, will be our undoing.
I think conservatives view the tribulations of other people as
disconnected—not real. I think conservatives enjoy a fight more than
liberals, be it verbal
or fist or guided nuclear tipped missile. A conservative
enjoys a fight because, being a conservative, he's certain he's in
the "right", and confident he'll win
9
.
A card carrying conservative craves one asset that brings with it all the
floral scented hospitality suites and Humvees that life has to offer—power.
Power
doesn't really get a good liberal's motor running (fun does)
10
.
Work is sort of
a necessary evil to many young people, but I think most older liberals and
conservatives would agree that there is a certain satisfaction in productivity,
on nearly any level beyond a mindless repetitive task. But the desire for work
won't inspire war the way a good power rush clearly does. Fun is
its own reward.
I think an overly conservative viewpoint imperils the very earth. I think an
overly liberal viewpoint imperils, at worst, the individual. Which is the
greater threat? I think there would be a lot fewer terrorists in the world if
we
agreed to share.
* Because its okay to be right sometimes.