"...it's not the training to be mean but the training to be kind that is used to keep us leashed best." ~ Black Dog Red

"In case you haven't recognized the trend: it proceeds action, dissent, speech." ~ davidly, on how wars get done

"...What sort of meager, unerotic existence must a man live to find himself moved to such ecstatic heights by the mundane sniping of a congressional budget fight. The fate of human existence does not hang in the balance. The gods are not arrayed on either side. Poseiden, earth-shaker, has regrettably set his sights on the poor fishermen of northern Japan and not on Washington, D.C. where his ire might do some good--I can think of no better spot for a little wetland reclamation project, if you know what I mean. The fight is neither revolution nor apocalypse; it is hardly even a fight. A lot of apparatchiks are moving a lot of phony numbers with more zeros than a century of soccer scores around, weaving a brittle chrysalis around a gross worm that, some time hence, will emerge, untransformed, still a worm." ~ IOZ

Apr 10, 2010

Note to a Conservative Friend

Sarah Palin does not care about you. She doesn't give one damn whether or not you starve, lose your home or have to trade your self-respect for a little bread.

She has a job to do. She channels your angst and rage into little quantum packets of hatred, and campaign contributions. You provide her party and her faction of the ruling class with a deniable buffer. When one of your group acts up, or does something stupid, they disavow you. They sit behind your rage and your anxiety and mutter, "What can we do?"

Repeat: you provide them with money and cover.

Stop it, already.

PS: Stop congratulating yourselves, sneering liberals. Sarah Palin's followers might have some funny notions about gold, markets and the imaginary national past, but they at least possess enough of an instinct of self-preservation, and self-respect, to know that the guys in the top hats would love to eat our young for dinner. Sure, their rage gets misdirected. Sure, they provide cover for the same top hats. But they know what the enemy looks like, even if they don't know the meaning of the word "socialism."

4 comments:

JM said...

No, they don't know what the enemy looks like. If they did, they'd actually be advocating for single payer health care, nationalize banks,etc. not calling for the abolishment of health care period. hell, do you think the middle class tea partiers care about Iraqis and Afghanistan citizens getting unjustifiably murdered as you folks do?

JM said...

And before someone calls me an obama fucker or something, let me say this: to make a change in society or even a revolution, you need everyone involved:african americans, african imigrants glbt folks, Muslims, Latinos, Asians, conservatives, far left democrats, greens,everyone. Not just white working/middle class americns, but EVERYONE.

Jack Crow said...

I would suggest, Jenny, that your average conservative can identify the banker, the lawyer, the corporate executive as the adversary.

The problem is not that they don't know who's oppressing them.

The problem is that they've - and this is a broad generalization, for the sake of brevity - constructed a narrative (or accepted one) which identifies the adversary as "liberals and socialists."

They've bought into exactly what Palin represents: one faction of the ruling/owning class (that is, capital) operating as if it represented these alienated wage laborers.

So that while they can rather obviously identify a banker (for example) as the agent of their woes, they see his actions through a defective perspective.

The two large factions of capital appropriators, in the US, each vie for the electoral and consumer support of population segments - reinforced with party and product affiliations that are not intellectual, but emotional.

For the faction which markets itself to white middle class wage earners and petit-bourgeois, a national myth of membership in an exclusive nation serves as a unifying reification. This abstraced fiction is treated as a concrete thing, given attributes which are all spectacle, and distributed via media and myth, as an intellectual commodity signifying loyalty.

That's what Sarah Palin is all about. She's the reinforcing agent, giving away that commoditized set of images in order to trap the rage and sentiment of the class her faction's policies routinely dispossess.

It's not that they cannot properly identify the enemy, Jenny.

It's that the identification is neatly misdirected towards membership in a fake nation, into fund raising for one of the two factions vying for control of the corporate state.

Jenny said...

You kinda said what I said,but articulated it better. Republicans do indeed still claim to be "small government", but aren't obviously.