Helen & Harry Highwater's cranky weblog of news and opinion.
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"News that's not known, or not known enough." Helen & Harry Highwater's cranky weblog of news and opinion. |
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'Conservative' is a synonym for criminal by Herb Ruhs, MD It may be an economic meltdown for us, but it is an economic bonanza for the criminals in conservative clothing. Criminals have always sought to effect a hostile takeover of the "conservative" brand. Real conservative thought, as in conserving what was good about the past, being against throwing out the baby with the bath water, of providing a necessary break to over-exuberant left wing idealism, is always easily displaced by wolves that want to wear these ideas superficially as a convenient and totally hypocritical set of sheep's clothing.
Real conservatives have become an endangered species because of their ideological commitment to actual law and order. The best and kindest thing we can do to honor the memory of real conservatives is to stop using their word -- conservative -- to describe the cabal of criminals that usurped the title by stealth and deceit. I suggest that if we just made it a habit of substituting the word criminal for "conservative" where it fits we would soon begin to be able to see through the smoke. Try it: The criminal majority that controls the Republican party... Criminal think tanks... Criminal rule... Criminal opposition to civil rights... The criminal approach to government has brought us to this economic impasse... See, it's easy -- and accurate. Criminality is as active and coherent a political perspective as any other and has always been. It is just allergic to using its proper name. Herb Ruhs, MD PERMANENT LINK Very convincing. I thought about programming an "auto-correct" for our word processor, so every time I type 'conservative' it replaces that word with 'criminal', but there are times when I still want to use the word 'conservative'. At least sometimes, though, I think I'll make the switch manually...You could program it to replace with -- "conservative" (criminal variety). The urge to bigotry never rests, not the least in me. In spite of the unreserved nature of many of my polemics, I don't actually think that all conservatives are evil. One of my favorite authors is Kevin Philips after all. Neither do I think that being rich necessarily makes folks evil, though it makes it darn hard to get through the eye of the needle. To the horror of some of my radical leftist friends I am not opposed to capitalism, at least of the socially domesticated variety such as thrive in places like Kerala. I actually am fond of military folk and I identify with the ranks, actually. My mom was a Marine drill sergeant, maybe my fondness for the ranks is somewhat inherited. I really like some lawyers, Ralph Nader and my brother in law Ron, for instance. I am even more fond of cops as I have known many in the context of my work with incarcerated juveniles and child abuse. In fact my real rage is directed towards those evil influences, which I subsume in the general category of "criminal," that oppress the socially responsible and kind representatives of these various groups that end up being used as virtual human shields by the criminal elements that have infiltrated all these groups and subverted their normal ethical roles. I worry about the populist rage that is developing taking out the good folks in a mass assault that might never reach the evil ones that are behind the curtains pulling the strings. Herb Ruhs, MD PERMANENT LINK I always thought conservatives were right about certain issues, liberals were right about other issues, and always enjoyed the serious conversation between liberals and conservatives. But those principled conservatives disappeared in 2000. They forgot their principles and cheerfully accepted a stolen White House.I expect some are just hiding. It's about principal, and they just don't have any.Isn't Ron Paul a Republican? The Republican Party leadership is totally corrupt and beyond any plausible defense. There is plenty of reason for banning the party as seditious. The Democrats aren't far behind in the sedition competition. I always like to leave some room for low-level individuals to escape the influence of gangster like organizations that I oppose. It is a very brave thing for a Republican to become a dissenter. The Republican leadership are gangsters. They don't allow people to resign without making an example of them. So compassion dictates that forgiveness be available to individuals as opposed to the party itself. It is also a good tactic. Make sure to leave an exit for your enemy to leave the field. With any luck the battle can turn radically into a rout if you are lucky. Of course the other part of the battle is to give the organized resistance extreme hell, so, by all means pile it on. The Ukrainian anarchists, under their elected general Nestor Makhno, defeated a well equipped German army sent my the reactionary White Russians (LINK). One of their really successful tactics was to buy train tickets back to Germany for surrendering German soldiers. The German officers, however, were summarily shot. Not that I think we need to shoot the party big wigs (not that some of them don't deserve to receive capital punishment for treason), but I really believe that a kind attitude towards the rank and file, to encourage defections, is a good idea. This is not some kind of parlor game. In real life you do what you can to win and restrain your passions when necessary. In my village we were pelted with leaflets encouraging us to surrender all the time. Not that my village was not in support of the Saigon government. That we were leafleted was just a reflection of how stupid the military was. Mostly it was the Americans who dumped leaflets on us, but occasionally the South Vietnamese government would leaflet us. That was a welcome event since the low quality paper of the South Vietnamese leaflets was highly valued as toilet paper. The American leaflets were high quality, magazine type paper that was virtually useless, even for starting fires. On the other hand, my fellow villagers would have been upset if something I said to the authorities resulted in a cessation of the leaflets of either kind. So mum was the word.
But I badly digress, as usual. The point is that part of conflict needs to be to encourage individuals of the opposing force to surrender, if not change sides. That would be a neat campaign. Organize Republicans against the Republican leadership! Besides, just because you register Republican doesn't mean you have to vote Republican in the secrecy of the polling station. A lingering doubt about the legitimacy of the party leadership at the point of the casting a secret ballot can result in unexpected votes. Herb Ruhs, MD PERMANENT LINK As usual, I don't think we're disagreeing. I try not to harshly judge people over their politics. When we're talking about ordinary folks of one political persuasion or the other I try to assume that they're decent folks at heart. I don't think your average Republican beats his wife or kicks his dog or embezzles his boss. My Apple dictionary defines politics as: "the activities associated with the governance of a country or other area, esp. the debate or conflict among individuals or parties having or hoping to achieve power." If there is no possibility of real challenge to established power relationships, to my mind, there is no real politics. But there is always the potential for people to assert their ignored interests. Historically, these cases of frozen politics usually result in horrendous civil wars. That may be our fate, but I keep hoping that a transformation of the mass of people to a point of view that honors our collective interests (including our collective interests as a species to halt the destruction of our environment before we force ourselves into extinction, rather than honoring the struggle for dominance by one group or another) will create the possibility for a brighter future. I guess you could call me an deep eco-communitarian. There is a lot of movement elsewhere in the world towards this point of view, witness the activities of the World Social Forum, but very, very little in North America, which remains in the clammy grip of a predatory ruling class. I bow to your experience and knowledge in the national political realm. I have spent a lot of time ignoring it. After living in most parts of the country, and several other countries, I have come to the conclusion that we here in the US have only a very vestigial political process. We have an exuberant *appearance* of a political process, with many institutions and ceremonies that serve to create a spectacle that uncritical minds can readily accept as a political process, but, except on a very local level and in increasingly few situations, there is nothing in America that resembles real politics. Everything is organized and controlled from very centralized structures and increasingly is oriented towards the interests of a vanishingly small number of people who have no national loyalty at all, merely loyalty to a world system of concentrated wealth. In an odd way it is the mirror image of the old USSR centralized command and control economy. In that case the system looked after the interests of those in control of the government bureaucracy, but, in outline, the two systems are identical, and in both cases there is no actual politics, just a theatrical industry to create the illusion of politics. From this point of view, I am more interested in seeking a change of heart in people who erroneously think that their interests coincide with the established power structure than I am in influencing those who already are aware enough to be disaffected from the system. Ideas may come from Berkeley or Madison, Austin or Ann Arbor, but change is going to come from Kansas. Have you read What's the Matter with Kansas? by Frank? I don't know if he is right about Kansas, but I do know that whatever is the matter with Kansas is the same thing that is the matter with the USA. I never seem to have trouble talking with the Republican rank and file people because we always have common ground, but I seldom have the experience of being able to break through the trance that they are under, the spell of "our country right or wrong", the government is our country, and so forth. But I relish any opportunity to undermine this spell of national exceptionalism that is leading the US, and the rest of the world along with it, off a cliff. Well, enjoy what you can, do what you can, and turn the rest over to some higher power of your choice.
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