evolution

What follows is a frank and often incendiary discussion of my current state that is sure to offend someone. If this sort of thing bothers you, just skip it.

So, against better judgement, I thought I should explain to what’s left of you what has gripped me over the past few months, and why I’ve been posting crap¹ about things like my loud (ex-)neighbor, stupid celebrity tricks — which you and I both know I hate celebrity news with a passion — and my silly little poems. I suppose all that is my attempt to “write my way out of it”, and it is in that spirit that I write this post.

I always told my meatspace friends who read this blog that if it ever got to the point where I started hating broad classes of people based on politics that I’d stop writing about politics. I have to admit that I’m almost there. I wanted to see something come out of this medium that moved this country forward, and for a long time I thought that was possible. Now — I don’t know.

Let’s start with the people I despise — the group I and others affectionately call the Nutroots®, the “progressive” left — as represented by the Kossacks, the Digbys, the Billmons, the Atrioses and their fanatic followers. I used to want to get along with these people — after all, we have to live in the same country. But I have read their thoughts and the thoughts of their subhuman commenters, co-diarists, co-bloggers, and other detritus for most of five years, and mostly now I want to see them poor, discredited, and forgotten. I used to want to convince them, one at a time, of another point of view, or at least one in which I wasn’t portrayed as a gun-humping, racist, uterus-controlling chickenhawk, but I have come to believe that such a union is not possible.

I thought, “Do I even want to be on the same side of anything as these people?” The answer was a resounding No. That is the tack they take, and that is the tack I am taking.

Let’s move on to my friends the conventional liberals, which comprise most of my readership and are by now wincing in pain. Let’s face facts here: Most of you are Democrats. Maybe not all, but some of you are. The Democratic Party is (besides the other role it’s about to take on) the primary vehicle for liberal politics; to be honest, I don’t have a problem with that and I never have. You say you’re not these people (and you’re right), and that most are not like them. Really? Whose asses are the Democratic candidates for office lining up to kiss?

Let’s now turn to my closest brethren, the socially lassiez-faire, minimalist-government, economic conservatives. Can we learn some organizational skills? Please? The Republican Party, even for those of us like me who aren’t Republicans, is still the primary vehicle for conservative politics in this country, just as the Democrats are for liberals. In a sense, the same sort of ass-kissing took place in our sphere, except we were the ones puckering up. Let’s stop supporting the Sam Brownbacks of the world when they mouth our platitudes. They haven’t done a thing for us. Maybe they would if they stopped taking us for granted.

Finally, I have some V.S.O.P. bile for the social conservatives: Thanks — for nothing. I voted for you because, frankly, I thought the alternative was worse. Looking back on it, as I have done several times in the last couple of years, I don’t see how it could have been. You have, through your monumental incompetence, narrow-minded focus on social mores, and pursuing your own self-aggrandizement, essentially destroyed any chance that things I believe in will receive any sort of a fair hearing for a generation, maybe more. I only hope that you will somehow pay a greater price for it than I will.

Thus endeth the rant. Maybe having written it and letting the stink hang in the air for a while will get it out of my system. I really don’t like being this way — but to tell the truth, I’ve felt this way for a while now. Maybe I’ll feel better in a while.

But don’t count on it.