By James Askew
I know, I know, conservatives are good people, too. This, at least, is what they tell me.
I follow politics. I listen to the radio, watch the news, read the papers, and I’ve waited to see what they’re talking about, this good side. Sure, I believe that many, if not most on the right are good people, with human hearts and human fears and feelings the same as mine.
In the same way, I can believe in the goodness of most WWII Germans and have empathy for the anger of the oppressed. Even I would like to believe that I am good and an American, despite all this shit being done in my name.
But that does not mean I will unreservedly sing America’s praises, unapologetic for all the ill this country does. And yet this is what so much of the Republican right insists on, unflinching in their resolve despite all the evidence.
These past few months I have been enthralled with the presidential primaries -- frightened from the right, excited on the left. And when I listen to the speeches of the right, when I hear what is being called out from the audience and what is being cheered, I feel it in the pit of my gut. It tickles at my greed and at my fear. It tells me to think only of myself and those close to me, to protect myself from those that are different. It tells me to attack every enemy and fear my neighbors.
When I listen to the right, I hear little more than our brutish nature given voice.
In “The Republic,” Plato foretells the end of democracy as the time when the masses come to revere the ways of the brute -- his brutish manners and money and power.
That any person could be offered an open and free society such as we have in America, with all the wisdom of the world available at a click of button or the turn of a page, and find little more than the impulse toward greed and the trap of defended ideology, utterly amazes me. To be given everything only to choose the most base - that is the legacy of modern America.
Think about it. Let’s look at three of the key Republican platforms.
War: The battle cries ring out loud and true from the Republican right -- $3 trillion a year for a means and ways to kill. “Certainly,” cries the right. A third of the national budget, “Yes, yes.” More than every other country combined. “Oh God, yes.”
It is one thing to know the necessity of war. It is an entirely different thing to make it your chosen option.
And what is this call to war based on? Fear, if not the baser emotion of revenge. “We must protect ourselves from another 9-11,” they tell us.
Three thousand people were killed in the attack on New York City, and we are so compelled by fear, and the even baser emotion of revenge, that we have enacted a justice of a million lives, have eroded our civil liberties, and have created new and angrier enemies all around the world.
Immigration: We are in the richest nation in the world, consuming an insanely disproportionate amount of the world’s resources, living as no human has ever lived, and yet what underlies this motivation is pure and unadulterated greed. Protect and preserve and keep it all to myself.
This is the sole motivation behind the immigration issue, terrorism be damned. The greed of people with so much they are fat with it.
In this foolish greed, they blame the immigrants for taking their jobs, while their bosses sneak out the back door will millions of dollars in bonuses. This is the nature of base emotions: logic become impossible.
And abortion, a woman’s right to choose: We all know the reason this fight rages on. This is matter of religious belief, of the knowledge of science over the belief of one religious leaning. Be damned what other people believe. The Christian right will be satisfied with nothing less than a theocratic tyranny in which they can control the education, the beliefs, and, I assume, anything else they are able, of all people.
In fact, I find it of no surprise that the Christian right should find favor in the Republican party -- two groups sharing the defining trademark of believing in archaic and absurd reasoning; reasoning that has proven again and again to be destructive.
Fearful, vengeful, self-absorbed, greedy and tyrannical, this defines the right in America, the most base of all that is human.
And the worst part of this is that the longer this is maintained, the more it becomes acceptable and the norm. This most recent generation, raised on the fear mongering of G.W. seems to be the most conservative, most fearful generation of the past 40 years.
As I write this, Obama has shown a positive force in the Democratic primaries and McCain has clearly taken the Republican nomination, a fact I welcome with a tentative sigh of relief.
I don’t know whether the Republicans are playing their b-team, knowing after W. they don’t have a chance to win, or if this is a true sign that even the Christian right knows how to be repentant. Whatever it is, I welcome it, hopeful that, at last, the vile display of politics that has dominated this country for seven horrible years, destroying just about everything good, has at last awakened a few more Americans to the threat of the irrational right.
Imagine a country forever dominated by the force of the right. No welfare or social service. Massed amount of weapons used without reservation at any approaching fear; trickle-down economics that all-too-often resembles the feudal system; and the worst of all, laws formulated not on reason and justice but the absurdity of archaic, century-old religious belief from a time when humans thought the world was flat and stars were holes in the fabric of heaven.
We have, I hope, survived these past seven years. Our economy is in ruin, our country in an ideological war no one can win, our infrastructure falling into disrepair, our civil liberties dissolved. The only hope is that the unapologetic right, those who so blindly chose the basest of reasons to support the basest of men for president, will learn the error of their ways and vow never to repeat them. Please, I beg, for the sake of the nation and the world, will all good, intelligent Americans move a little to the left? The rest of the world will thank you.