The Final Battle. Now With Deflowered Virgins.

Hmm...

OKLAHOMA CITY—Democratic Rep. Dan Boren of Oklahoma said Tuesday Barack Obama is "the most liberal senator" in Congress and he has no intention of endorsing him for the White House. [...]
Boren, a self-described centrist, is seeking a third term this year in a mostly rural district that stretches across eastern Oklahoma.

"We're much more conservative," Boren said of district. "I've got to reflect my district. No one means more to me than the people who elected me. I have to listen them." He called Obama "the most liberal senator in the U.S. Senate."

Boren still is going to vote for Obama, mind you, just not "endorse" him. Because, you know, Obama is "liberal", and that's just not an OK thing to be in the OK state.

It seems like a rather odd line for a Democrat to be taking -- clipped as it is from conservative talking points -- but I'll be honest. I can't get all that worked up about it. So, you know, whatever -- if he "votes for" Obama, but "endorses" an animated tick hiding in a Pokemon's brightly colored back fur, meh. I'm hoarding my disapprobation right now, in anticipation of Peak Outrage. Which will probably be sometime in 2009, for those of you who are following the outrage markets.

So here's my gentle question for Rep. Boren. Let's just suppose that he was right, and Obama really was "the most liberal senator" in the entire Democratic contingent -- a term magically conferred by conservatives on whatever figure wins the nomination, election after election, while hyper-mega-death-penalty-mocking-war-humping-salmon-punching-archconservative Republicans magically turn into "moderates", using those same conservatives' exact same terribly objective calculations for such things.

So let's just stipulate that someone might be "the most liberal" senator. My question for Rep. Boren, and for his Oklahoma constituents, is this: so what? So what if someone is a "liberal"?

What exactly are you afraid of?

What, will he start some wars? Will the economy go to hell? Will gasoline suddenly cost four bucks a gallon, so that getting from one end of town to the other starts to be something you have to plan for in your family budget? Oh, wait, no -- that's what conservatism has wrought. So what big, scary menace will "liberalism" rain down upon us all?

The horror of free public education? The apocalypse of affordable healthcare for families and the elderly? An energy policy that consists of something other than "hell, let's just sit on our asses and see what happens"? My God, maybe we'll have a foreign policy that doesn't revolve around sucking thousands of dollars out of your constituents' pockets, lighting all that money on fire, and using the pyre to make super-special Democracy Smores in the middle of the Iraqi desert?

What, are we afraid less American soldiers will die? That our trade deficit will be, if not reversed, at least addressed? Are Oklahomans all huddled in their closets, lest some of the now-legions of outsourced jobs start reappearing in their towns? What? What is it that is so absolutely alarming about the word "liberal" that you'd rather stomach having everything that's happened to America for the past decade continue, rather than being seen as someone who might secretly have tolerance for, shudder, that word?

Markos linked to this only briefly, in an open thread, but I think in order to absorb the true terror of liberalism, we must seek out those that fear our liberalism the most. The powerhouses of conservative thought who can really define, for us, what exactly it is conservatism is facing. If our fine Democratic representative Boren cannot explicitly define why liberal is supposed to be a bad word, let us go to the experts at Townhall.com, in this case one Mary Grabar, whose name I will not childishly compare to fellow cartoon elephant Babar because I'm trying to be helpful and understanding and all that other terribly earnest crap.

So perhaps by understanding conservative fears, we liberals can assuage those fears? Grabar:

An Obama presidency would signal the final salvo by the Left in the culture wars. Obama’s advance troops have already taken over our college campuses, have bound and gagged our conservative professors, have ravished our virgins, have pillaged our stores of wisdom, and have ensconced themselves in the thrones of power in deans’, presidents’ and department heads’ offices.
The victory cry is heard across the land in the cheers of Obama’s constituency on college campuses.

This has been going on under the very noses of the Republicans.

Ok... I was wrong. There's absolutely no way I can assuage those fears.

For starters -- and I will here too strive not to be too harsh on the poor creature that wrote such things -- they are the demented ravings of a buffoon. They would make the screechings of howler monkeys sound like enlightened discourse. They would make the graffiti on a bathroom stall look like the Gettysburg Address. We have met the enemy, and it is not us, but an imaginary sprite inside a delusional head, and it is called liberalism, and by God it does sound scary when you put it like that. Anything that can ravage your wisdom -- no, sorry, bound your daughters -- no, sorry again, pillage your... thrones... in the dean's office... um, where were we again? Suddenly it sounds like conservatives don't fear liberalism, but some post-Narnian villain. (The lion in that story? That was supposed to be Jesus, if Jesus had three-inch claws and powerful jaws capable of snapping a gazelle's neck like a toothpick. Now that's a Jesus we can all relate to!)

I think, in the end, perhaps the conservative fear of liberalism really is all about scary people ravishing their virgins. That is the only thing that comes up consistently in so-called conservative intellectual thought; the notion that someone, somewhere is just one dashing, hopelessly suave line from getting it on with your virgin daughter. Or son. For a long time, it was black people seeking to move into your neighborhoods and seduce your offspring. Then it was illegal immigrants -- yes, apparently all these people were swarming across our border because your virgin daughter was just that damn hot. Don't even get me started on the homosexuals -- they are all about corrupting your virgins. Except conservative Mark Foley, who was innocent. And conservative Larry Craig, who was twice as innocent. And conservative preacher Ted Haggard, who in his defense was mostly just in it for the drugs.

The problem, you see, is that since we can't be freaked out about ethnic people anymore, at least not in polite company, and you can't be all that freaked out about gay people now that we've figured out that most gay people are, you know, boring... so now it is simply the ephemeral liberals that are after your virgins.

Where do both liberals and virgins hang out in large numbers? Ah, there is the rub -- college campuses. And there, liberals do much more than seduce each other with tantric recitations of civil rights code. They've "bound and gagged our conservative professors." They've "pillaged our stores of wisdom". They've done that whole ensconcing-themselves-in-thrones thing. More from Grabar:

Even for the well-being of the business world we need to refocus on the humanities. As Ryn points out, the “honesty, good manners, and social responsibility” of Western businessmen is formed by “an ancient civilization.” But the increasingly popular business school major offers little in terms of appreciation for the hallmarks of our Western civilization.

For decades, teachers have been inculcating an alternative tradition and belief system. The beliefs may be based on such amorphous and sophistical ideas as “social justice,” “tolerance,” and “multiculturalism,” the traditions may lead back to the communist ideology of the nineteenth century and then through the heyday of radicalism in the sixties, but the means for inculcation are entrenched.

Here, I think she wounds us unnecessarily. Not once have I inculcated sophistical ideas. Not once have I gotten up in the morning, as a liberal, and plotted out how to further sophisticalize whatever it was I was about to inculcate. But you can see the perceived menace. A good conservative teaches social responsibility, which is a concrete behavioral charge to behave in a fashion that works for a common good. A devious liberal teaches social justice, which is an amorphous, sophistical idea about who should be entitled to that common good. Honesty and good manners are fine, upstanding values brought about by our Western civilization, by which we mean White People Jesus. Social justice and tolerance are communist ideas practiced by hooligans, radicals, and Ethnic Jesus.

Once you've entrenched your inculcation of the sophistical, that's it. Game over, man -- you've just doomed society to the vicious cycle of tolerance. If the Founding Fathers wanted anything to do with multiculturalism, they would have written it into some crazy-ass First Amendment or something, wedging it in just before another part that says you can can mount rocket launchers to your mule for all we care. But they didn't, so sophistmentalize that, you inculcator.

So if we are to properly comport ourselves around conservatives, we must not only stop deflowering their virgins, we must also stop teaching foolhardy notions like tolerance and social justice, the notion that individuals are imbued with certain inalienable rights to be treated a certain way, and replace it with more concrete notions like social responsibility, the notion that it's be really nice if you treat people in the right way, but if you don't feel like it and just want them to go get bent, that's OK too because that's what Western business civilization is all about.

The conservative traditions and beliefs, in contrast, are rarely to be found in college syllabi and high school textbooks.

I must disagree. High school and college textbooks have entire chapters on conservative traditions. There is the conservative tradition of slavery; the conservative tradition of social and cultural isolation, and the conservative tradition of hanging people from a tree because they looked at your womenfolk wrong. One can hardly muddle through a history textbook without being educated, somewhere down the line, on the historic conservative belief that women should not be allowed to vote, because they are too emotional to make good decisions, or that Asian Americans should not be allowed to own property, because they might own too much.

If these textbooks read like a litany of the failures of conservative ideals, I hardly think liberals can be faulted for that. If you wanted women to be blocked from the right to vote forever -- sorry, you should have tried for it harder. If you wanted to retain the right to kill non-whites without trial, whether it be in Mississippi or Wyoming or California, maybe you should have made that case a little better, don't you think? It's not the fault of liberals that you conservatives keep getting your asses handed to you by Lady History. I'm not sure how we can rewrite the textbooks to say "and to this day, black people have to sit in the back when using public transportation", and still keep that whole "honesty" thing that you were going on about. Maybe we can retitle the chapters with things like "The Negro Troubles: Let's Agree To Disagree", or "Dinosaur Saddles: Did Jesus Make Them?" but I still think we're going to have some points of fundamental conflict.

In 1957, with the threat of communism looming, conservatives had passion.

...except for that whole "virgin" thing...

But recently I had some college sophomores ask me during class discussion what communism is. Where to begin with such a question? Those who have been taught about communism likely have been told that it is one of many systems of government, not evil, perhaps even offering better health care, as in the opinion of Michael Moore, himself likely to be on the syllabus.

This, again, is indeed a conundrum, and I can see the conservative frustration with non-conservatives. Why is it that colleges would teach that the definition of communism is a "system of government"? Of what value would such a thing be, to a student of history or literature or anything else? Cannot we simply cross that definition out, in all the history books, and instead write in very large block letters: evil? What is the point of the more objective definition -- something that flies in the faces of our insulted conservative brethren, who rightly know that the correct definition of any person, place or thing should begin and end with the value judgement to be assigned to it? Should we be teaching our students what communism is, or where it was tried, or how it failed, or what the philosophical underpinnings of it were premised as, or the environment of the world just beforehand that caused it to rise among those of certain ideologies and with certain social goals, or should we simply make a notation: evil; see esp. Michael Moore, so that our bright-eyed but dull-minded future scholars can get on with more important topics?

What idiot would study communism as a system of government? What gullible fool, what half-assed Buckley or pudding-headed Will would seek objective analysis of contrary socioeconomic systems, rather than simply skipping to the systemic condemnation part? Do you know how much more rapidly we could graduate students into the working world if college educators like Mary Grabar could, when faced with an abominable student question like what is communism, simply refer her students to the two lists of evil and not evil things in the world and be done with it?

We had 9/11, but already in the days following you could see how the left brainwashes the inmates of the educational system. Students who should have been inspired to passionately defend their country and culture instead were given lectures in English classes on the historical reasons for the attacks (the Crusades, as my colleague at the University of Georgia presented it to his freshman composition classes). Or they were treated to “workshops” on the “peaceful” traits of Islam (presented in contrast to the rapacious imperialism of Christianity). Today, the fountainhead of anti-Semitism and anti-Christianity is on the college campus.

If a student today sees a “preacher” screaming, “G—damn America!”, as Obama’s of twenty years did, it, for him, simply echoes a little more crudely what his professor has been saying in class. Besides, he has been taught to value all religions equally, and with very little exposure to the Bible cannot recognize that what Jeremiah Wright preaches is antithetical to Christianity.

She has liberalism by the proverbial hacky sack; we are done for. Students who should have been inspired to passionately defend their country, perhaps by getting off their noble conservative asses and joining the fucking Army instead of asking so many questions, instead stayed in class and were doomed to the banalities of learning the recent and not-so-recent historic context of the world around them. Instead of properly being indoctrinated into their required new role as soldiers in the new global culture war, students were taught the heresy that not every single Islamic person on the globe had attacked their nation that day. It was devious: instead of honing a new generation of Crusaders, one particular college professor taught about the Crusades.

And indeed, if you cannot count on professors on our college campuses to teach your children which religion is the One True one (the answer is televangelism, or you are a heretic) and that all others are summarily evil, then truly you cannot count on anyone to do it.

What fucking bastards we must be, to do such a thing. Forgive my language, but I am shocked at this exposure of our young people and the cultural Holocaust of their environment. Why, indeed, can our college students not recognize that Jeremiah Wright is not a Christian, but Jerry Falwell is? Would not any college student immediately know such a thing, as matter of required social upbringing? And why cannot they immediately recognize that to ascribe value to religions other than the most narrowest possible subsect of American Christianity is, in fact, deeply troubling to the Jews?

But the indoctrination goes even deeper. An insidious, concerted attack on logic itself has been conducted by the radicals and feminists. [...]

As the mush-brained feminists and wild-eyed radicals have taken over English departments and comparative literature departments, they have eliminated or demolished the great works that promoted our values and inspired the passion necessary to propel a movement. The great works of literature that could inspire passion for the love of God, love of a spouse, and loyalty to one’s country, and foster the appreciation for the comedy and tragedy of human life, have been excised from the curriculum. In their place are ideological tracts, video games, television dramas, celebrities, and pornographic performance art. The love of God and a spouse that John Donne could evoke is now replaced by such things as an analysis of Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s sex life.

And don't forget loud music, and the kids today who will not get off our lawns. But once again, we must admit conservatives have a valid point, and that we liberals (or mere non-conservatives, as the case may be) may indeed be injuring them.

It is true that my own Humanities department dabbled in all sorts of ethnic literature, from ancient Greece (hedonists all) to ancient Rome (a culture which produced the vomitorium cannot possibly have produced anything else of value). I have myself been exposed to the names of Norse gods, and Native American creation myths, and African proverbs, and the most slutty of Shakespearian sonnets; my mind is now a bilge of conflicting ethnic traditions and strange archaic spellings of perfectly good American words.

But even my high school teachers and professors of comparative literature were certain of one thing, which is that absolutely no written art of any redeeming value whatsoever has happened since the nineteenth century, except for American literature which managed a few legitimate works up until the 1960's. To make the point rather bluntly, if you were alive when the work in question was written, it is not art, and you are a radical or a feminist for thinking so.

What could we possibly learn, indeed, from any artifices of modern popular culture? Can you imagine the educational insincerity involved in declaring that English or Comparative Literature might have any applicability whatsoever to things students might be exposed to in their own lives? It is a preposterous notion, only serving to get their hopes up that their fields might actually have some small amount of modern-day relevance or insight. It mocks students, by pretending that what was true in the world of Dickens might be applicable to modern culture, as opposed to being merely dusty, worm-riddled insights meant for storing away in the attic of the mind, perhaps to be someday unpacked as verbal parlor tricks years later to let fellow cocktail party guests know that you have had, as the saying goes, education, and that you have not merely been inculcated with the sophistical.

How can a student learn to love God from a television drama? What fool would attempt to glean meaning from an ideological tract, instead of instead investing themselves in the cozy, entirely non-ideological world of John Donne? What pudding-head would attempt to learn of love from something that did not rhyme, or learn of loyalty from something not originally written in English? Good God, the damage that will be inflicted if students learn that their fields of study have applications and intellectual ramifications even outside from a narrow collection of mouldering corpses.

And what of, as Grabar says, the great works that "promoted our values and inspired the passion necessary to propel a movement"? There is the truest question: how can we promote our values, unless all are exposed to exactly the same artistic works -- and no more. How can we propel a movement -- what movement Grabar means is never explained, so we must assume she means "conservatism" since the answer to roughly nine out of ten such questions would be "conservatism" -- unless we interpret the same artistic snippets, in the same way, and studiously avoid exposure to anything else?

Conservatism may have been a match for the most powerful communist nation on the face of the earth, but it cannot survive if students attempt to analyze artistic messages in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Conservatism could handle Stalin and Lenin, but is too fragile a thing to survive Joss Whedon. That is the defining assertion, in this clash between liberalism and conservatism. Stop teaching our students new things, or you liberals will win and conservatives will lose.

To declare absolute conservative defeat, in all of this, because now Barack Obama has won the Democratic nomination for the presidency: that is a visionary assertion, and not at all the political equivalent of Munchausen Syndrome. Liberals came to deflower your virgins -- now it is too late. Obama has deflowered them all, via the public airwaves. Liberals came to teach your children that not all ethnic people are frightening; now the point is moot, because Obama has come with his dashing half-Kenyan good looks and torn your precious ethnic stratifications to ribbons. Conservatives might as well abandon all hope; it appears womenfolk will keep the vote after all, and we may not be able to make evil and Muslim synonyms even though it would indeed make the final exams simpler to grade, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer will be buggering a vampire in reruns, thus through her first sexual act destroying their relationship and releasing an ancient curse which makes him turn evil. (Yes, I indeed saw that episode. I would have thought that "don't have sex or your boyfriend will turn into an undead jerk and try to kill you" would be just about as conservative a message as one could possibly be exposed to, but what the hell do I know. You can never parse what conservatives will or won't find objectionable -- they loved Disney's Beauty and the Beast, even though the entire movie was premised on an attractive but socially rebellious woman finding romantic satisfaction with an animal. Go figure.)

Grabar concludes her column with that most necessary of all conservative badges; the revelation that she once received an email from someone who disagreed with her. I will let that incident lie undisturbed; if Grabar was upset enough by the experience to devote nearly a full third of her article to it, I can only imagine the vortex of despair that would open up if someone were to opine, gently, that there is an ever so slight difference between receiving a disapproving note and being nailed to the cross of true conservatism. We shall look away, respectfully, and pretend to be watching something interesting across the street.

Ah, well. Back to Oklahoma representative Boren and where we began, at the beginning of this long journey into what liberalism means, and why it is such a fearsome, asophistic thing, and whether or not we liberals have any possible way of assuaging the fears of trembling conservatives or those that so devotedly speak for them. Boren, a Democrat, is alarmed that perhaps a fellow Democrat had shown liberalism, whatever was meant by that, and that he felt as a representative of Oklahoma it was his firm duty to recoil from such rhetorical cooties. In his non-defense, Rep. Boren also managed to pick up another Republican virus that's been going around; perhaps he needs to wash his hands more when he goes to Washington...

Boren, the lone Democrat in Oklahoma's congressional delegation, said that while Obama has talked about working with Republicans, "unfortunately, his record does not reflect working in a bipartisan fashion."

And with this our hopes for understanding our conservative brethren are dashed, for it seems that what conservatives truly want in the end, whether we are deflowering their omnipresent virgins or not, is to be invited to a seat at the table whenever any liberal, or half-liberal, or person-we-think-might-be-liberal has had the audacity to become popular. We may be evil incarnate, but... you know. The rules are simple: if a conservative is elected, then conservatism should rule, and if a liberal is elected, conservatism should still rule or he is a mean poopy-head.

Conservatives think Obama has singlehandedly destroyed liberalism via his mere charisma; our Democratic "moderate", as Boren would self-praisingly call himself, thinks the victorious Obama is not bipartisan enough. But compared to who, exactly? Where are these mythical Republicans that are suddenly all available for people to be bipartisan with? Where were they in the last Congress? Where are they in this one? Last I heard, there weren't any actually left that had interest in bipartisan anything -- they were busy tying up the Senate with constant procedural gimmicks in an attempt to hold up everything from environmental protections to Senate investigations to funding for Iraq War vets, and the only "bipartisan" stance any of them have asked for this whole session is the "bipartisan" requirement to absolve Bush and the phone companies from that whole by-the-way, we've been flagrently violating the law for years thing. That's the only one I can think of.... oh, and McCain's fevered and repeated requests to Obama that McCain be allowed to tag along on some of Obama's speaking engagements, because bipartisanship means sharing your charisma with the charisma-challenged, or you're a Marxist. So there.

Seriously, though: whatever. We must learn to practice goodwill towards people like these, not condemnation. I am going to sit down right now and write a letter to that giant anti-establishment left-coast hippie conglomerate, Starbucks, asking them to introduce a Bipartisan Mocha Swirl Frappuccino. That way when people demand mutual respect and bipartisanship while at the same time railing against the menace to society caused by the mere existence of liberals, I can smile graciously and tell them, with a clear conscience, to suck it.