A little while earlier, after I'd managed to piss off a bunch of people here by saying that a certain soldier who talked about killing "faggots" deserved a bullet as his reward, I wound up on another board where the usual "liberals are PUSSIES!" thing was being bandied about by some of the local rightist crazies. Working off of my recent experience here, and thinking that even a broken clock can be right twice a day, I thought perhaps some of these redneck stooges had a certain convoluted point.
It occurred to me that maybe in the liberal quest for tolerance - a characteristic that seems to endear us to ourselves - we might have gone a bit overboard: we're tolerant of everything except the suggestion that there ought to be limits on tolerance.
In my earlier discussion I had expressed the view that the military is not a noble profession, and that some (though not all) soldiers were basically pretty horrible people. For my own part, I have no big problem with it if some sociopath - a Lt. Calley, an Abu Ghraib torturer, or one of those fucks who let the prisoners die in the shipping containers in Afghanistan - gets his useless brains blown out. Of course, it is only my opinion, and that won't effect the ultimate outcome for them either way. But this seemed, um,
intolerant to some folks around here, and they lit into me for it.
Thinking about the "pussy" allegation in tandem how my own admittedly "insensitive" statements were received put a germ of a thought into my mind. Why is it that "we" - speaking of "liberals" as a broad class - are so reluctant to embrace absolutism, even when we're absolutely right? Of course there are going to be differences of opinion, drastic ones, among the left just as anywhere. But it seems to me that (again, speaking broadly) "we" are reluctant to take a really hard stand for a lot of things.
We claim to be against war - yet we fall for the canard of "supporting the troops," lending our tacit approval to the actual killing that they engage in, instead deflecting all criticism to Bush and Rumsfeld.
We claim to stand for truth; yet, when public schools in Texas slap stickers on textbooks saying that evolution is only a theory, we flail and grouse but fail to attack the underlying problem - the superstitious horseshit that the sticker proponents believe. We allow our ideals of "diversity" to mean, in practice, that lies get to be taught alongside the truth.
We claim to be for the rights of working people for healthcare and decent jobs; yet we piss around, not daring to say the obvious - that medical care needs to be standardized and/or nationalized, that the private insurance system is a ripoff. We echo the big corporations' and medias' lie that Americans need to "increase productivity" and "be more competitive", code words saying that U.S. workers should produce more in exchange for their meager checks without any additional reward - thereby doing industry's propaganda work for them.
Yeah, by these sorts of yardsticks, we ARE pussies, in my opinion. Collectively, we wonder at the appeal that ignorant pig george bush has to the mass of Americans, even when it's clear that half of what he says is wrong and the other half is bullshit. What Bush offers, and we typically don't, is CERTITUDE. He may be dumb and evil, but the fucker is NOT afraid to take a stand.
Hell, when one of our own (Howard Dean) did so, look what happened; people FLOCKED to him, until he was ambushed by the media in the BS "dean scream" story. "Deaniacs" like me were drawn in in large measure, I think, because of his resolve; he said what he meant, you knew where he stood, and you admired his courage of conviction even if you differed on individual issues. While this appealed to me, it seemed to frighten the piss out of a lot of Democrats (hello, Lieberman voters...).
I rather think that if the left is to rehabilitate itself, stridency and militancy are our allies. It might scare the fuck out of John Q. Public to hear of concepts like nationalized healthcare - at first. But by siezing on principles, sticking to them, and by not being afraid to call bullshit by its name, I think that the left stands to win back much of the respect, and ultimately the allegiance, of average Americans.