The latest entry in my ongoing
Agitprop on the Cheap project,
"OwnThis!" (probably vol.1) is a small pdf file (115k) that can be printed out on US letter or A4 paper, or emailed about.
It is designed to be provocative, in-your-face, and irrefutable. The quotes I "translated" were selected according to strict criteria - they had to be core conservative tenets, they had to be by mainstream authors, and they had to be, whether short or long, immediately accessible without footnotes or editing. Anyone who goes to look these up will find only more of the same, they're not taken out of context, they're not by marginal Wingnut X/Y/Z, and these are central, beneath and before all other specific issues, going back to the 70s before AIDS ever haunted Bill Buckley's nightmares or PNAC was conceived.
Hypocrisy, sophistry, prurience, racism and bigotry, callousness, greed - they're all here. Use them as you please. Make more if you want - the "Own Up to your own ideas/Own your own monsters" meme isn't copyrighted - but make sure you understand what it is that I've done there.
Those are the sorts of words that broke
me out from the herd, you see. They might not seem so critical to anyone who wasn't part of the tortured and sincere denials that, frex, Pat Buchanan was really a bigot, to anyone who wasn't
raised on the plutocracy's koolaid. --Except that whether we know it or not, most of us
were--
We need to sieze the radio station.
What do I mean?
Well, I see people here repeating Hegemony talking points unquestioningly. People who are supposedly liberals, who have been liberals far longer than my plus-minus four years of political awareness and about half that of "out" lefishness. Saying things like "the poor are lazy" and "confederate flags don't equal racism" and believing the BS about majority of powerful liberals being organized to ban all guns.
I mean, it sounds just like the stuff that used to come into our house every week courtesy of the Heritage Foundation and the Four Sisters, from 1970 onwards, and their allies.
I am put in mind of the bit in 1984 where Winston is surprised to find that Julia is generally skeptical of the entire system, yet believes various things that the Party taught her in school without ever thinking to question them.
Now, it took me a longtime in my online fandom career to admit to being a former Theocon, and still longer to admit to how much of one I was - I doubt there are many here who can say that they voted for both Buchanan and Keyes in primaries past, any more than that they have childhood friends who worked on those campaigns. But eventually embarrassment could no longer be allowed to matter: my pride isn't worth so much.
But now I'm not embarrassed at all, for having been Neoconned from age five or so until about fifteen and decreasingly thereafter, nor that after dis-identifying with the Right, it took me another half-dozen years or so to accept that I could, in conscience, stand with the Left against everything I had been raised to believe.
And not just because, as a defector, I have names and dates and connections that I have been able to use to prove the Hegemony's entanglement and track its progress.
It seems like in many ways I'm far more skeptical of government and the establishment than all but the Old Guard who not only lived through but fought through it all in the 1960s and '70s - I'm beginning to think that it's because the particular marginal conservative group I was in, had that black helicopter mindset, only believed that the secular government and "the world" was going to enforce godless liberalism and soulless materialism on us all. I may be on a different side of the field, but the target is exactly the same. (Okay, the Blue Helmets are the good guys, and the Churchmen are the bad guys - deep breath--)
What's happened, in fact, is that the people who used to be with me have all gone over to the same side they used to denounce, leaving me here, naively still believing in justice, truth, colorblindness, compassion, equality for women, empathy for the Third World, and everything that we used to say we were all about, and those of us who were footsoldiers in the movement believed we were working towards.
So I will speak to you out of that Byzantine past, "unwind the winding path" and advise you from the memory of that former single-issue anti-feminist straight-ticket-Republican voter that I was:
You who were never conservatives don't know how to talk to us conservative academics, and you don't know how not to paint yourselves right into the Hegemony's trap, either. We know you're corrupt, lying, unscrupulous hypocrites, it was fed to us via National Review and The Wanderer with our morning cereal. We know you make shit up about honest conservative scholars to discredit them and make them look like bigots by taking their words out of context. Go ahead and live down to it, and seal your fate.
You know what it was that converted me out of being a good little Theocon? It was cognitive dissonance, repeated cognitive dissonance, and the greatest amount of that came after I left my liberal-moderate Christian college and went to work at a conservative Christian ministry.
There I could no longer evade the growing realization that we were sexist, we were hypocritical, we were bigoted and callous towards the poor, and ignorant of the consequencs of the policies we endorsed, and this was because of - not leftist publications, or the token liberal there, whose sneering extremist statements, assuming that everyone agreed with her or else was an evildoer or a fool, made all the talk of whackos sound true - but because of, mostly, National Review and Crisis and First Things, with Limbutt coming in much later and fainter after it was mostly over for me, but clinching the deal.
That's right - the propaganda of my own side is what turned me off from the Right.
Because as long as you just go to church and hang out with the other nice soccer moms and conservative teachers and writers and intellectuals of both sexes, none of whom ever say "nigger" or "fag" and all of whom talk in eloquent, literary-reference laden ways about Tradition and Reverence and Beauty and The Good, you can manage to avoid ever realizing that all this talk is vanity, and a chasing after wind, and complacency and a standing idly by--
And if you do start to be troubled, they will be more than ready to wrap the sharp edge of injustice up in layers of Borkian sophistry, and of course, you want to believe it, rather than that you're endorsing slaughter in Central America and starvation in Central Africa and slave labour in Central Asia and feeding the cycle of grinding poverty and crime and despair in the heartland at home--
Sometimes you need the bitter dose of salt, to cut through this fog and wake the zombie from captive slumber.
But it has to be salt.