The Pity Party

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Inside the Conservative hive-mind you will hear -- all the time, every day -- a constant, peevish, background thrum of aggrieved fury. Like cultural cosmic microwave background radiation, (Motto: "My thermal black body spectrum temperature is 2.72548±0.00057 K and I'm ready to party!") point your eyes or ears in the general direction any Conservative pundit, any hate radio glob, or any Fox teevee goon and you hear exactly the same whiny, inconsolable rage over imaginary slights by imaginary enemies.

Over and over and over again.

In today's spotlight, Kathleen Parker.  Ms. Parker, you might remember, achieved brief fame outside the wingnut Thunderdome a few years ago when, after an entire career spent lobbing red meat to violently insane bitey-bitey Conservative zombies, was suddenly and hilariously shocked!shocked! to discover after a less-than-supporting column about Sarah Palin that her readers were not just violently insane bitey-bitey Conservative zombies, but  violently insane bitey-bitey Conservative zombies who super-duper luuurved them some Sarah Palin:

Allow me to introduce myself. I am a traitor and an idiot. Also, my mother should have aborted me and left me in a dumpster, but since she didn’t, I should "off" myself.
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After 20 years of column writing, I’m familiar with angry mail. But the past few days have produced responses of a different order. Not just angry, but vicious and threatening

Happily, Ms. Parker recovered from her brief collision with reality and has managed by dint of sheer, batshit talking point repetition to slither back into the good graces of violently insane bitey-bitey Conservative zombie crowd with verbal junk food like this:

Kathleen Parker: The dangers of sensitivity training

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Well, gosh, I feel so bad about all this that I’d like to cede the lower U.S. to Mexico and adopt the chicken as the national symbol. There’s no end to the ways by which nations can make recompense to those whose fates were altered by history. Shouldn’t we all just pack up and return whence we came?

This is, of course, emotional extortion designed to engineer behavior while enriching people who have invented an industry around the notion that people can be numbed into niceness and, therefore, more easily managed. It is helpful to recall that drones are also stingless bees.

There was a time when such lessons, otherwise known as manners, were taught in every American home. Said homes were not privileged in most cases, but they were occupied by a mother and father who, though they perhaps did not adore each other every waking moment, were at least committed to the mutual task of rearing thoughtful, well-behaved children.

Sensitivity training, alas, is one of the many legacies of our sundering of the family, which has led necessarily to greater dependence on third parties to instruct and order. We are unlikely to hear much about that in the next government diversity seminar and, soon enough, there will be none left to recognize that there is something wrong with this picture.

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I am a veteran of many, many mandated seminars -- 

-- and in a couple of uncharitable moments I admit to having kicked myself for failing to figure out a way to get in on the business end of the lucrative scam that was clearly unfolding before my eyes.

(brief driftglass aside -- At one publicly-funded organization that should've damn well known better, the boss decided to drop an assload of money on buying the entire "Who Moved My Cheese?" jumbo pack and towing kit:  books, videos, team building "games", body glitter, henna tattoos, and a huge "management retreat" hole blown in everyone's weekend.  At one point we were all asked to select a "character" from the "story" with whom we most closely identified.  Because my instinct for self-preservation occasionally flees altogether and at the oddest moments, when my turn came I said I most identified with author.  "Really?  The author?  Why?"  Because he figured out how to make a bloody fortune from stringing a dozen cliches together between two book covers. -- end brief driftglass aside)

But at no point during my many seminar-induced sanity-preserving flights of imagination did it ever occur to me to think about the incredible privileges I enjoy as a result of being born in an America shape in no small measure by a very real and bloody record of conquest, subjugation, segregation and slavery as one more opportunity for me to biiiiiiiiiiiiiiitch about how unfair it is to make me think about those (to use Ms. Parker's violently insane bitey-bitey Conservative zombie-friendly language) "whose fates were altered by history".  

Honestly, these people.