In aid of helping readers make sense of our mad and seemingly-incomprehensible world of mindless, smirking Conservative goons, sniveling Republican cowards and feckless Never Trumpers, I have turned to Ray Bradbury before, and I probably will again. For example, to explain why Conservatives and Both Siderists both loathe us lefties with such intensity (and why we are all but banned from the mainstream media) you don't need to have mastered public policy because their contempt of us has nothing to do with public policy. What you need to understand is that they dread us because we are the stewards of the past. Because we are the ones who insist on remembering all manner of terrible things that their ideologies absolutely demand to be forgotten.
That is what makes us a genuinely existential threat to them. And no one was ever better at explaining the kind of visceral hatred by the Many Who Want To Forget for the Few Who Dare To Remember than Bradbury:
That is what makes us a genuinely existential threat to them. And no one was ever better at explaining the kind of visceral hatred by the Many Who Want To Forget for the Few Who Dare To Remember than Bradbury:
Ray Bradbury's "The Chicago Abyss" is a tale of an old man who remembers too much. In the rubble of some bombed out urban center, the people physically abuse the old man when he shares his memories of such things as Baby Ruth candy bars, music, restaurants, and television. A small group protects and cares for the old guy, hiding him from the ever-searching police.Of course, the reason for the loathing and fear of this gentleman was that he held a frame of reference that degraded the present...
And so today or tomorrow your assignment is to find 30 spare minutes to sit and enjoy "Night Call, Collect" while keeping the following in mind. Like the old man in the story -- stranded alone on a desolate, abandoned Mars -- Never Trumpers are not at war with some external force, but instead are being tortured by an ideological engine which their younger, crueler selves gleefully set in motion decades ago.
David A. Walsh at Washington Monthly puts this phenomenon into it a larger historical perspective here:
Conservative pundits repackaged Cold War–era attacks equating liberals with communists during the Bush years. In 2003, Ann Coulter, a frequent Fox News talking head, published Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism, which was a full-throated defense of Joseph McCarthy that accused liberals of being, well, traitors who hated America. The book sold 500,000 copies in its first three weeks. Even the racially charged birther myth—that Barack Obama was not a U.S. citizen, and was a covert Muslim, to boot—was a riff on the old John Birch Society charge that liberals, including moderate Republicans like Dwight Eisenhower, were secret members of the international communist conspiracy. The cry that Obama was a Marxist, Maoist, Muslim Kenyan socialist was almost interchangeable with right-wing attacks directed against the civil rights movement in the 1960s. And the idea that a vast left-liberal conspiracy was both undermining the country and using dirty, underhanded tactics to do so rhetorically justified an anything-goes strategy on the part of the right. Shutting down government. Refusing confirmation votes. Supporting Donald Trump for president.So-called Never Trump conservatives lament that the Republican Party and, indeed, the conservative movement have ceased to be about ideas beyond slavish devotion to Trump’s cult of personality. But this critique ignores the centrality of the idea of liberal nefariousness even in the self-consciously intellectual corners of the conservative movement. Jonah Goldberg, who has been affiliated with National Review for twenty years, has called for a revived conservative intellectual vigor to tackle the policy challenges of the twenty-first century. He was also the author, in 2008, of the book Liberal Fascism, which—until a last-minute change by Goldberg—bore the subtitle The Totalitarian Temptation from Mussolini to Hillary Clinton...
And therein lies the real reason why both Conservatives and Both Siderists hate us so hard.
Because Never Trumpers would rather be staked to an anthill -- nekkid and covered in high fructose corn syrup -- than be forced to admit that the Left was right about them all along. That the rough orange beast which is wrecking the country is nothing more than the toxic legacy of their own cruel and callow ideology -- a monster which they turned loose upon the world and for which they never in a million years thought they would have to foot the bill.
And Both Siderists would rather be staked to the adjoining anthill rather than be forced to admit that they consciously ignored 30 years of Liberal warnings that this day was coming and enabled the rise of this run-amok Republican beast every step of the way.
Behold, a Tip Jar!
