First off, Happy Mom’s Day to all of you madres out there.
OK, so us liberal twirps got a nice chuckle the other day over William Bennett and his big-time gambling habit. The man who said that no vice is victimless is now saying that his own vice is, in fact, victimless. The man deserves be handed over to the satirists and mercilessly whipped with lashes of raw humor. A good example of what I’m talking about is the treatment that Allan Bloom, the celebrated social conservative from the 1980s, got from Frank Gannon (who, as I said before, is my favorite underrated American humorist). In Gannon’s second book, Vanna Karenina, there’s a chapter entitled “The Trial of Allan Bloom”. Gannon envisioned Bloom being brought before a tribunal of judgmental teenagers (is there any other kind of teenager?). I won’t describe the whole thing, but it’s an excellent read. Here’s the opening paragraph:
“So we finally got him out there. We had to cancel sixth period, but that was nothing because for most people, it was gym. So we get him out there, and we start talking to him, and he is just the biggest wienie in the world. Jason asks him ‘what happened with your hair?’ and everybody just cracked up.”
Yep, that’s the punishment that William Bennett deserves.
Speaking of liberals and conservatives, I was thinking the other day about why law-and-order conservatives get so upset about what liberal twirps say, e.g. in questioning the wisdom of President Bush’s decision to invade Iraq. After pondering this a bit, it occured to me that it has a lot to do with body types and a person’s sense of mission in life.
As a general trend, it occurs to me that liberals and anti-war people are usually not muscular people. Yea, I’m sure you can think of exceptions to that rule, but I’d bet that if you were to line up 10 liberals, 7 of them would be scrawny or otherwise out-of-shape (FYI, I weigh 130 lbs – not exactly an Arnold Schwarzenegger or Dolph Lungren). By contrast, conservatives are often robust, big-boned people, folks who like to get physical. (Again, there are exceptions like George Will, but they seem to prove the rule; Mr. Will is a big-time muscular wanna-be, the kind of guy who knows that he can’t impress the big guys with his pecs, so he tries to make them like him by saying brainy things that defend their way of life). I work in law enforcement, and I’m surrounded by robust, physical people who, in fact, are generally quite conservative. I’ve seen these people get very upset with liberal challenges to their ways of living. And I think I now understand it a little bit better.
People with muscles are like anyone else, in that they want to feel that their lives have some underlying meaning and purpose to them, something more than day-to-day survival. Yea, deep down inside, even the biggest lunk-heads have a sensitive spot about who they are and why they’re here. They often go into the armed forces or into law enforcement because that’s a good way for them to gain a strong sense of self-worth. They are using what they were given, i.e. their muscles and aggressiveness and robust bodies, to help maintain order, to defend society from the bad guys. In their own way, they are just as selfless and socially engaged as Mother Theresa and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. were.
The problem is, because these people are contributing to the greater good more with muscle and loyalty than with critical reflection, they need to put their faith in the goodness of the social institutions that hire them. If the U.S. Government or the local police department is not good, then they are not good. So, when the scrawny liberals come along and start pointing out the imperfections in their modulus operandi after critically reflecting on the U.S. Government or local police department, the big-boned (or wanna-be big-boned) conservatives can’t help but take it personally. This happens even when the criticism wasn’t intended as an insult by the liberals, but as a call to see the imperfections in society and try to make them better.
The liberals, despite their intellectual capacities, often don’t see this. Thus, the motto “support our troops” is a rather brilliant pitch by conservatives to force liberals to acknowledge that muscular people out in hostile places with with M-16 rifles and missle-launched grenades have just as heavenly a personal inspiration as the bearded liberal ministers and old nuns and Quakers marching for peace in front of the Pentagon.
Yea, if both sides could accept the fact that we all want to do good (and that we all do bad too, because of our inherent imperfections), maybe we could all communicate better. That would at least be a step in the right direction.