Wherever there is a jackboot stomping on a human face there will be a well-heeled Western liberal to explain that the face does, after all, enjoy free health care and 100 percent literacy.” (John Derbyshire)
Swede brought the above quote to me in a comment in another post. I’m a little concerned about that man, as his intellect is locked away in a steel trap, sealed off by hatred and inaccessible to him. He reads some, has exposure to a wide array of YouTube videos. That speaks of long obsessive hours online. The way the Internet is constructed now, post-Google, allows each of us to follow our own passion without exposure to the uncomfortable, even sane, reasoning of others. Google suits our fancies.
I did a quick Wiki-hit on Derbyshire, hardly fair to the man. There’s obviously been some furious back-and-forth editing going on there, and as Bryan Schweitzer reminds us, we should never judge a man when he is at his worst. Derbyshire did work for National Review, after all.
NR was my first exposure to the intellectual culture of the right wing. I subscribed for over twenty years, and my mother long after that so that I always had access. (I’m not a puzzle person, but on the back page of each issue (in the 70,s and 80’s) was what I recall as “Anacrostic,” one of the most satisfying puzzles I have ever done.) William F. Buckley, despite his regal background, his oil wealth and recruitment by the CIA out of Yale, was one of the most delightful brainiacs ever to cross our scene, witty and kind and able to bury an adversary with just a few words*.
But I was surprised to pick up NR during the Bush years and discover how degraded it had become, merely partisan where it had once been above all of that. Or maybe I just didn’t notice.
Anyway, “conservatism,” as it once existed, has much to offer. Buckley saw what we all see, the problems of poverty and the human spirit, and did not shy away. He knew, for instance, that people need to eat and have access to education and health care. For sustenance he suggested that we all be given the basic staples – flour, coffee, basic meats – rather than food stamps (mostly used to buy unhealthy high-carb foods like frozen pizza). The idea is that we have nutrition and not be subsidized in our junk food habits while working our way up the economic ladder. He did want people to succeed. (In Playboy in 1972 or so, the man interviewing him said in the intro that Buckley was “genuinely kind” to waiters at a restaurant, apparently surprised.)
We don’t have conservatism anymore, though people running around like to call themselves that. I once suggested to a business acquaintance who loved to goad me with right-wing emails that every time people like him call themselves “conservative” that Barry Goldwater spins in his grave … his family got wise to it, and hooked his corpse up to a generator to save money on electricity. His most recent email, I told him, had just lit up their back yard flood lights.**
Swede is powering a small town down in Arizona now. This tripe, this hatred spewed out against perceived threats like illegal (and legal) immigrants is a result of fear. The cerebral cortex is shut down, and what appears to be the reasoning man has been taken over by the primitive brain. This fear, this hatred, will consume him. I would not be surprised someday to read about barricades and a police standoff up there in Montana, and then to learn his real name.
Anyway, I invite the reasoning and thoughtful, kind and considerate Swede here for a visit. He is in their somewhere. After all, he has children and perhaps friends, so that a social being exists under the outer wrapping. I challenge him to comment below and say a kind thing about a perceived enemy, anyone from Allende to Castro to Mao to the Zapitistas. It has a cleansing effect. I hope he tries it.
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*Buckley got one of those seething letters that people like me write, complaining about his magazine and closing with the words “Cancel my subscription!” Buckley printed it and answered “Cancel your own goddamned subscription!”
**Buckley would have trimmed this insult down to ten words somehow, so that it was not so labored.
Piece of Mindful 
The intersection of microtargeting, and total surveilance has created the endless war of us against them. Anything not us, is them. The marketing industry profiles and classifies us all. Talk about profiling! Data is customized and targeted with ultimate precision. Twitter, Google, Facebook, Apple et al. profile everybody, and NSA collects everything on everybody. You are nothing more than a digitized consumer target. They know you will buy it before you do. Whatever it is they’re selling, you’re buying, and the marketing research is a tax-deductible business expense against gross income. So, we all pay private and public Big Brother, who is watching every move, microtargeting everybody. I wonder how “citizen” is classified. Maybe it’s become too small a cohort to record.
When real conservatives stand up and start spending their hard-earned savings they may regain some of their former political and social esteem. Guess that would make them something “other.” In the meantime, the word conservative will mean anything that turns a buck.
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I always wondered why a persons words can’t stand on their own.
For instance it seems that it’s more important to research the man, who he works or writes, instead of the essence of his/her thoughts.
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Just wanted to know more about him. The words themselves were bizarre, part of rightwingville topsy-turvy land, and stood on their own. The fact that you thought there was some kind of wisdom there also speaks loudly about you.
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Swede,
Bush? Buckley? Derbyshire? Mark? Anyone in particular? And why would you not apply that same standard to your own words, which are not always easily detectible among a plethora of links?
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I once sent an email to a talk show host. The tsh put me on a list of people who recieved his newsletter. Every once and a while, this newsletter would piss me off, and I would send a reply. The tsh never answered my objections, but told me to unsubscribe if I did not like the newsletter. I wrote back and said that I did not subscribe in the first place, and I don’t want to go to the trouble of unsubscribing now. After the third or fourth exchange like this, the tsh took me off his mailing list.
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You’re messing with the culture you know. “TSH” is a garbage dump, a place where people go to have their own views validated. They get very angry when views of the other side are even discussed, much less discussed in a civil manner. I just had an exchange with Michael Brown, a local TSH, on Facebook. He had asked for a caption to the photo of Hugo Chavez offering the book Open Veins of Latin America to Obama. I suggested what I thought should be the winning entry, which would contain the name of the book and a word about it’s content, which would broaden Obama’s horizons.
Zounds! Brown had no clue of the book or its content, but based on the fact that he had visited Latin America, lectured me on socialism and Marxism. I suggested to him that the author, Eduardo Galeano, who spent his life there and survived Pinochet and Condor, might know a thing or two as well, even if he did not have the benefit of Brown’s visit.
End of discussion. We don’t live in ignorance. We cherish it. We enable it. We avoid dealing with people we disagree with. The “TSH” is a symbol of our intellectual decadence.
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Do you guys even read what you type?
Steve’s first comment hits on conservatives. Mark demeans me several times in the original post then slams me again in the comment. C54n rags on some talk show host.
Conversations based on insults speak volumes.
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I said that your intellect is sealed off by your emotions. I stand by that. Deal with it.
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I did not say that you don’t have an intellect, as we all are equipped that way. We all got one, and they are pretty much alike no matter what the girls tell us. I said yours is not functioning because your thought processes are blocked. Emotions interfere. That is primitive brain overriding the cerebral cortex. 9/11 did that, the Red Scare did that – it’s been unending agitprop since Truman took office. Ellul said that one this happens, a person is lost, cannot recover. He’s just a guy, but he studied this stuff. I hope he is wrong. In the meantime, I would like to discuss things with your brain, and not your emotions.
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1- I was trying to be polite. I usually say radio whiner when talking about that species.
2- There is a lovely quote, which applies to a lot of people who enjoy their opinions. It is discussed more in this post… http://chamblee54.wordpress.com/2012/03/23/the-burdens-white-man/ The post was written this time last year, when Joseph Kony and George Zimmerman were in the news. “The White Savior Industrial Complex is not about justice. It is about having a big emotional experience that validates privilege.”
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