Abramoff Shrugged

After nearly a decade of trying unsuccessfuly to get past the first chapter of Atlas Shrugged, I am finally barelling through it and, to my great surprise, I am enjoying it immensely. Obviously, I have huge problems with Ms. Rand's worldview, but as a piece of fiction, it is highly readable. I intend to give it a full treatment here upon completion, but one of my fundamental complaints about the novel's ideology instersects serendipitously with my thoughts on Casino Jack and the United States of Money, a documentary about Jack Abramoff that I happened to watch last week - and I feel like talking about that now.

Let's begin with Atlas Shrugged. To put it simply, I find Rand's protagonists to be incredibly admirable. I did not expect this. I expected to be appalled by the merciless greed of self-interested, capitalist swine. Instead, I found brilliant and deeply principled achievers, creating, building, making, and doing great things. Hank and Dagny are the sort of people that I would have nothing to say against. In fact, I would have profound admiration for anyone like them.

I think that Ayn Rand would have been very surprised to hear that assessment from someone like me because nearly everyone else in the story is a grotesque, horror-show caricature of the most reprehensible, freeloading, pinko commie fag that Ayn Rand could dream up in her worst nightmare. There are literally dozens of secondary characters swirling around the saintly Rearden and Taggart, illustrating with every word, thought, movement, and breath the repugnant ideas, motives, and weaknesses of those whom she perceives as enemies of Objectivism. She thus defines her philosophy not so much by its virtues, but by her unmitigated hostility toward everything else. I'll delve more into that at a later date, but for the moment, let's move on...

Casino Jack and the United States of Money - not to be confused with the Kevin Spacey dramatization - details the rise of Jack Abramoff - along with Karl Rove, Ralph Reed, Tom Delay, Dana Rohrabacher, Grover Norquist, et al - through the 1980's college Republican movement. Their political personalities were formed by the Cold War's paranoid anti-communism, particularly through their activism with Nicaraguan rebels, to the extent that they ended up thinking and speaking about domestic political opponents in the same terms as Regan spoke about the Soviets. According to the film, George C. Scott's famous speech from Patton was a favorite at College Republican headquarters, where they would replace "Nazis" with "Democrats," like so: "Democrats are the enemy. Wade into them. Spill their blood. Shoot them in the belly." Ralph Reed spoke of his political tactics thus: "I do guerrilla warfare. I paint my face and travel at night. You don't know it's over until you're in a body bag." Grover Norquist wants government reduced "to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub." This sort of language obviously continues through the present day, as recent events in Arizona remind us.

So thinking about these two significant pieces of the conservative movement, it strikes me that while liberals may think of conservatives as ignorant, conservatives think of liberals as evil. Not misguided, not cut from a different cloth - but motivated by powerful, metaphysical forces of darkness that seek to sew destruction and misery among God's children. They would draw a straight line through history from the devil's temptation of Jesus Christ, to Atilla the Hun, to Vlad the Impaler, to Hitler, to Stalin, to Pol Pot, to bin Laden, to Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama. (I'm pretty sure Glenn Beck has drawn that exact diagram on his blackboard.)

I, for one, don't happen to believe in evil - at least not in the ecclesiastical sense. No...not even in the case of Hitler. I have chosen not to ignore all of the information science has bestowed upon us regarding the workings of the human brain. We now understand mental illness in a vastly different light than did, for example, the people of Salem in the 17th century. Schizophrenia (or Tourettes Syndrome) was surely the leading cause of demonic possession in the past. We now know that most sex offenders were sexually violated as children, that most violent criminals were abused as children, and so on down the line. We no longer need to ascribe bad events to some occult force. In fact, the longer we insist upon doing so, the less we take responsibility for our ability to intervene, and the more often we will fail to prevent future tragedies.

Now...I am quite sure that I have used language on this very site that would appear to contradict everything I've just said. If I've called Sarah Palin an evil fucking cunt once, I've called her an evil fucking cunt a hundred times. It goes without saying that I don't actually believe her to be the literal spawn of satan any more than I believe her to be a large, walking vagina. I use the term "evil" in two different ways, both secular. The first is for hyperbolic effect. It just sounds (and feels better) to say that Sarah Palin is an evil fucking cunt than to say that Sarah Palin is sadly misguided by her own oversized ego and demonstrable lack of intelligence. The second is to describe what I believe to be bad motives on the part of some entity. If I say that Fox "News" is downright fucking evil, I simply mean to say that they are motivated by greed, xenophobia, racism, chauvinism, and other forms of ignorant ass-backwardness.

So while it may appear that both sides of the divide despise each other with equal vehemence, the nature of the underlying animosities of each are very different. Ayn Rand apparently could not conceive of a person who might disagree with parts of her premise without being a repugnantly pathetic cancer on the ass of humanity, clawing and scratching the great capitalist dream to its death by a thousand cuts. Modern conservatives are convinced that liberals are attempting to drag the United States into some sort of socialistic new world order that will collaborate with the illegitimate (by virtue of his Kenyan upbringing and Mau Mau sympathies) President to establish a worldwide Islamic caliphate.

This explains why conservatives cannot coherently or rationally contextualize the presence of Muslims in the United States or the tendency of liberals to accept them. Radicalized or not, Muslims are, quite literally, enemies of God in the eyes of Christian Conservatives. 9/11 was not a confluence of complicated historical and geo-political forces with the brilliant exploitation of weaknesses in American security. 9/11 was pure evil, perpetrated by enemies of the Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. (Their worldview also miraculously shields them from the ravages of...well, of their worldview. The shooting rampage in Arizona had nothing to do with lax gun laws and the proliferation of violent, inflammatory language and imagery in the political realm. It was simply an act of evil.)

These are not conditions under which serious discussion can take place. Earthly problems - admittedly, the only kind I know of - can only be dealt with on earthly terms. Liberals may make things difficult by believing that conservatives are greedy, xenophobic, racist, chauvinistic, and ignorant, but those are earthly charges based on quantifiable data. There is, believe it or not, room for debate with someone in possession of some combination of those characteristics - unless, of course, they come to the table believing that our side is colluding with Beelzebub to lure as many souls as possible into the fiery pits of hell on judgement day.

I was about to scour the internet for evidence of just that attitude, but why waste my time? Just watch Fox "News," follow Sarah Palin on Twitter, watch Glenn Beck, listen to Rush Limbaugh, read World Net Daily. Instead, I'll continuously update this post with examples as they occur in the coming days and weeks. Please feel free to suggest your own on the Chronically Pissed Facebook page and I'll add them to the list.

Comments

[Guest]

Conservatives don't think liberals are evil. Quit forming opinions after getting halfway through one book and watching a documentary.

The vehemence is not equal on both sides. As conservatives, we are sick of your shit. But we don't hate you. Liberals DO hate though. Just look at how savagely liberals react to Sarah Palin, or Fox, or Glenn Beck, etc. You practically foam at the mouth.

If anything, we think of you liberals as adolescents. You think you know it all and rage against what you perceive to be "the man." To us you are just teenage children who act like you deserve the world and that we have somehow deprived you.

Your assessment is wrong; we're not ignorant and you're not evil. Here is the disconnect: We completely understand you, because we were adolescents once. You don't completely understand us, because you haven't grown up yet.

There's a reason why liberals tend to reside in academia, Hollywood, media, and the public sector and why conservatives tend to reside in business and in the military. It's because conservatives have experienced the real fucking world that liberals haven't learned about yet. Emphasis on yet...

"If a man isn't a liberal at 20, he has no heart. If he isn't a conservative by 40, he has no brains."

[Brutus]

You sorta veered away from your discussion of Rand and Abramoff, which is what interested me. Your openness to Rand's books is more than I can muster. As to your guest comment, reversing all the arguments isn't much of an argument. But I will grant one thing: conservatives do understand better than liberals how to exploit human fears to promote an agenda. We still disagree about the agenda.

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