Tag: Conservatives

Can We Be Honest? “Conservative Thinking” Is An Oxymoron

~ A L Katz ~ Leave a comment

I’m a proud Progressive. I prefer the term “progressive” to “liberal” because the word liberal has gone through too many gyrations over time to be effective as an accurate descriptor. “I’m a liberal” could mean a whole lot of things that “I’m actually not”.

Progressives, as the name implies, want to progress. We want to see people — as a society — progress. We want each individual person to progress — to feel like their lives are constantly improving — as are the lives of their children and grandchildren going forward. There’s a caveat there — progressives build into their calculus the fact that change is a constant. In order to progress successfully, one has to accept as a fact that things will change. People will change. Circumstances will change.

Change is a Fact Of Life.

Progressives say “Okay — change is a thing — let’s deal with it like big boys & girls, accommodate where we must but convert to our advantage in every other way”.

Conservatives also do what their name implies. They want to conserve — what is (if only because they failed in this instance to conserve WHAT WAS and so have no choice but to accept it) but really — they want to conserve WHAT WAS. Or how they “remember” what was. How they idealized “what was” in reality.

There’s a reason conservatives tend to be more institutionally religious — more affiliated with their church than the spiritual side of their faith. They like the rules and regs; doing unto others — that’s a little too hippie-dippy for them. You know — “progressive”. They prefer the concrete of Commandments. Don’t Do This, Do That — Or Else.

Conservatives want to hold tight to a thing that makes them feel safe and secure — a world where men were men and women (and people of color, non-Christians, LGBQT people) knew their place. They see the antebellum south as a kind of heaven on earth. They think white people ARE America. And that’s the America they want to conserve.

Unfortunately, that America is entirely a figment of their imagination. Yes, white people have always held sway. But “white people” have never been the engine that drives the remarkable (but flawed) experiment in self-government that is the United States of America. One of our flaws is that white people have held too much sway. The engine — the thing we call “American Exceptionalism” is diversity. It’s the flow of people from every other country in the world into this one — e pluribus unum — from many, one — that’s the nature of American Exceptionalism.

It’s the opposite of what conservatives “think”. That’s just it — conservatives, by their nature, don’t have to “think”. When everything you do is motivated by your knee jerking lizard brain, you’re not thinking — ever. You’re reacting in real time to a fear-fueled twitch instinct. Everything you do is colored by it. Your whole goal in life is to get the toothpaste back into the tube.

As we all know — that’s never going to happen.

This is why conservatives stopped playing by the rules the rest of us play by. It was leading them nowhere — except to extinction — and they know it. That’s why Mitch McConnell — at the behest of conservative money (the Kochs, the Mercers, Sheldon Adelstein) — refused We The People Merrick Garland (chosen by the POTUS we elected) — then conspired with Russia to literally STEAL election 2016 in order to shove conservative judges into every open judicial seat — seats they’d been KEEPING open for this very purpose.

Make no mistake — what Mitch McConnell did and is still doing — is a deliberate soft coup d’etat. Mitch is a traitor (not a revelation). Mitch is the conservative errand boy, doing what he’s told to do. Reminder — it’s not just conservative money holding Mitch’s nuts in their hand — it’s Vladimir Putin, too. Mitch has taken gobs (as in MILLIONS) of Russian money into his PAC. In the abstract — perfectly legal. But in the midst of a counter-intelligence operation looking directly at Russian influence on American politicians and an American election? NOT so innocent or even legal perhaps). But I digress…

Mitch isn’t “thinking”. He’s reacting. He’s trying to drag us back to a time and place in the past that never was — not because he’s thinking how good it will be for us if only we’d listen to him — but because he’s stuck in the past like a mastodon stuck in tar — sinking slowly — grabbing desperately at everything around it.

They can’t save the mastodon. They can only get sucked into the tar with it. Welcome to “conservative thinking”.

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Can We Be Honest? “Conservative Thinking” Is An Oxymoron

~ A L Katz ~ Leave a comment

I’m a proud Progressive. I prefer the term “progressive” to “liberal” because the word liberal has gone through too many gyrations over time to be effective as an accurate descriptor. “I’m a liberal” could mean a whole lot of things that “I’m actually not”.

Progressives, as the name implies, want to progress. We want to see people — as a society — progress. We want each individual person to progress — to feel like their lives are constantly improving — as are the lives of their children and grandchildren going forward. There’s a caveat there — progressives build into their calculus the fact that change is a constant. In order to progress successfully, one has to accept as a fact that things will change. People will change. Circumstances will change.

Change is a Fact Of Life.

Progressives say “Okay — change is a thing — let’s deal with it like big boys & girls, accommodate where we must but convert to our advantage in every other way”.

Conservatives also do what their name implies. They want to conserve — what is (if only because they failed in this instance to conserve WHAT WAS and so have no choice but to accept it) but really — they want to conserve WHAT WAS. Or how they “remember” what was. How they idealized “what was” in reality.

There’s a reason conservatives tend to be more institutionally religious — more affiliated with their church than the spiritual side of their faith. They like the rules and regs; doing unto others — that’s a little too hippie-dippy for them. You know — “progressive”.

Conservatives want to hold tight to a thing that makes them feel safe and secure — a world where men were men and women (and people of color, non-Christians, LGBQT people) knew their place. They see the antebellum south as a kind of heaven on earth. They think white people ARE America. And that’s the America they want to conserve.

Unfortunately, that America is entirely a figment of their imagination. Yes, white people have always held sway. But “white people” have never been the engine that drives the remarkable (but flawed) experiment in self-government that is the United States of America. One of our flaws is that white people have held too much sway. The engine — the thing we call “American Exceptionalism” is diversity. It’s the flow of people from every other country in the world into this one — e pluribus unum — from many, one — that’s the nature of American Exceptionalism.

It’s the opposite of what conservatives “think”. That’s just it — conservatives, by their nature, don’t have to “think”. When everything you do is motivated by your knee jerking lizard brain, you’re not thinking — ever. You’re reacting in real time to a fear-fueled twitch instinct. Everything you do is colored by it. Your whole goal in life is to get the toothpaste back into the tube.

As we all know — that’s never going to happen.

This is why conservatives stopped playing by the rules the rest of us play by. It was leading them nowhere — except to extinction — and they know it. That’s why Mitch McConnell — at the behest of conservative money (the Kochs, the Mercers, Sheldon Adelstein) — refused We The People Merrick Garland (chosen by the POTUS we elected) — then conspired with Russia to literally STEAL election 2016 in order to shove conservative judges into every open judicial seat — seats they’d been KEEPING open for this very purpose.

Make no mistake — what Mitch McConnell did and is still doing — is a deliberate soft coup d’etat. Mitch is a traitor (not a revelation). Mitch is the conservative errand boy, doing what he’s told to do. Reminder — it’s not just conservative money holding Mitch’s nuts in their hand — it’s Vladimir Putin, too. Mitch has taken gobs (as in MILLIONS) of Russian money into his PAC. In the abstract — perfectly legal. But in the midst of a counter-intelligence operation looking directly at Russian influence on American politicians and an American election? NOT so innocent or even legal perhaps). But I digress…

Mitch isn’t “thinking”. He’s reacting. He’s trying to drag us back to a time and place in the past that never was — not because he’s thinking how good it will be for us if only we’d listen to him — but because he’s stuck in the past like a mastodon stuck in tar — sinking slowly — grabbing desperately at everything around it.

They can’t save the mastodon. They can only get sucked into the tar with it. Welcome to “conservative thinking”.

It’s No Secret What Conservatives Want — It’s In Their Name: They Want To Live In The Past

~ A L Katz ~ Leave a comment

I call myself a writer (regardless of what anyone else thinks) because I write. I call myself a Californian because I live in California (and an Angeleno cos I live in LA). I call myself a Progressive because I want to see humankind progress.

If I wanted humans to live in the past, I’d call myself a “conservative” since that’s what conservatives want. It’s right there in their name: “conserve-ative”. The obvious next question — what is it exactly they want to conserve? Judging by the specifics most American conservatives want to conserve? They want to conserve an idealized white Christian male dominated world that existed only in their own minds.

Mitch McConnell — one of the greatest villains to ever turtle crawl across the American stage — made it the whole point of his political career to drag America backwards via lifetime appointments of judges so conservative they think Hitler was a commie rat bastard. If he could have his way, Mitch would finish his days sipping mint juleps from the front porch of his marijuana plantation (Mitch couldn’t care less that he’s destroyed millions of lives enforcing cannabis mythology — there’s MILLIONS OF DOLLARS to be made now that it’s legal and the hypocrisy’s running like the bulls in Pamplona!) watching his slaves sweat and work and die. But Mitch won’t like what actually happens to him. He won’t like ending his days on a diet of prison food — as he will.

Conservatives despise diversity because diversity spells their doom. The more women and people of color become politically empowered, the more pure power slips away forever from conservative (white Christian male) grasp. The irony is it we gave up and let conservatives have the world they cherish, within a generation that world become so backward and upside down that THEY’D be the ones clamoring the loudest to go back to how it was — when the world was more progressive.

Think about it… Conservatives hold dearly to following laws based on the knowledge of people who thought the universe revolved around the earth and that illness was caused by evil spirits. It’s like following a map drawn by someone who’d never been to the place he was mapping — and never planned to. Conservatives will happily go wherever that map takes them — not out of audacity but out of blind loyalty

Every Day, I Feel More & More Hopeful; Here’s Why…

~ A L Katz ~ Leave a comment

I’ll own it straight up: between a mood stabilizer & copious amounts of THC (we’re talking “COPIOUS”), I walk around most days in a state of perpetual bliss. But I do not, for two seconds, ever forget that I live in a shithole of a world. I live in the most fucked up times imaginable.

I live during World War Three.

Yeah — WWIII — I have a sneaking suspicion that, once the smoke has cleared, we’ll realize this whole experience has been a cyber war (or an disinformation war — same difference) being waged on us principally by Russia (but with “assists” from Saudi Arabia, the UAE and probably Israel, too).

What we thought was “just how life is” will turn out to be Historic. Historical. History On The Hoof. Lucky us.

But, just as things swing to the negative, they can’t stay there. Everything cycles. Nothing remains stagnant. Not for long in the great scheme of things. The swing back in the other direction is already a happening deal. The intensity of the swing back in our direction will be in direction relation to the swing in that direction.

Caveat — we don’t know yet how massive the swing was in “THAT” direction. We think it was bad. We have no idea how bad. We were swinging wildly toward outright authoritarianism. The Republican party has completely surrendered whatever ideals it had to just plain holding on to power for power’s sake.

Well — no power, no money — I imagine they saw it as a package deal. They weren’t wrong.

But the same reason the Republicans & conservatives felt compelled to cheat & even commit treason to hold onto power is the reason I feel hopeful: Demographics.

Republicans & conservatives fear America’s shifting demographics. While they tell themselves that THEY are American Exceptionalism, they’re dead wrong. America IS exceptional because of its diversity. Such diversity from so many cultures in one place — that never happened before on a grand scale (it did before in places like, say Baghdad from 800 – 1100 when, being an open city, ideas from all over flourished). Rome benefited from getting influences from its far-flung colonies. Growing diversity means extinction to a party of White Christian Men.

If not “extinction” then Zero Political Power. Ah! There’s the rub!

It comes down to political power. Who has it — and who’s acquiring it? The Culture of Old Christian White Men had it — and Everyone Else In America is in the process of acquiring it. That’s what’s happening all around us. Being as women and people of color make up a lot of that “Everyone Else” who’s been out of power, that spells the worst news imaginable for Old Christian White Men.

Trumpism is Republicanism is Conservatism. I’ve said here before and will say again. I KNOW what Progressives want — it’s right in our name: we want PROGRESS. We want people to “progress”. We want the most people to do the best they possibly can — and believe that will bring the most prosperity and happiness to the widest possible part of our population. It won’t be cheap. But investing in people almost always returns handsomely on that investment. It’s greed & conservatism that wants to gaze at the cash in its pocket — and screw the people.

Conservatism — as it’s name says — wants to “conserve”. Not what will be — but WHAT WAS. In the past. When White Christian Men were the alpha dogs and everyone else was their bitch. Conservatives want to conserve THAT. If I’m wrong, please correct me. What ARE conservatives trying to “conserve” if not the past?

The last election wasn’t “The Blue Wave”. It was the Blue Wave’s leading edge. Having tasted political power, more and more women and POC will step forward, run for office or just vote. The more Americans vote, the more progressive we are. Because we’re so diverse.

Even if the republicans “could” stifle the Mueller Report (they can’t), the numbers are completely against them. Women are already outraged at conservatism’s treatment of them. Just wait till the Jeffrey Epstein story really catches fire — and the Big Names he’s been protecting start getting aired.

Wanna see outrage & moral indignation?

I am hopeful BECAUSE so many women are so outraged. I am hopeful BECAUSE of their oral indignation.

I am hopeful because FINALLY America’s women — and our people of color — OUR DIVERSITY — are coming center stage and TAKING the political power they should have been given long, long ago.

Does Anything Epitomize Conservative Thinking Better Than ‘A WALL’?

~ A L Katz ~ Leave a comment
The prototypes for U.S. President Donald Trump’s border wall are seen behind the border fence between Mexico and the United States, in Tijuana, Mexico January 7, 2019. REUTERS/Jorge Duenes – RC1B258D6BC0

We stand on a precipice — one of many precipices we seem to end up standing on here in The Age Of Trump — being held hostage by Donald Trump’s campaign slogan ‘Build The Wall’. It’s absurd on it’s face. If you tried to WRITE this — as a script or a novel — you’d bomb because no one would buy it as a premise. It’s too absurd, ya see…

“Build A Wall” began its life (as most things Trumpian do) as an exercise in cynical marketing. During the 2016 campaign, Roger Stone & Sam Nunberg suggested a way to easily remind Trump to rant about ”illegal immigration”. They proposed a cheer line: “Build The Wall”. The icing: “Mexico Will Pay For It”.

‘Build A Wall’ & ‘Mexico Will Pay For It’ were never ever ever based in reality. They never ever EVER were connected to any sort of actual policy beyond pure unadulterated racism. They were mneumonics — memory devices designed for a narrow-minded, forgetful, but deeply racist OLD MAN — Donald J Trump. The wall is a metaphor for everything Trump.

It’s a metaphor for everything CONSERVATIVE, too. To call building a wall — and thinking it’s actually ‘defense’ — is Medieval. It’s more ancient than that actually but — for the sake of kindness, we’ll call it Medieval. As we learned today — Trump’s wall can be chewed through by a common saw that anyone can by at Lowe’s (shop them instead of Home Despot — the guy who owns Home Despot is a Trumpian).

https://www.alternet.org/2019/01/turns-out-trumps-steel-barrier-can-be-cut-through-with-a-saw/
Turns out the word ‘impenetrable’ & ‘wall’ don’t go together…

Donald Trump wants us to ‘buy’ that his wall is ‘impenetrable’ just because he says it is. That’s how authoritarians ‘think’. A thing is so just because I will it. The way sycophants work is they say ‘Yes, it is!’ regardless of the truth. That’s CONSERVATISM right there. Conservatism is the willingness to deny every bit of WHAT IS because you want it to be HOW I WANT IT — regardless of how inaccessible the one place is from the other.

This is Trump’s Wall – post ‘sawzall’…

Conservatives have built a metaphorical wall in their minds around a notion of ‘How It Was’. That’s what they want to CONSERVE — just as their name says. They don’t WANT to go into the future (they certainly don’t want to Progress there…), no, they want to stay in the past — in a place the they’ve CONSERVED.

The overwhelming majority of Americans don’t want to conserve what was since it was weighted so heavily against them. That would be women & People of Color & the LGBTQ Community & Immigrants to the country & Asylum seekers & Frankly, Anyone Who Isn’t White-Christian-Male. WE want what this country can BE far, far more than what it WAS.

To that end, we lend our talents, our passion, our tax dollars, our hopes. Our citizenship comes with great privileges but also awesome responsibilities. A lot of us see it as our duty — as citizens — to help steer this Nation toward the place where as many Americans as possible enjoy the fruits of our common ‘struggle’. That’s not something to conserve — it doesn’t exist yet. But it’s at the very CORE of the American Promise: Come, Give Us Your Best, Work Hard — And We Will Share Our Bounty With You As You Share Yours With Us.

That’s what Conservatives want to KEEP OUT. That’s the thing they want to WALL against. The Truth is, walls don’t keep out Human Progress. Oh, they can delay it a bit — but no wall has ever truly kept human beings captive.

Only a fool conservative would think so.

Wouldn’t Ya Just LOVE To Give Conservatives The World They REALLY Want?

~ A L Katz ~ Leave a comment

CryptKeeper-1200x675

Remember this guy?  The Crypt Keeper?  Friend of mine actually.  For real.  He used to say “Be careful what you wish for, kiddies, you may just get it!”  Then the Crypt Keeper would laugh — kinda like this —

And then he’d get on with the episode.

Now, of course, when the Crypt Keeper warned that you’d ‘get’ it, he didn’t mean that you’d ‘receive the thing you wanted’.  He meant, ironically, the opposite.  You’d ‘GET IT’ and wish like hell you hadn’t.

That’s how republicans would feel — in a very short amount of time — about The World they have been trying to foist upon the rest of us:  “Wait — we didn’t realize THIS would happen if we had our way — send it back to the kitchen!  Is it too late to order something else off the menu?”

American conservatives — if we take them at their word — want to CONSERVE a world where:

  • The Rich Get Richer
  • Everyone else gets poorer
  • A dwindling Social Safety Net (to pay for the rich guys)
  • White Christian Male Cultural Hegemony rules
  • Abortion is illegal & so is Birth Control
  • All non-European immigration is illegal
  • The Free Press is not Free
  • Guns are even MORE ubiquitous than they are already
  • Anyone who isn’t Straight, white, Christian & male is automatically suspicious.
  • Might makes Right
  • Ignorance is bliss

A lot of conservatives want to bring religion (theirs) back to a Central position it really never had in American Life — except in Currier & Ives prints.

A lot of conservatives want to restrict education to ‘special white people’ only.  Everyone else is going to work the gig economy while their faltering, compromised standard of living gets harder and harder to maintain.

A lot of conservatives think guns should be everywhere.  Literally EVERYWHERE (except republican party events).

American Conservatives now think conspiring with a hostile foreign power is no different than cleaning hand and finger prints off a gun you just used to murder someone.   No prints, no crime.

Uh huh.  Let’s see if Mr Mueller goes along with that…

If one could really pull off ‘Thought Experiments’, I would LOVE to give Conservatives the world they crave.

First, of course (because it’s a thought experiment), we’d put all the Conservatives in one part of the country (one that’s already hard core red) and — irony — PUT A WALL AROUND IT.

Then we, the progressive world, would go do our thing for, say, A GENERATION while our conservative chums did the same thing inside their world.  Then, at a certain pre-determined time and place, we’d all get together and COMPARE NOTES.  Question:  How would Conservative World have done in contrast to Progressive World?

If we realistically laid out Each World’s approach to education, to diversity, to health care, to birth control & abortion, to financing the commonweal itself, we would find very distinct countries:  One — Conservative Land — would be lots of fun to live in if you were straight and white.  More of a daily grind if you weren’t but that’s by design.

For anyone else, Conservative Land would be the ‘spark’ in their lives going out.  It’d be the voice of Reason sputtering.

For us, it’s just another day in TrumpLand…

Conservative Land would NOT be a place that innovated anything because innovative people would have been dissuaded from going there.  Conservatives figuring that THEIR gene pool would make up the difference are going to be mighty shocked when they discover that White People — fine as they are — aren’t an more innovative than anyone else.  In a world though where few new ideas gain purchase (because thinking the SAME is encouraged), innovation fails to ignite.

Thinking the same promotes acting the same promotes being the same.

And yet — as it teetered toward ruin — because bankrupt, because horrible standard of living, because dwindling tax base — Conservative World would still THINK it was succeeding.  What everyone else called failure, they’d call ‘doing things their way’.  But, no — it’s failure.  Total failure by EVERY other name.

Conservative World would probably attend the meet-up as spiffed up as it could be — but unable to hide how hard things have been.  Holding out their hand to Progressive World — after the hand-shaking was done — probably gave the WHOLE GAME away:  They needed help.

And they knew Progressive world 1) could help and 2) probably would help.

Progressive World would be a very different place — where anything can happen because so many people are creating so many things and thinking so many exciting new thoughts.  Diversity challenges everyone to compete against everyone else on the levelest possible playing field.

Diversity of opinion and process, diversity of point of view, diversity of problem-solving.  The human genome works by favoring strong attributes over weak ones — strong attributes being the ones where you’ll ‘survive better’ for having them.  The irony (cause you can never have too much irony) is that White Supremacists are under the mistaken impression that they can ‘fine tune’ and ‘purify’ their white genes by excluding everything else from their gene pool.

One more dumb white person idea gets revealed for the dumb white person idea that it is.  White Supremacists aren’t stupid.  The aren’t incompetent.  But they do cling on to bad information like it was their last dollar — which is stupid.

While Progressives could never, would never have a place in Conservative World, the opposite is almost never true.  It’s not true now.

One of the most important aspects about Progressive World — what really sets it apart from Conservative World — is that it evolves.  All the time.  It allows people to evolve.  To grow up and mature.  To live and LEARN.  And then to come back to the fold and contribute — hopefully having LEARNED from their mistakes.

There wouldn’t be a single attribute about Conservative World that wasn’t a thousand times better in Progressive World — Food, Entertainment, Art, Technology, Governance.

The only question remaining after this Thought Experiment — if it could be made real?  What to do about the fence we’ve built around Conservative World.  We’re not tearing it down — that’s for sure.  Hell — the question I’m thinking of is — do we build it even higher?  Or do we must mine the damn thing and enjoy the fireworks?

What EXACTLY Do Conservatives Want To ‘Conserve’?

~ A L Katz ~ Leave a comment

I’ve asked this before but haven’t gotten an answer yet… I know what Progressives want to PROGRESS toward: as much equality as possible for as many people as soon as possible.  Progressives want to progress in any we they can toward a level playing field where every American has the best possible chance to contribute as much as they possibly can to America while benefiting as much as they can.

Progressives want America to be as diverse as possible because they know that DIVERSITY is what makes America Exceptional.

Progressives want America to PROGRESS — just like it says in our name.  We want America to PROGRESS into THE FUTURE.

Okay, conservatives, we showed you ours, now show us yours:  What do Conservatives want to CONSERVE?  And how will conserving THAT get us anywhere NEAR our FUTURE?  To judge by republican policies and Trumpian attitudes, conservatives want to conserve the worst of America:  Its racism, its misogyny.  Its bigotry and willful ignorance.

Republicans want to conserve White Christian Male Culture.

Now, that’s easy for me to say — a progressive shithead but, for shits n giggles, I recommend finding a conservative friend — if you still have any — and ask them, point blank:  “Dude — what is it exactly you’re trying to conserve anyway?”  After they try to avoid answering, listen carefully.  They won’t say anything logical or even intelligible.  That’s the point.

Their simple answer is “How it WAS.”  Meaning, ‘How it was when WHITE PEOPLE ruled the world’.

The real joke of it is, White People really do believe the World is ‘far better’ when their Wonder Bread tastes and judgments rule everything and diversity is held at bay.  White People think they have a choice regarding the Future — and who ‘peoples’ it.

Shouldn’t someone tell them what happens to people in the MINORITY when the MAJORITY decides to treat them unfairly?

Oh well — Live and learn…