Red Flag Publishing

Editor’s note: I’m reblogging this because I thought it deserved much better play than as a comment on Buzzfeed.com. Bear, if you read this, let me know who you are, because this is freaking great!

From Bear Beorning

Located at Buzzfeed.com

One of the most pathetic and obnoxious things about the modern conservative movement is the way they try to frame every one of their pet issues as a battle in which they they are the clearly disadvantaged outsiders. They’ve all either drunk the proverbial Kool-Aid or refused to leave the compound or uncritically swallowed the talking points (depending on whether you subscribe to the notion that they are malicious cynical greedy pricks, misguided souls who have miraculously avoided an experience that might have taught them a different point of view, or just incomprehensibly stupid) and will say with a straight face (and vehemently) that the media is against them, the government is against them, the entertainment industry is against them, the entire academic establishment is against them…practically everything and everyone is against them. And there they are, small in number and vulnerable, but defiant despite the terrible odds. 

They are fighting the good fight, the poor things, with supply lines from the nearest suburban mega-church stretched dangerously thin. Their only allies in this David-versus-Goliath battle are a few oil company and defense contractor executives, some hard-line Israelis, and a parallel-universe Jesus Christ who’s whiter than snow washed in OxiClean, has privately admitted to his real followers that the Golden Rule was “just a test to weed out the dorks and pussies,” and who’s well-known for dictating a 28th book of the New Testament containing a very long, angry sermon devoted in its entirety to making it crystal clear, once and for all, that gays and lesbians really are filthy abominations before the Lord. You can really see their plight when you consider this rag-tag bunch going up against so many big, mean libullies. 

Hell, even the overwhelming majority of BuzzFeed visitors are hive-minded zombies out to victimize and persecute innocent conservatives like CooD3peace, who are disgusted (but not surprised) at the hostile reaction of the liberal masses to sensible, forthright arguments like those of the folks pictured above—folks who are already oppressed to the point of having to scrawl their pleas for understanding and consideration on simple signs and placards, in the desperate hope that somehow, some way, the liberal media might finally see fit to broadcast their humble, meager requests to their fellow citizens, and their voices might finally be heard after 8 endless months of commies, faggots, fascists, socialists, spooks, towelheads, illegal wetbacks, and other libtards obscuring their shouted demands. Between that long ordeal, nights worrying about Biden becoming President when it’s finally revealed that Obama is a damned African, and the need to make daily trips to the gun store to check for any ammo that might come in before the bans and confiscations begin, it’s easy to see how the lives of these folks have been utterly torn apart by the lib agenda. 

Seriously though: Sometimes I wonder what it would take to disabuse them of these staggeringly ridiculous notions—to make them realize, for instance, that if the media actually was liberal, their first string (supposedly rational, intellectual individuals like newt Gingrich, Mike Huckabee, Mitt Romney, John McCain, etc.) would never be taken seriously enough to get a mention on a real news program—to say nothing of whole news programs and even entire news organizations devoted to serious discussions of their ideas, and/or to disturbingly unhinged nutjobs like the teabaggers, Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, and pretty much the entire executive branch during Cheney’s 8-year Puppet Oligarchy of the Sociopathic Rich, the Machiavellian, and the Mentally Subnormal. 

I wonder what it would take to get them to realize that academicians as a whole aren’t so much liberal as they are anti-neoconservative—and that it couldn’t be any other way, not only because modern conservatives have exhibited great hostility toward systematic methods of academic inquiry and toward widely tested and agreed-upon factual information gained therefrom, but also because they’ve striven mightily to corrupt and/or discredit the standard model of a thorough education rooted in classical Western thought, augmented by the best of a diverse array of other traditions, and subjected to constant and extensive critical examination and careful revision. 

I wonder what it would take to get them to stop fearing the fact that a such thorough, evaluative, diverse, and critical education will inevitably lead most thoughtful, rational people to the conclusion that modern conservative thought is driven by an untenable bundle of contradictory and depraved impulses borne of of the unbridled id and often justified and abetted by the laziness, cowardice, and cynicism of religious fundamentalism. I wonder whether they could be rational enough to open their minds to such an education, if they could stop being so fearful of the re-evaluation of values it might bring. 

I wonder what it would take to get them to realize that if their repeat-it-’til-you-believe-it narrative of victimhood ever came true, and they really did suddenly find themselves in a society guided by liberal/progressive institutions and cultural values, that they still wouldn’t legitimately be able to claim disadvantage even then—because a society guided by liberal/progressive institutions and cultural values operates on the principle that when every person is guaranteed and assigned equal freedom, responsibility, justice, opportunity, and dignity, and reasonably protected from both inadvertent and purposeful harm by others, only then will it become possible to secure true liberty, peace, and prosperity.