www.thornwalker.com/ditch/lights136.htm

November 11, 2004

Strakon Lights Up
 
Feelin' blue among the Reds
 

 
I wonder how many votes P. Diddy cost that Massachusetts foreigner, on net. Remember the joke about how Wernher von Braun aimed at the stars but kept hitting London? Mr. Diddy aimed his famous slogan ("Vote or die!") at his fellow blacks, but I'm pretty sure it kept hitting Red Americans — perhaps better described here as white Americans — who actually heard it as, "Vote for Kerry, or me an' my posse gone pop a cap in yo' a--, honky mo' fo'!"

Of course it wasn't only rapper thugs who helped re-elect (or, if you prefer, elect) Little George. Also gyrating and shrieking helpfully were entire circusfuls of scary homosexuals, Hollywood freaks, and abortion subsidizers. The homo-marriage movement, in particular, arose with exquisite timing to sabotage the chances of any squishy liberal the Democrats might have nominated this year.

Using all those oddballs as cover, the Bush regime succeeded in winning a de facto endorsement for chapter two of its epic adventure in Israel's Zone of War.

Anti-anti-culture libertarians are probably more comfortable, at least in some guarded way, with Red Americans than they are with Blue Americans. I am. And to our paleocon cousins, the Reds are the great white hope. They're the Middle-American Radicals (MARs) from the red planet of the heartland who, it is hoped, will one day rise up and redeem the country from the frizzy-haired goofs and soulless technocrats of Brave New Blue America. But someone needs to point out that one of the Reds' best-established, most deeply seated attachments is to that great characteristic project of the American nation-state, imperialistic war.

 
I am willing to stipulate that on November 2  your typical Red American voted for this particular war only half-heartedly. A Red who was restless with the Mesopotamian adventure had no place to go, in terms of ruling-party alternatives. Bush promised to resist the domestic freak show and continue the war, while Kerry promised to promote the domestic freak show — and continue the war. The Admiral of Massachusetts was not only Freak Promoter in Chief for 2004 but also a war liberal in good standing, and his pledge to deepen the quagmire for at least four more years was believable enough, in light of his Zionism and Zionist connections.

But I'm not inclined to let the Red American off the hook. First, a half-hearted voter can't cast half a vote. He must cast a full vote, and it operates as a full endorsement of the candidate winning that vote and as a full endorsement of that candidate's policies. The moral thing for the Red American would have been to refrain from voting altogether. If the voters' returning Bush to power was not an endorsement of the man's war policies, then the whole theory of democracy collapses. That would be fine with me, but I suspect that most of the "half-hearted" theorists are unprepared to follow their own logic to its conclusion.

Second, even if their war partisanship could be seen as half-hearted in the electoral sense, an incontrovertible sign of the Reds' underlying support for Bush's War is the fact that they're sending their sons and daughters and husbands and wives over there to fight it. They may not sound too bellicose or excited about it, but they do sound proud about it.

It's my understanding that many of the Blues, especially the urbanites among them, don't know a single family that has invested its blood in Bush's War. The case is otherwise among the Reds. I'm a somewhat socially alienated type, and I do my best to keep a low profile here in my little Hoosier town, but still I am acquainted with several local families whose children have done a tour in one of the desert hells. At least one of those youngsters was badly wounded as a result. I will formulate the characteristic sentiment of the war families as "scared but proud." I see no evidence that they are war resisters or even skeptics. Some of them may be secret skeptics, I suppose, but publicly they have to "support our troops," because some of the troops really are theirs. And in "supporting our troops" the war families objectively and materially support Bush's War. Secret skepticism may be interesting to speculate about, but it is of no account.

In the '60s, the more sandal-friendly of the antiwar crowd liked to warble the question, What if they gave a war and nobody came? You'll never have to worry about that eventuality as long as there are a lot of Red Americans around. Count on them to show up in droves. And that's even if they can't find on a map the latest country that needs invading — which is a good thing for our rulers, because the places the empire has chosen to muck about in since 1945 have been mighty obscure.

I almost described the Reds as America's characteristic war maniacs, but that goes too far. It's probably not even fair to describe them as fans of war in the same sense as they're fans of NASCAR, the NFL, and "Wife Swap." War fools is a much more precise description. Unfortunately, fools serve as well as fans and maniacs, especially when they're fools of courage, strength, and loyalty.

The important cold-eyed Bicoastal gentlemen who dreamed up the Iraq war, and who are running it, are neither fools nor maniacs. They are capable of making mistakes in their own terms, but they operate in their material self-interest, with clear goals in mind. The Red Americans, on the other hand, have made themselves the willing RPG-fodder for a war that has absolutely nothing to do with them.

Red Americans, we hear, hold steadfast to established American traditions; but in fact the Reds are pretty selective about the traditions they attach themselves to. To our rulers, the most important of those Red traditions is a seemingly incurable bedazzlement by national-statism, which the Reds confuse with patriotism. They encourage their children to stand up in school every day and pledge allegiance to the nation-state, and when those diseducated unfortunates grow up (in the physical and chronological senses, at least), the Reds encourage them to join the imperial military and kill exotic peoples at the direction of their cosmopolite supervisors over in Blue America. Nowadays the Reds are even encouraging their daughters to do so. That is a radical progression indeed, and to our rulers it must be the most valuable aspect of Middle-American Radicalism.

Can anyone really believe that our Bicoastal supervisors harbor any sentiment gentler than contempt for these credulous, suicidal saps of flyover country?

 
Imperialistic war isn't the only great tradition that your typical Red American can be counted on to favor. Another one is Socialism As Long As It's for Folks Like Us. Surely we need not dwell too long on this point. It is sufficient to recall how few Red Americans in any way oppose the legacy of the New Deal, the Fair Deal, the Great Society, and Nixonian Socialism. How many have stood up to oppose Bushite Socialism? Red Americans' contemporary political heroes don't hesitate to name Franklin Roosevelt as one of their political heroes. If I may quote the title of Charlotte Twight's great book, all modern Americans, Red and Blue alike, have become profoundly Dependent on D.C.

Some election analysts think that the economy was a more important issue for Bush voters than "moral values," i.e., the domestic freak show. Seems doubtful to me, but who can say? I can say this, however — the question for any "economic" voter was, Which of the two totalitarians will manage the economy better? No "economic" voter, Republican or Democrat, voted to have the state keep its mitts off the productive sector of society.

I'm going to leave off speculating about what, if anything, occurred in millions of craniums during the Voting Moment; it's more useful to focus on chronic traits. Red Americans chronically whine for the Robber State to coercively distribute wealth and privilege for their benefit; and they chronically whine, as well, for leviathan to protect them against the cultural dissolution that is proceeding all around them.

Because the Robber State was actually set up to benefit the ruling class, the Reds' whining for material advantage resembles that of hungry curs circling for table scraps while trying to avoid being kicked. Their lobbying on the cultural front is just as pathetic, since the ultimate rulers who own both Bush and Kerry are determined to demolish whatever remaining cultural framework might serve as a support and solace for Red Americans. All else being equal, and all neocon wildmen aside, the ruling class may have wanted Bush to be re-elected lest the cultural demolition, under a President Kerry, become too arrant and too precipitate. Our rulers may have feared that a Kerry presidency would call forth resistance more authentic than the "protection of marriage" referenda that passed in a dozen states on November 2, only to be docketed for routine gutting by the Blue-dominated courts.

Authentic resistance has to begin at home, as people find ways to keep afloat in an ocean of poison, and struggle to bring themselves and their families to a solid shore.

In my town, which is populated largely by German-Americans, there is a family of German Catholic heritage both of whose daughters have produced children out of wedlock. A "live-in boyfriend" of one of the girls, the father of her children, was a violent criminal (and he died violently). I believe I am on firm ground in imagining that before this latest, sad generation all the family's children had been born legitimate, going back hundreds of years, probably for as long as the family had been Christian. The manufactories of the anti-culture are situated mostly on the Blue Bicoasts; but distribution centers are everywhere. The culture has dissolved not just in distant, alien Manhattan and Hollywood; it has crumbled right under Red Americans' feet, in Mississippi and Indiana and Wyoming: in Red Americans' homes, workplaces, and churches, and of course in their children's schools.

 
I'm an enthusiastic partisan of secession, but I'm afraid that for it to be worth doing we'll have to find a way to secede from the Reds as well as the Blues.

November 11, 2004

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