“So, Loser, where’s Part III?”

“So, Loser, where’s Part III?” June 8, 2007

Part III is partially written (go here and here if you don’t know what I mean) – I got jammed up yesterday and couldn’t finish it, and with the death of the immigration bill I’ll necessarily have to re-think where I wanted to go with it. Some appointments this morning will delay that.

But I can make a quick observation…

Remember when the Democrats won in November, and some of us said, “well, okay, maybe now that they’ve gotten control of the Houses the Left will stop feeling so put-upon and they’ll pull back from that edge of rank, bitter and soul-suffocating hate they’ve been clinging to…maybe they’ll become human again and stop the spitting.”

And remember how surprised and disappointed we were to discover that no, victory not only brought no relief to them in their BDS and their ideological hate, it also brought with it no magnanimity toward the perceived “losers” on the right?

Well…I have to be honest with you: perhaps because some on the BBS Far-Right are quickly evolving into caricatures (or mirror images, I can’t decide) of the BDS Left, – I’m not actually that surprised to see the so-called “winners” in this particular battle acting quite a lot like the Victorious Left of November ’06, with the same classless, infantile (“kiss my white American ass“) and ungracious weirdness.

I hate to use terms like “winners” and “losers”
in discussing this – it was a piece of legislation over which there was a difference of opinion – since when have differences of opinion become “take no prisoners” warfare with identified “villains?” We’re all Americans; this splintering off into “us,” “them” and “those guys over there” never sits right with me, but it is useful language, I guess.

“…you just spent three days marginalizing yourself Anchoress, with your Bushbot bleeding heart!”

Have I? I don’t feel marginalized. I feel pretty much the same as I did yesterday and last year, perhaps because I am the same person I was both yesterday and last year (and was never much of a joiner, to start with) so “marginalized” doesn’t sting. If “the majority who actually care about what’s right for this country” are the folks filling my email with victor-bile, then I think I’m doing just fine over here, away from the central broth of boiling rage in which those folks have decided they like to swim. I’ll just stay here on the edge and keep splashing with my toes while I watch the bubbling. Maybe I’ll chew some gum.

“…bet you feel like a fool now…”

Well, no, I don’t. Part of me is proud of what I’ve written in the past few days, and of how the folks from “both sides” (the “America-loving Conservatives” vs the “RINO cowards and crybabies”) managed to comport themselves in the comments section. I think when all is said and done, we elevated the discussion – moved it beyond the bitchfest, beyond the grousing-and-name-calling sort of mental masturbation that heaves and jerks but never goes anywhere and can be found in all too many places on the internets. We actually talked real ideas, real possibilities, real complications and we did it respectfully and maturely and sometimes we even managed to smile at one another in the midst of it. No, I don’t feel foolish. I think we won’t know for a while, yet, who is foolish on this issue and who is not. Roads always turn and zigzag in unexpected ways.

“A pox on you and your children! A pox on the villain el Presidente Jorge and on all the RINO Senators who will be gone next election!

You know…when I read that I gasped…then I laughed. We’ve corresponded, that writer and I, although not lately, not since she moved into the camp of “better Americans.” Once upon a time her standards precluded that sort of language, and she thought that even a president she disliked, like Bill Clinton, deserved the respect due the Office of the American President, not name-calling. Now she wishes ill on me, my kids and the president.

You do know, don’t you, that wishing my kids ill means you never post here again, right? I don’t flatter myself that it’s any loss to you, but you do know it? I just want to make sure.

Like I said, I’m the same person I was a year ago.
Are you? Ask yourself if you’re the same person you were last year, or if you’ve allowed the mob-thinking that spreads so easily (as I can sadly attest – I have not been immune to the lure of jumping on an idea and haranguing others with it) through forum echo chambers to infect you with something powerful and ugly and so hateful and unthinking that it cannot possibly serve a “higher” good? Do you recognize yourself, any more, or is this who you have always been, simply revealed?

I read through some of this pathetic crap and thought: what if it’s all an illusion?

It’s been nagging at me for a while, how this issue – ignored by so many, for so long – not even discussed in ’96, ’98, ’00, ’02 and ’04 – suddenly became a searing flashpoint needing a solution “yesterday” and pulling so many into positions of shrill absolutism, incapable of compromise.

What if it’s all an illusion, just like the Cinco de Mayo “nationwide protests” by Hispanics was an ’06 (election year) illusion that had nothing behind it in ’07 (no elections). What if everyone is being played a little bit, here, being prompted to emotional reactionaryism as a means of reaching into and infecting those Americans of good-will who until the “flashpoint” and the sudden hue-and-cry couldn’t be moved to hate? Moved to grousing, yes, but never before moved to real, unadulterated hate?

Illusionists are clever sorts – they are specialists at making us look at one thing, and convincing us that we know what we are seeing, while they are actually doing something else, entirely. It’s called “misdirection.”

What if the illegal immigration flashpoint was never about immigration at all, but about getting people stirred to “hate.” Who would do that, you ask? Think about it. Who and what does hate serve? What happens to the soul of a nation, when “hate” is the overpowering force driving a majority of people – it doesn’t matter which “side.”

I wrote last year:

Prayer is a force and it is real. I came away from Adoration convinced that we will not defeat the enemy (and on the most fundamental level, the enemy – both within and without – is hate) unless we are willing to use the weapon of real and loving prayer – faithfully, humbly, daily…and did I say humbly…we will not win.

And what is humble prayer? It is not the one that all-too-often tempts us, which runs along the lines of: “Destroy them O Lord, they maketh a blight…” Rather it is the one that seeks mercy and trusts God to handle the justice part – it is, “help us Lord, help us all, begin with me who am so broken and full of fault…”

I read a forum last night wherein a poster made a prayer of thanksgiving offered to God with a sneer toward all those who didn’t have the same opinion as the writer. An awful prayer, offered with such an undertone of disdain and superiority, and I thought…well…Bush did say he was worried about how this was affecting the soul of the nation.

Oh, I forgot, that was “offensive.” How dare the president presume to think he needs to worry about the nation’s soul, when it’s full of Godly men and women who know they’re Right before the Lord? (Do any of us ever really know that? Are any of us so scrupulous in our behavior and in examining our consciences that we know that?) Why, if Bush would just fall in line, they wouldn’t hate anyone! It’s Bush’s fault that they hate.

Some on the Right have been “offended” a lot, lately; they’ve embraced the politics of “hurt feelings and insult” that usually characterizes the Left, and with breathtaking ease. Maybe you’re reading this right now and saying, “damn straight I was; offended and insulted!”

But when you got offended because some charged a racial component to all of this, did you think you’d end up writing the words “kiss my white American ass,” just a few days later, as though your ass being a white American one made it an innately superior sort of ass? Did you think you’d be referring to the president as “Jorge” as though having such a name is a bad thing? When you got offended because the president worried about our national soul, did you think you’d be wishing “a pox” on me and my kids and the American President? Did you think you’d be calling Bush a “villain?”

Think about it, that’s all I’m saying. If a year ago you weren’t hating and now you are, think about it.

As I said, roads can make surprising turns. Things have a way of working out in ways we don’t always anticipate. Already some are looking at this uncontrolled hate and feeling surprising sympathy for Bush, even if they don’t much like him.

In one of the comments
sections, igout says:

I don’t know who “us” is anymore. I’d vote for the Dem Dorgan 1000-times before I’d vote for any Republican who aided and abetted this latest attempt to con the people.

Yes…in very short order the force of hate has left us unsure of who we are – and a house divided cannot long stand. My fear is that the fracturing of the center-Right and Right, coupled with the wayward far-left is going to destroy America faster than any desert-running alien ever could.

Who would that serve? Hmmmm….lemmee think.

The next year is going to be interesting as hell.

See also: Sister Toldjah who gives the right an even-handed (far-right and center-right) rebuke, and well done, too!


Browse Our Archives