We all have our guilty pastimes, I suppose. I certainly have mine. One of them is the Schadenfreude I get from viewing train wrecks like this one ... purely for the comment threads (I wouldn't characterize the blogmistress's work product as a "train wreck" by any means -- she's quite a good writer). But those comment threads! Unlike me, she has a large audience, and it's composed almost exclusively of -- well, I was going to write "doctrinaire lefties," but that's not really true. These folks are partisans of the Democratic Party, which certainly doesn't qualify as "the left." When the Barackster practices the drone warfare and the extrajudicial assassinations, that's jake with them. When he demonstrates his servant status relative to our corporate masters, well, that just isn't noticed. Nor is it just the current president; they'll issue the same free pass to any halfway presentable and successful Donk.
So, I looked in there today, figuring (after yesterday's orgy of voting) that I'd be treated to some crude triumphalism. I was not disappointed. Man, is everything wonderful today! It's an all-blue country, for sure. Fortunately for the commenters, the House of Representatives remains nominally in evil GOP hands. As the Empire continues its slow-motion collapse, then, it won't be difficult to lay the blame on those red-tinged miscreants.
Certainly, the same thing happens in the scarlet wing of the War Party; if I'm not mistaken, there was a short period during the Dubya regime in which both White House and Congress were nominally red. And I'm sure there was plenty of elephant hubris to be seen online. Probably because I used to self-describe as a "conservative," I seem to get more pleasure from viewing blue excess. As I say, a guilty pastime.
I just wish it were possible to do the following simple experiment. Get some volunteer political partisans, red and blue: a statistically-significant sample of each sort. Get them to agree to live in an isolation dome for, let's say, a decade. No newspapers, no broadcasting, no internet goes into the dome, except through the busy hands of the experimenters. The experimenters would provide to the subjects a daily Dome Newspaper, which would contain all the news, complete and truthful, but with the names and formal political affiliations redacted: replaced with "person A" and "person B," affiliated with ... what shall we call the parties? Maybe the Vice Lords and Gangster Disciples? (I started to write "Crips and Bloods," but I believe those two already have blue and red associations. An interesting thought, that!) Anyway, after the ten years' experimental period was up, ask each volunteer to say who was who, and what party was in power when. Unless I'm greatly mistaken, they would be correct at no better a rate than would result from random guessing.
Folks, there's only one party. And it keeps you fascinated and diverted by this sock-puppet show it puts on, continually: a blue sock on one hand, a red one on the other. And that's the way it's a-gonna stay.
2 comments:
I feel you here, being a former conservative/libertarian Ayn Rand-fan.
I got a little bit of that reading about Glenn Beck's meltdown with Romney's loss. He says he thought he knew the American people.
After so many prayers, fasts and sacrifices to their god, the Iconoclast in me is glad to see the idols crumble.
Indeed, the "high places" have to be torn down, at some point.
I didn't hear about Beck. I'll have to check that out. I may OD on Schadenfreude this week.
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