I saw this the other day.
Ross Douthat, of the New York Times, lamenting the fall of "The American Imperial Project" whatever that is, and the rise of "Wokeism" also, whatever the fuck that is.
Honestly I'm tired of hearing people bitch about this stuff.
First of all, Ross, nobody gives a shit about your Catholic Neoconservative pretensions, least of all the vast majority of your fellow modern "Conservatives" in general and card-carrying Republicans in particular and I say that as a former Protestant Neoconservative Republican myself. It's just not happening.
And I'll be honest with you, the reason for that is that a lot of the "Conservative" voter base was never really all that conservative and simply lost interest in any philosophical anything longer than four words and requiring more than two active brain cells.
In fact, they hate you and even people like the Bush family or Mitch McConnell or Mitt Romney simply for not being racist enough. and Republicans as a whole for failing to deliver on their imagined spectacles of blood and cruelty over the decades.
Trump was probably the closest they'll realistically get to that, and damn it, they're going to hang on to that particular mile marker with everything that they've got for exactly that reason. They don't want people who can convincingly quote Marcus Aurelius or Winston Churchill or who offers conservative economic policy or right-wing Christianity.
No, they want WWE in the goddamned Oval Office and somebody who will give them money and make them feel good about themselves.
They want somebody who they think will hurt the people that they don't like for basically no good reason. They've been wanting that since the days of Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon, and they've been disappointed for just exactly that damned long.
But we're talking about people who haven't gotten over the fact that their ancestors (real or imagined) lost the Civil War, here...and too many of them hunger for another one without having the slightest idea what that might mean, or who might die in such a war.
In another 156 years, these people's descendants won't be talking about Julius Caesar, Tiberius, Caligula, and the complex interplay of Platonic philosophy and Roman conservative culture in the formation of Christianity and the eventual influence of these things on the modern West and the United States. No...they'll be building gold-plated statues of Donald Trump whether it's in the backyards of mansions hidden in the bushes like a Rhodesian war memorial...or in the town square like so many Confederate statues were (and in some places still are.)
Second, I'll remind you that the American or more appropriately Conservative ideological and imperial projects of this century were ran smack into the ground at full speed, controlled flight into terrain at relativistic speeds, by conservatives.
Your attempt to set up some kind of a "Stab in the back" mythos doesn't pass the sniff test for a presently-unemployed food service worker who's done nothing much more than pay attention off and on throughout this mess.
Too damned few white Americans even give a shit about religion anymore, if you ask me, one hell of a lot of them never really did, either. Racism is their new holy gospel, although again, in too many cases it was a dominant factor in any others they claimed to believe in as well. These people's idea of strength isn't the military, or a sound political structure. They think strength is exemplified by a bullying coward who brays like a jackass on stage in front of a bunch of drooling morons.
And their idea of religion is brazen cultic worship of Donald Trump...and through him, worship of themselves.
There are a hell of a lot of people out there who wouldn't believe in Jesus at all, except that they've been shown images of a white Jesus with brown or red hair their whole lives, in spite of the improbability (in a straight up historical sense) that such a person would have been regarded as anything but an outsider and unclean by Israeli Jews in the First Century/ As I've been saying for decades now, the only white people in that part of the world at that time were some of the Romans...and whiteness itself, as a construct, didn't even exist. In point of fact the main relevant cultural signifier was whether one had adopted Greek or Roman culture or not.
Of course, you know this, even if your understanding of Rome and the Classical era comes from obsessively, repeatedly watching Gladiator. (For the record, since the film is deeply based on Platonic and Stoic philosophy it's not actually a bad place to start, just it's not really all that comprehensive and the film is riddled with historical inaccuracies. That said it's still a hell of a good movie.)
It makes me sad, that this is so, just as I'm sure it does you.
But I am here to tell you, it can and will get worse.
As I've said before, all any of this "Woke" stuff is, is common decency. That doesn't say too much about the people who are rabidly against it, or how they are as people. I'm pretty sure your boy Marcus Aurelius had a few things to say about that kind of stuff/
We're dealing with a "Conservative" movement here that doesn't give a flying fuck about history, about the achievements of its ideological forebears, or even about words and what they mean. If anything, conservatives have turned away from the idea of Empire because Empire means that Brown People get to come here...because Empire is a two way street. Do a lot of business or wage war in a different part of the world, and you end up with people from there coming here. That's not "Woke" that's reality.
Also as I've said before Communism hasn't been much of a thing since 1989.
But these fucking people are so eager to "Red Bait" their fellow Americans, Democrats in general and moderate conservatives in particular that...well, they'll just go right on ahead and erase the presidencies of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. In point of fact, they've pretty much already erased both the memory and the legacy of every American President that came before Donald Trump.
And the vast majority of current in-power Republicans (some of whom predate Trump in power by many decades and retain power bases that could be well independent of his that would prosper and even increase if only they stood up against this bullshit) went along with this or, excepting only ten, then two and in some cases only one, sat silent and let this happen.
Doesn't say much for any conservative ideological or imperial projects, does it?
But of course these are people who are perfectly content to, now, view slavery as something one can argue the pros and cons of, rather than simply viewing it as bad because it's, well, slavery and that's a thing nobody should be subjected to.
But that's the difference between conservatism as I was taught it 40 years ago and what it's become today. There's no moral absolutes, no reverence for truth or even historical fact or the accomplishments of their own movement.
The racism, the stupidity, and the worship of cult leaders and wannabe dictators has become the fucking point.
The difference now is, all these people think is that the bad stuff won't happen to them, and they can profit from the misery of others. The only thing a lot of these morons want is the chance to own other people.
Because of that, They'd rather ally with our country's enemies and cast themselves fighting the conflicts of the past (but against the wrong people) for their own glory and for the sake of fighting than contribute to the greater good or human progress or even support their own country.
So, Ross, I'll answer your claim of an American imperial project with another of my own.
I've personally referred to Barack Obama, more than once, as the American Marcus Aurelius.
Marcus Aurelius was the last of a century-long series of Roman rulers known to history as the "Five Good Emperors." Under the second of these, Trajan, Rome reached the apex of its power, stretching from the rolling hills of the Scottish borderlands to the deserts of modern-day Kuwait.
Likewise if you count down the list of the Five Good Presidents, Reagan, Bush 41, Clinton, Bush 43, and Obama...the apex of this idea of American Empire was under George H.W. Bush, when the Soviet Union fell and we were suddenly the only superpower.
There's a thing to be said for some of the historical parallels of such an analogy, but America is not Rome nor even the Victorian Britain that shaped Churchill. America is not an empire, not in real terms.
And to become one would mean the end of America. That's the part that ghouls like Ross don't understand. The Emperor ain't got no clothes, and in America his philosophy that we should have one is fit only to be laughed at.
If you want a better country you have to be a better citizen. Stop lusting after the idea of being a Subject to some kind of god/emperor and remember that.
Yes, it's harder, but that's the price of being a free people.
I think previous conservative leaders like Reagan or either president Bush understood that.
If we lose freedom here, there is nowhere to escape to.
Remember that part. There'll be a test later.
Every action, every day, is a test. The price of liberty is eternal vigilance, and that's a statement attributed to and repeated by figures as diverse and historical as Cicero and John F. Kennedy.
There's a reason for that. It's the truth.
Peace.
You have power over your mind - not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength. ~Marcus Aurelius
No comments:
Post a Comment