I've got to make it show, yeah
Yeah
It' so much larger than life
I'm gonna watch it growing
The place where I come from,
Is a small town
They think so small
They use small words
But not me
In spite of that
I worked it out
I've been stretching my mouth
To let those big words come right out
I had enough
I'm getting out
To the city
The big, big city
I'll be your big noise
With all the big boys (So much stuff I will own)
And I will pray to a big god
As I kneel in the big church (Big Time)
I'm on my way, I'm making it (Big Time)
Uh, yes (Big Time)
I've got to make it show, yeah (Big Time)
(Big Time) It's so much larger than life
(Big Time) I'm gonna watch it growing
~Big Time, Peter Gabriel
"It certainly feels like the entire society is rigged against people who hold my values."
Seriously?
No fucking shit, Sherlock.
I spent three quarters of my life as a conservative.
Conservatism isn't supposed to be popular, it's conservatism.
Conservatives, you know, the people stereotypically represented by Dwight Eisenhower, Lt. Hauk in Good Morning Vietnam, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Frank Burns and Margaret Houlihan on MASH. Archie Bunker, the Unfuckable Dork Brigade villains in a whole bunch of 1980's movies, Harris and Proctor in the Police Academy movies, you know, people who aren't any fun at parties because we mostly didn't go to them in the fucking first place, or get even get invited to, for that matter.
And when you did show up, you blended in as best you could, or you didn't get invited back.
We used to console ourselves, if and when we felt like we needed to, by saying it was better to be right than it was to be popular. We were the political equivalent of "Are you sure this is a good idea?" or "Eat your vegetables" or "pay your bills" and yes "Somebody really DOES need to go out there and fight the Communists" back when there was such a thing, anyway. Republicans used to know that being the adults in the room wasn't going to be any fun, and Democrats are finding this out now that Republicans have abdicated their old roles completely.
Did those values shelter a lot of bad people, of course they did. Plenty of authoritarian shitbirds, nuts, racists and various other bad actors were always hiding somewhere in the midst of all that, wearing the rest of us like a cloak of protection. And there were always those who thought enough power and control would mean they would have to be popular...but for the most part a lot of those people got laughed at for a long time, sometimes to their faces, sometimes not. There's always been some fucking fool out there, trying to immanentize the eschaton.
Nobody with a brain in their head expects that type of stuff to be popular.
When I was a little kid, I don't remember that any of the people I knew who talked that way gave a shit whether it was popular or not. Of course, that started to change when Reagan let the religious nuts into the Republican Party because a lot of Evangelicals are and always have been greedy, grasping, money hungry social climbers, but they still weren't the main body of conservatism.
Of course that started to change in the 1990's with people like Newt Gingrich and Tom DeLay, and the shifting of the Religious Right from the farcical sideshow of people like Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker to an animating force under people like James Dobson and Ralph Reed. I'm sorry it did, and I say this as somebody who was a conservative Christian in the 1980's and 1990's and who voted Republican in 1994 and thus helped usher a lot of this crap in.
One of the biggest things I remember from the 1990's was a lot of both political and religious preaching against moral relativism and situational ethics. And hey, if you really want to not be popular (Note: The sarcasm light is on) with your fellow students in a Community College speech class...give a few speeches on those sorts of subjects, and do it reasonably well!
Just sayin.' I do actually know some of this stuff from experience.
Now fast forward to 25 years after the Gingrich Revolution, and 22 years after that speech class and here we are, the "Conservative" movement and the Republican Party have fully embraced both moral relativism and situational ethics, religion has been on its way out for awhile, and there's plenty of Republican voters who, given the chance, would literally bow down and worship Donald Fucking Trump.
Look at it long enough and you really start to wonder how the hell these people expect some kind of heavenly Salvation from an extremely earthly wannabe-dictator who doesn't even believe in their supposed previous God. But he'd be real happy if they'd just come out and tell him he's their new one.
And these fucking people are mad because they're not popular and they feel like society is against them?
Well, bitches, when you've spent the last decade trying to tear down our political system and overall society sooner or later you need to realize that the system is going to have to act to save itself.
And so it did.
And today people in Georgia are voting in that state's senatorial runoff election, lots of people are in fact hoping to nudge the system past merely protecting itself towards actually helping the common person.
Meanwhile, Democrats have adjusted to being the adults in the room with gusto, though not always doing the right thing, and least they're trying, with maybe half of Republicans trailing behind in their wakes...more to save themselves and the system that got them elected and keeps them in power than with any good intentions...as the other half of the Republican Party and a majority of Republican voters threaten those other Republicans with bloody vengeance for...doing their jobs? Does any of this seem kind of fucked up to you yet?
Basically, the arsonists and terrorists and mad that they're not getting a free hand-job from the rest of a civilization they've spent the last twelve years or so actively trying to destroy.
It's not about right or wrong, it's about who these fucking idiots "identify" with, even though they freely mock other people for identifying as, or with, or whatever. Whatever they do, what they like, or what resonates with them is seen as holy...while anything anybody else does is literally of the Devil. How these people keep all this shit straight, I'll never know. I couldn't do it.
Trumpism in my view basically combines the very worst of both far-left and far-right politics in the dumbest possible ways, and there's no up-side for anybody but Trump, personally.
Frankly, I'm just tired of the hypocrisy and wondering how these fucking people don't drown in the sheer amount of bullshit that they spew from day to day. And then, when it doesn't turn out how they want, they cast themselves as the perpetual victims?
Fuck all that.
Listen up, fuckers.
It's like my Grandma used to say; Sometimes when it feels like the whole world is against you, the problem is you.
And that's pretty much all there is to say about it.
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