Early one morning, for some reason I forget, I got off at the Metro at Union Station and came up to Capitol Hill. This meant I had to walk up to the Hill, go in on the Senate side, and take the underground trolley to the House side where my office was.
When I walked in on the Senate side, the “black” senator from Massachusetts, the blue-eyed one, had come in just ahead of me. The policeman had to search my briefcase unless I was with a member of congress. I showed him my staff ID and he asked, “Are you with Senator Brooke?”
Brooke was well on his way and I could have nodded and gone on in. I said, almost, “NO!”
Most of us men have special fear of being called queer or child molesters and so forth. We always fear that SOMEONE will believe it.
In politics I have always had the same sort of queasy feeling about being considered one of THEM:
Little White Bobby trailing after his liberal Republican Black Idol.
ICK!
My actual views would strike the average yuppie or Mommy Professor as a lot more perverted than homosexuality or even NAMBLA membership, but that doesn’t bother me. My feeling of creepiness has to do with being mistaken for something Bob Whitaker considers perverted and sick.
I would be shamed to be considered Senator Brooke’s Little White Worshipper because that is a sick idea TO ME. However untrue it is, if the guard believed it, I would be shamed in MY OWN eyes.
It is what I call intellectual shame. It is not logical. I could respect another senior staffer if he was hired by Brooke for his merits, and if he really was a liberal Republican. Hell, I ain’t prejudiced. Some of my best friends were members of the Ripon Society.
But the idea of someone thinking I was one of them gives me the same chill a guy gets from being thought a homo. As they kept repeating on Seinfeld, “I am NOT gay.”
“Though there’s nothing WRONG with it.”
This is not a creepy feeling that only belongs to old right-wingers.
I think most people normally get this feeling when someone tries to classify what they think of as their own ideas. I have had liberals scream at me when I repeated that what they had said was a standard liberal position. What can you say when someone has five times in a row quoted standard political positions.
I am SHAMING them by saying they sound like a tape recorder, though they do. But I find that the ones with a sense of that shame are now the exceptions.
What gets to me about yuppies and other Mommy Professor Products is their total lack of simple intellectual SHAME. How can they be such walking, talking mental clones and it doesn’t even bother them?
As Anne Rice said, these are the sort of people who ask each other, “Are WE still boycotting grapes?” Four of them on a single block will have the same bumper sticker.
Most of us really dislike it when it turned out that the person we are talking to has heard the JOKE we are telling before. These people tell you that the highlight of their life was when they were heroically out marching with a thousand other students shouting for something very single professor had advocated in class.
They called it a Campus Protest.
Protest against WHAT?
This is straight out of 1984 or Red China. How can you be brave independent members of a Campus Protest against Racism when anyone who says anything non-PC on race will be lucky just to be lynched
By minority students while white students cheer them on?
“We CARED in those days. We marched on campus.”
In 1984 every time the government announced another Five-Year Plan had been a success “spontaneous demonstrations” would break out, the signs already prepared. Orwell was not exactly prescient about this. The same thing happened all the time inn Stalin’s Russia.
But how can you BRAG about marching for a Politically Correct cause on a Politically Correct campus?
Stalin’s slaves did it, but I never heard one of them later claim he was BRAVE to do it.
Once again, I ask you, “Does this sound familiar?”
Have you many times wondered how someone could have such a lack of intellectual SHAME that he claims he was brave to go out and agree with everybody else?
#1 by Dave on 05/18/2010 - 10:39 am
People are mired in incoherence because their CONCERN is with ever proliferating rules and practices of concluding issues among one another.
This is why there is no intellectual shame. It is a matter of the placement of CONCERN.
But it is superficial.
Education is deadly to the ability to think. It leads the mind to habitual and unrecognized inattention.
Aldous Huxley said, “Want to solve your problems? Learn a new way of seeing”.
But this has to be done with your very own mental resources. It has to be internally motivated and driven.
It has to be done in the exercise of personal autonomy and power.
Otherwise, you never get to the ability to think on a personal basis.
These people we encounter, who are just skating along, superficially. No one ever told them how important it is to exercise personal autonomy and power.
This is why so much of the Establishment is so weak. Without organizational rank and the fact that their finances work for them personally, they are helpless.
Take them out of their protected environment and they can’t cope. Their brains simply fail them.
That is because they have never really used their brains. They have never really exercised personal autonomy and power.
I can smell this brand of weakness in a heartbeat. Our white race suffers from this brand of weakness horribly.
#2 by shari on 05/18/2010 - 10:44 am
On the other hand,we don’t know who is absolutely FED-UP. I know I sure don’t, but I bet there are more than is apparent at the moment.
#3 by Simmons on 05/18/2010 - 3:20 pm
“Brave New World” is our world.
Ask a college educated lib kid to explain the “Blank Slate” theory and the only blank is on their face, ask them if they believe what dirge they can spew and you have made a major social etiquette faux paux.
#4 by unjew on 05/19/2010 - 1:28 am
It takes a special kind of stupidity to be vocally brave in the face of no danger at all.
A local radio, every hour or so, is playing the new song by an especially untalented band called Manowar. It goes something like this:
“…Let them stop us, let them try,
For Heavy Metal we will die!…”
Every time, the urge to puke passed, I scream “Who the fuck would ever ASK you to die for metal, you morons?”.
Then my girlfriend tells me to stop talking to the radio.