A Bunch of Fuckin Crybabies

“Will you be the generation that sat on the sidelines and watched as candidate after candidate comes up, and the national media takes their whack at them to try to destroy them in every way possible, as they’ve done with every single Republican candidate, and as they will between now the election? Will you sit on the sidelines and say, 'Boy, that’s not fair,’ or will you stand up and fight for freedom?”

-LA Times

I like that Rick casts this in world-historical terms, like: it is the generational struggle of those now living to stop the media from taking whacks at Republican candidates in an overstuffed primary contest.  I am going to start using this formulation at home, I think.  "Honey, will you be the generation that sat on the sidelines while I folded all of this laundry?  Will you complain that I mixed your vintage tees with polo shirts?  Or will you come over here and fold it yourself?"  But voters love to be hectored about this sort of thing; it gets their essential juices flowing.  Well, shit, if fighting for freedom involves hauling my ass down to the precinct and yanking a lever, you can call me Che, or Edmund Burke, or Joan of Arc, or whomever.  The essential derangement of democratic systems comes alive every campaign, wherein participation in the accepted, prescribed, normative civic forums is cast as a revolutionary act.  Obviously the Oh, Brother campaign did just the same back in its preadministrative phase, and I expect them to pull it out again.

It is a little sillier, if only a little, coming from the supposed conservative candidate, which only comments once more on the tragicomedy of the whole American political taxonomy.  Our conservatives may or may not be totally atavistic, but they do proclaim allegiance to a certain revolutionary creed.  They say they despise and abhor all the existing institutions of government and wish to through their Dr. Scholls into the machinery.  Meanwhile, the liberals defend all the state's traditional institutions, which they claim to have erected with nothing much more than gumption, a fiat currency, and their very own wartime dictator, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.  Thus does every worm, um, turn; the agents of so-called progress, having built their society, become with the swift passage of years the conservative defenders of it, and the former conservatives become the prophets bringing a new gospel, even if it harkens ever back into some Edenic past.

None of them are sincere, of course; Rick Santorum no more wants to destroy the institutions of American state capitalism than Barack Obama--this restaurant may be getting lousier and lousier reviews, but it's still making money for the owners and not yet fit for an accidental grease fire ifyaknowhadahmean.  So there's that.  I've said it before and will again: I truly do admire the genius of our system of superficial consensualism, a system whereby we are forever assenting to our present circumstances in the belief that we have any option to do otherwise.