Virtual Insanity: Why the Culture Wars Slaughter American Survival James Edward Lamb, Jr. Thursday, March 10, 2005 Practically every night, after some pixelated polygonal pretend pugilism via Steve Fox in Tekken 5 or some good-natured reality-tv debauchery with my partner-in-crime Angel, I read political blogs. (Mental Note: Just because you are on the Amazing Race does not give you a license to a) hit your spouse/ girlfriend or b) reference your sexual orientation as you climb a mountain or haul donkeys through an Andean backwater. No one cares. It‟s a race, not MTV's Newlyweds.) I have an entire section of my Favorites menu devoted to people‟s online ramblings on American politics, from the famous Daily Kos to the infamous Michelle Malkin. (Love the new picture, btw! Very Area 51.) Margaret Cho's blog is good for liberal laughs, while I can‟t help but laugh along with Ambra Nykol. Sure, she‟s a tad too conservative for me, but the lady can turn a phrase, and keeps her independence. I‟m chill. Essentially, as you know, I like political discussion. If you want to read some amazing commentary, check out Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post. It‟s like reading everything you should be saying, with higher eloquence and better candor than you can develop on your own. (I‟ll comment more on my newfound hero later.) From the poli-style arenas, Frank Rich of the New York Times never disappoints. Seriously, this is the alpha male of postmodern political commentary; want a sensible linkage between Jeff Gannon and the demise of investigative analysis reporting? Rich is your guy. Recently, Josh Marshall‟s Talking Points Memo has me more interested in the Social Security debate than ever before. But this post must thank Marshall for linking the most interesting political magazine I‟ve kept up with in years, the Washington Monthly. Man,
what writing. From dissecting Barack Obama‟s “great Black hope” hype to assaulting a million fractures in female boxing, the Washington Monthly – specifically Benjamin Wallace-Wells – asks the right questions and seeks the literal truth. But enough praise. It‟s too late and I‟m too annoyed. Benjamin Wallace-Wells latest piece, “Off Track”, discusses the inside-theBeltway theater of the absurd concerning microeconomic planning to retain America‟s fast-eroding edge on the up-and-coming world technology and innovation markets. Even the simple stuff – forcing the FCC to push broadband technology into more American homes (making the Net simpler to use as well as a more effective domestic spending force) or governmental encouragement of more research and development in alternative fuel technologies – isn‟t being done by the Bush Administration, who add yet another public policy fuck-up my generation will suffer from later on to their already dismal record. When the American economy atrophies under the crushing might of tech giant creditor countries like India and Japan, with the engineering and the corporate savvy to unseat the notion of 21st Century American economic dominance, please remember the impact of a few hundred thousand voters in rural Ohio. Compassionate conservativism under the CEO President rapes our natural resources in the most inefficient and consumer cost-heavy methods possible to promote heavy profits (with piss-poor accounting) for the nation‟s robber-baron old economy industries, and astronomical budget deficits for the federal government; this criminal fiscal irresponsibility hides from the limelight of George W. Bush-incited overseas wars John Q. American can not pay for in foreign nations most Americans can neither locate nor name nor spell in regions so balkanized by war, famine, disease, and ignorance that Humpty Dumpty laughs from beyond the grave.
Yet Americans aren‟t yet weary of playing Gerald Ford in All the President’s Men, so I suppose a half-hearted shout-out of love and affection is in order for all the brave men and women who serve in America‟s Armed Forces. They kill with machine guns, so McDonald‟s doesn‟t have to. Average liberals believe that George W. Bush was elected (this time) by a slim majority of the confused, frightened, and angry – in short, the typical American citizen, whose myopic zeal for low taxes and low crime and moral values and cheap gas has yet again ruined the big picture landscape of the greatest nation on Earth. Sure, low taxes means that the federal government has less money to work with to preserve homeland security, provide grant money for university research and secure adequate health care for the sick, indigent, and elderly, but hey, at least little Wakeesha Jenkins living in SE Washington DC in Section 8 housing has brand new, state-of-the-art metal detectors on her first day of middle school, so why worry? Of course, lower grant money means that Jerusalem University has a greater chance of outstripping Cornell University in the nanotechnology innovation race, but hey, we‟ve just spent billions making Iraq safe for terrorism, so why complain? Of course, electronic patient information databases have been proven to save thousands of lives from simple human error and patient medicine mismanagement, but hey, Cialis can get your penis really, really hard, so who cares? Liberals care. Liberals want decent national security, decent health care, decent public education, and decent civil liberties protection. Liberals fail to secure these sensible ideals because liberals have been forced to take up arms in a culture war forced upon them by the holy and the damned, the white Southern Christian conservatives. And
here, my friends, is tonight‟s major issue – why do conservatives continue to fight against the country‟s best interests? Isn‟t the culture war a treasonously huge waste of time? I dunno, maybe it was the ten minutes or so of First Lady Laura Bush‟s speech a couple of days back on inner-city youth and the terrible influences of drugs and gangs and sex and violence they face, or maybe it was my masochistic reading of LaShawn Barber‟s Corner tonight, but I‟ve had it with the racist White Christian conservative‟s fervor over social and cultural questions. Sometimes Southern, sometimes not, the White Christian conservative delights in blotting out the national agenda like atmospheric dust and ash following the Mt. St. Helens eruption so that American citizens are inundated with Puritanical propagandizing about abstinence, God, the evils of abortion, and the healing power of prayer; these self-appointed social censors – reconstituted saints embracing sobriety following decades of alcohol and marijuana and cocaine use like Kitty Kelley‟s take on our current President‟s „Prodigal Son‟ years – waste national agenda space with useless and illogical diatribes, columns, and congressional hearings on personal taste and public decency in capitalist media. Man, I so don‟t care anymore! Face it – teenagers have sex. Keeping them docile and ignorant is one traditional use of secondary school socialization, but promoting safe sex via condom usage is sensible, proactive, realistic, and smart. It says to the wayward teenage boy with more testosterone in his bloodstream than hemoglobin, “Be a responsible adult. Sexually transmitted diseases kill people. Teenage pregnancies can wreck your life. Use your fucking brain and wrap your three inches of fun in latex before you hurt yourself or someone else.” Hell, I heard every abstinence prohibition mainstream media carried in the South; nothing stopped me from having sex at seventeen. Not even the dirty, soiled
hobos watching and laughing and drinking Thunderbird on the pier. (Long story. Known to induce vomiting. You‟ve been forewarned.) Even the welfare state costs of teenage pregnancy suggest to the logical observer that the aggressive promotion of condom usage as public health policy outstrip the fervent screams of Bible Belt conservative critics and soccer moms who listen to James Dobson between Little League practices. Sixteen year olds with Chlamydia help no one; they certainly aren‟t studying for Advanced Placement exams. Sorry, but college freshmen shouldn‟t need Valtrex in today‟s America. No one follows abstinence policies, and no one should – provided safe sex practices are followed. I‟m so damned tired of hearing about God when discussing fornication. Religion is not an excuse for public ignorance, and shouldn‟t be used as one. Or take the major culture war issue that assassinated John Kerry‟s chances for inaugural bliss across many Southern and Western states – gay marriage. Damn, the Religious Right really trounced the Left on this one. Talk about an issue that really doesn‟t affect the grand scheme of American life for most American citizens. A basic civil equality issue neutralizes liberalism throughout the country, without so much as a protest or peep from the Democratic Party? What? Here‟s one point where I believe that conservatives seriously, treasonously undercut American political thought. The truth – conservatives don‟t care about Adam and Steve‟s personal life anymore than I do. Conservatives know they don‟t care – they know they don‟t care so much that Andrew Sullivan has a bigger prominence than Michelle Malkin in most conservative circles. Yet they are willing and able to promote fear about a radical realignment of “traditional American values” if Adam and Steve are legally married. Adam and Steve should kick Jerry Falwell‟s ass on the lawn of Liberty University. I‟ll bring the boxing gloves.
I mean think about it – thousands killed or injured in a war to either find non-existent weapons of mass destruction or forcibly democratize a Middle Eastern Arab nation without their consent (whatever the reason is today), no useful domestic energy policy, skyrocketing HIV-infection rates among women and minorities, rising petroleum prices, continued voter disfranchisement and harassment issues in American precincts, low wages, looming Social Security and Medicare insolvency, and steadily increasing prison populations, among other issues, and the best solution to the modern American nightmare Christian conservatives can raise is a Constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage? Are they crazy, or just stupid? Madisonian pluralism did not fade into the ether in the early 1830‟s. You may not find it referenced in Leviticus or Numbers, but the United States Constitution and the Federalist Papers expound on the subject quite heavily. In short, no particular faction should gain monopolized control over American politics. Inherent in that perspective is the idea that our capitalist-imperialist nation is vast enough to allow for difference of opinion in cultural matters. Sure, in Ithaca, NY two young, clean shaven, trendy white men with tousled brown locks and Kanye West sportjackets draped over tight brown American Eagle printed tees may lip-lock and tongue-hockey in line at the movie theater before the 7:20 pm showing of Million Dollar Baby without any fanfare from other waiting patrons; waiting in line for the 7:20 showing of Diary of a Mad Black Woman in Norfolk, VA with that attire and behavior may prove, unfortunately, a tad more dangerous. To me, that says that homophobia and basic fear of difference is alive and well all over the country. However, it also gives hope in a perverse way, for the danger and the taboo of gay
sexuality in American culture operates on a particular band of socio-cultural macrointeraction, subject to the particular political positioning of the circumstances, people, and historical moment involved. In short, open domestic questions like public same-sex sexuality operate within an ever-shifting American social marketplace, made possible through a foundation of Madisonian political pluralism and basic legal civil rights and civil liberties protections (Civil Rights Amendments, Nineteenth Amendment, Civil Rights Act of 1964, Voting Rights Act of 1965). Adam Smith‟s invisible hand dynamic, beloved by conservatives since its inception, should be applied from the Right on the social level to the culture wars, negating the conflict‟s necessity, especially over public social acceptance of homosexuality. (This does not apply to more concrete human rights or anti-discrimination issues involving minority groups, but rather the more pervasive “moral fabric” questions certain behaviors of said groups raise.) Always slow and inhuman to the Left, the invisible hand perspective is the perfect conservative weapon to eliminate welfare state funding to alleviate poverty among American citizens, just they are strangely reluctant to apply this perspective culturally to the social conservatives‟ endless barking on “radical gay culture”, where it might do some good. The tragic slaughter of Matthew Shepard, mind-numbing in its insidious hate for another human being, was reported on by American media. People knew about it, a hate crime against a gay youngster. Ten, maybe fifteen years ago, President Ronald Reagan refused to acknowledge homosexual slaughter via the growing AIDS epidemic. Like it or not, homosexual issues have emerged from the long dark midnight of America‟s social order to occupy a public space within our cultural fabric. This space was etched through, in some respects, a shift in the „cultural invisible hand‟ operating
within our society. Depressingly slow and cumbersome it may be, this has precedent. Decades and terrorized, lynched Black generations lay between the end of Reconstruction and the heyday of the Civil Rights Movement. The influx of mass numbers of decorated, respected Black veterans of foreign wars in Europe, the Pacific, and Korea into the slums and ghettoes and rural backwaters of America‟s racist reality and discriminatory domesticity incensed Black America into a cathartic social movement rebelliousness that sought political equality, civil rights, and social justice without further delay, but within a broader international context of communist vs. capitalist Cold War tension. One could argue that the national sociopolitical positioning changed. The cultural invisible hand moved, nudged ever so slowly by the brutal arson of a Southern Black church containing four martyred Black girls, the murder of Medgar Evers, the kidnapping and murder of civil rights workers (White and Black), protest marches, televised police brutality, speeches, assassinations, etc. You know the story. The point here is that the nation had then and continues to have now dialogue and debate over the social changes that allowed African Americans to spearhead the plethora of social justice and civic equality legacies (within legal, political, economic, and cultural contexts) all American citizens enjoy today. Gender, sexual orientation, religion, and immigration concerns deserve discussion as well, irrespective of the nation‟s social fabric's final composition. At base, straight Americans, like every other majority group in human history, want to preserve their judgment rights, or rather the individual ability to disagree publicly with other people‟s behavior. There‟s nothing wrong with that – once we prevent the ability of our opponents to disagree with us, Orwellian totalitarianism replaces representative democracy. Reasonable citizens can disagree with homosexual sex
practices, rising abortion rates, misogynistic urban Black youth culture, and premarital sex without torturing gays, shooting doctors, and profiling Blacks. However, the Christian conservative would have us believe that our nation, more openly culturally diverse than ever before, loses its national coherence, domestic tranquility, and moral consciousness as long as the country avoids the „moral absolutism‟ perspective they promote without fail thorough right-wing hate radio, FOX News, and most conservative blogs. A random sampling of Townhall.com today included conservative commentator and Harvard Law student Ben Shapiro waxing illogical on “The radical homosexual agenda and the destruction of standards”. Shapiro cites the recent flaptrap involving Jada Pinkett Smith‟s comments before approximately one-hundred fifty students at Harvard‟s Sanders Theater, called “extremely heteronormative” by an on-campus gay rights group, as evidence of a forced realignment of America social standards by immoral, deviant homosexuals. A short quote:
“The rise of the homosexual movement is a textbook example of societal amorality devolving into societal immorality. The rationale behind societal amorality is the myopic question: "How does my immoral behavior hurt you?" The answer is: It may not, in the short term. But when society sanctions your immoral behavior, that does hurt me. If millions of people accept the deviant as normal, that reshapes society in vastly destructive ways. Your moral self-destruction may have no consequences for me, but destruction of societal standards always has consequences. When the stigma left single motherhood, society felt the sting in rising rates of single motherhood and juvenile crime. When the stigma left sexual licentiousness, society felt the sting in rising rates of teen pregnancy, sexually transmitted disease, emotional emptiness and nihilism. Your immoral personal behavior may not affect me, but exempting your immoral behavior from societal scrutiny certainly does. A society without standards is an unhappy, unhealthy society -- a society with no future. And all of us have to live in that society.” - Ben Shapiro, Townhall.com, March 9, 2005
Here is a textbook example of a conservative commentator attempting to eradicate difference without understanding distinction. Given his perspective, every citizen would have to possess an instinctive, inerrant sense of moral absolutism, to not only know in advance what immoral behavior is in every situation, but also how that immoral behavior can devolve societal decency standards. Ben Shapiro‟s close-mindedness does not benefit a interactive, plural society. No official approval of heterosexuality or homosexuality can exist in a plural society based in part on freedom of expression, as is the United States of America. To assert that homosexuals practice “moral self-destruction” is as foolish as the notion that adults practicing consensual homosexual sex without the violent intervention of local police to enforce anti-sodomy statutes will somehow degrade and dissolve public decency and societal standards of conduct to the detriment of all citizens. If Lil‟ Kim or Lindsay Lohan or Christina Aguilera dress for public consumption like five dollar whores, my thirteen year old niece Ashleigh does not have to. Shapiro discards all notions of personal accountability and individual responsibility in order to attack homosexuals for being different. His irrational commentary deserves no accolades and no applause; this culture warrior provides a perfect example of the Right as the last refuge of angry, bigoted, intolerant, disaffected White men, so culturally solitary that any example of cultural distinction shocks them into constant attack mode, domestic DEFCON One against folk who never harmed him. Again, one can disagree with another‟s behavior without presupposing that the other person‟s behavior is against the natural order of things, that the other person‟s behavior is so disgusting and so heinous that the other person and all those like him are subhuman, primal anarchists whose only desire is to destroy our civilized society until every
individual partakes in the very same deviant and demonic behavior that they supposedly champion. Trust me, a new Carson Kressley approved wardrobe on Queer Eye for the Straight Guy won‟t kill you, Shapiro. Neither would pink pleather pants. Are there aspects of social homosexuality visible in mainstream media that did not achieve public consumption ten or twenty years ago? Of course. But George W. Bush‟s America is a vastly different realm than Clinton‟s centrist democracy, Bush Sr.‟s international and economic Death Valleys, or Reagan‟s deficit-friendly urban blight. Today‟s fear-driven, terrorist-threatened, passively patriotic Katie Couric Americana includes security moms and Swift Boat Vets, boasts the unparalleled ascendancy of both the Grand Old Party and the G-Unit. Plastic surgery is as commonplace for the children of the rich and fabulous as eating disorders. We live in different times – „live and let live‟ speaks more sense now than ever before. Hell, the best example of our unique historical moment is the constant media maelstrom that is singer Michael Jackson. During the Eighties Jackson was the preeminent entertainer on the planet. Not simply the United States, or Europe, or Latin America, or Asia; Jackson was the greatest entertainer on Earth. His body of work still defines contemporary popular music and rhythm & blues; every new jack singer/ songwriter Viacom Entertainment promotes with hypersexed, oily softcore porn music videos on BET and MTV plagiarizes Michael Jackson without subterfuge or shame, without innovation or invention. Still, to gaze upon Jackson ivorypale skin and his processed straight black locks is to embrace Medusa and defy stone. Allegations of child molestation, „Jesus juice‟ and other criminal allegations of nonconsensual sexuality so corrode Jackson‟s public reputation that an entire generation of new music consumers regard Jackson as a state-sanctioned oddity, the weirdo you
have to hate. Every night, the country‟s major news outlets frighten citizens with salacious tales of Jackson‟s eccentricities; proof by extension how outside of „normality‟ those “insert-relevant-Jackson-minority-identity-here” are. If he‟s the freak, are you the geek? I certainly felt odd after reading some of Ben Shapiro's conservative commentary. I mean, why jump to the conclusion that a “radical homosexual agenda” is trying to make so-called normal straight people feel negative concerning their so-called normality? Personally, I doubt one can make any sense from the recent Harvard brouhaha without understanding Jada Pinkett Smith herself. An accomplished actress, Smith was once romantically linked to Tupac Shakur before her longtime marriage to Hollywood megastar Will Smith. Think about that – she moved from “2Pacalypse Now” to “Parents Just Don‟t Understand”, from “Definition of a Thug Nigga” to “Men In Black”, from “I Get Around” to “Summertime”. The cultural archetype of the sadistic, nihilistic urban sociopath, Tupac Shakur was everything the single Black female is taught to adore at age seventeen – the modern-day rebel without a cause, James Dean with a Tec-9 strapped under his Phat Farm hoodie. Sure, some would assert that Shakur‟s „cause‟ was the economic uplift and social renewal of the inner-city Black community, but let‟s be honest. Shakur was a studio gangsta without virtue; the author of “Brenda‟s Got a Baby”, “Keep Ya Head Up”, and “Dear Mama” was himself convicted of sexual battery and often glorified violence and sexual misconduct toward women in his music. Whatever one can say about Tupac Shakur, he was not the upstanding gentleman and mildmannered Negro Clark Kent that Will Smith always represents to mainstream America. One of the progenitors of party rap, this pop star embraced a wholesome sanitized
sexuality on-screen that allows even the most strident anti-Black Bill O‟Reilly wannabe to feel pleased and proud when his sister‟s genitalia moistens while watching Hitch, just as his own nature rises when Will dispatches killer cybernetics in the blockbuster I, Robot. Jada grew up people! The rambunctious Tupac Shakur – spitting-on-reporters, forcing sodomy – could never hope to provide a stable family life for anyone‟s children without massive personal psychological change. Like an unstable, heavily tattooed, antagonistic Peter Pan on creatine, Tupac‟s counterculture charisma and illicit bad-boy persona exists only in hip-hop‟s underage rebellion; those of us like Jada Pinkett Smith who must mature past the chronological glass ceiling of thug life NeverNeverland to survive in Form 1040 America, make the vastly beneficial choice to marry the stable family provider to achieve suburban nirvana, not the intellectual thug cut down in a blaze of anonymous gunfire before the age of thirty on the Las Vegas Strip. Given that background, are we really surprised at Smith‟s commentary? The most overplayed quote given as an example of Smith‟s “extremely heteronormative” perspective is this: “Women, you can have it all - a loving man, devoted husband, loving children, a fabulous career, ... To my men, open your mind, open your eyes to new ideas." Harvard‟s gay activist group, after promoting Smith‟s commentary as another example of excessive standardization of heterosexuality, called for an apology from the Harvard Foundation for Intercultural and Race Relations, who gave Smith the “Artist of the Year” award that day. Now, this slightly comical example of knee-jerk on-campus liberalism will not prevent American society from embracing traditional heterosexual interaction as the unspoken default for the vast majority of American citizens. Further, regardless as to whether one disagrees with the perspective the Harvard gay activist
group promoted, there is an open question involving monolithic, presumed acceptance and promotion of heterosexual sexuality in a polysexual social population, including bisexual, transgendered, questioning, homosexual, and heterosexual citizens. Without question, America operates within a sexual pluralist landscape, and all citizens should remember and respect that fact during discussions of sexual issues. Without doubt, respect for others emerges from understanding other perspectives; the gay activist community does have a reasonable point with the bumper-sticker adage “straight is not normal”. There is no sexual normality, nor has there ever been. Spartan homosexual pedophilia was no more deviant to Ancient Greece than the Paris Hilton sex tape is to the simple minds and simple lives of the prepubescent Total Request Live cell phone instant messaging jet set, and was culturally accepted and institutionalized in that era. Hip hop and rhythm and blues enthusiasts still keep Robert Kelly in the utmost echelon of popular music sales with every successive record not because of his alleged predatory sexual appetite for young girls not yet old enough for Playtex commercials but because of his irrepressible, if repetitive, musical talent. Sex in First Amendment America is not the purview of prudish neo-Puritans, rather each individual is allowed here to follow their own dictates. All of us should respect one another‟s boundaries to refrain from the assumption that everyone within earshot performs exactly like we do. However, no one said that heteronormative or heterosexist behavior was a pressing issue befalling the homosexual community. Sexually transmitted disease infection, hate crimes, the military‟s “Don‟t Ask, Don‟t Tell” policy – those are pressing, important issues. The realignment of American sexual tolerance will not be served by attacking Jada Pinkett Smith for attempting to remind women – especially highly
educated yet sexually insecure young professional Black women – that “career” and “family” are not mutually exclusive ideals, and that the strong, ambitious, intellectual Black woman need not sacrifice her desire for a mutually beneficial and equally supportive Black relationship with a strong, attractive, ambitious, and intellectual Black man. Given her background, I‟d bet money that my characterization of Jada Pinkett Smith‟s remarks is closer her perspective than anything concerning the promotion of heterosexuality over other sexual identities. This gay activist group totally misinterpreted Smith‟s remarks to suit their agenda, an agenda that pales drastically in importance to other serious issues facing the gay community. But Ben Shapiro and other conservative cohorts waste no time spinning an oncampus misunderstanding into a national media frenzy to suit their ideology. Unlike Harvard President Laurence Summers recent disparaging remarks concerning geneticbased disparities between men and women, Smith is not a Ivy League university president and veritable keeper of the Establishment kingdom. She‟s an actress. This issue is only being kept alive by angry online Christian conservative polemicists, who would rather e-gay bash than admit that understanding difference is a needed component of social interaction in a diverse society. Cosmopolitan multiculturalism does not exist when our leaders and thinkers encourage simplicity and anti-intellectualism towards those they don‟t understand. The nation‟s current Cultural Cold War is a result of the Christian conservative imposition, through the Executive Branch bully pulpit, of simpleminded rural redneck stubbornness on complex, complicated domestic and foreign conundrums. Radical Islamist fundamentalist terrorists annihilate American citizens and property? Fight them overseas so they won‟t attack over here, says the President. Same-sex
marriage in San Francisco? Constitutional Amendment to ban gay marriage. Black people upset over high crime rates and high poverty levels? Invite some random preachers to the White House and serve fried chicken. Black people like chicken, right? Here lies the utter truth about the Cultural Cold War – the Christian conservative front line soldiers blasting hot leaden righteousness on the bloody Gettysburg of our collective souls don‟t fight for the Union. These Southern shock troops fail to mention that their universal allegiance is pledged to the former Confederacy and its ideals of stratified gender roles, imperial military supremacy, traditional nuclear families, unabashed patriotism without public dissent, unquestioned subservience to an evangelical Protestant Christianity expressed without end in all facets of public and private life, Northern liberal antagonism, anti-intellectualism, religious fervor, athleticism over academia, and of course, nigger hating! Let‟s just admit it – African Americans are now and have always been the easy target for Christian conservative pundits and thinkers upset over a godless society overrun with abortions and single parent homes and teenage licentiousness and down low homosexuality and rich, hedonistic Black male athlete entertainers and unceasing, amoral murder. Snoop Dogg‟s profane pimped-out promiscuity is more dangerous to the young American boys‟ moral fiber than precision bombing oil-rich Arab nations. Janet Jackson‟s starburst nipple ring is more destructive to young American girls‟ pristine virginity than collective apathy towards Black female HIV-infection rates. Christian conservative culture warriors throw up their hands in frustration when confronted with the knowledge that the mainstream African American community, sad to say, generally agrees with the Christian conservative political platform; many middle
class, churchgoing Black people support school prayer, oppose abortion, dislike violent movie and music content, abhor homosexuality, and hope to change general American social coarsening. Republican political operatives, bored with their consistent annihilation of Democratic competition, ask as a intellectual exercise the obvious question: why won‟t African Americans support Religious Right Republican candidates? The answer: the Religious Right is rather racist, something reasonable religious Black people can not ignore. Problems of teen pregnancy within the Black community could be solved with radical encouragement of condom use and the social de-stigmatization of abortion within the African American community, but the post-Civil Right Era Christian hierarchy of Black America does not support such measures, on religious grounds that white Christian conservatives agree with. Yet the only reason teenage pregnancy is a national concern for the Religious Right is because of their moral disagreement with abortion practiced within the mainstream White community. They could care less about urban Black social problems. An even more blatant example of the racist Religious Right involves American narcotic use among my generation. During the Reagan Revolution of the 1980‟s, the crack cocaine epidemic decimated the Black community. Draconian narcotic statutes, police profiling, and the lucrative drug trade contributed to massive murder and mayhem within Black America‟s dilapidated criminal ghettoes and backwards rural countrysides, wrecking the lives of untold numbers of young Black people within my generation through addiction, homicide, or incarceration. But when young White children bought music that reported from the front lines of the new Black Holocaust (attempting racist caricatures of African American rebellion and pain in the ever-present desire to be
„cool‟), White Christian conservative preachers, pundits, and concerned parents attacked rap music and the balkanized concrete jungles that spawned both the bass and spoken word. Preaching universal love and universal damnation to selectively champion and condemn other American citizens based on racial affiliation is one of three traditional elements of White Southern culture; the other two involve unfree labor and mobocracysanctioned racial terrorism. The guns of the South have been replaced with radio microphones and sound trucks, broadcasting fiery suburban condemnation and white flight indignation upon minority communities suffering under poverty, outsourced employment, abysmal credit, discriminatory lending practices, inadequate affirmative action programs, and disgustingly inadequate public education. Sadly, the guns are not yet silent. The industrial vs. agrarian, intellectual vs. plebian, democratic vs. aristocratic formerly geographic schism of American political participation has now relinquished yeoman farming‟s leafy green boundaries for the fluid ideological arena of impersonal online thought warfare. The current red state/ blue state dichotomy presents an anachronistic antebellum Americana, without Harriet Beecher Stowe or Frederick Douglass available to make it all make sense. No, the violent Southern rebel yells today radiate from radiowave broadcasts and cable modem connections, and the Religious Right‟s electoral success in national politics proves only that the Confederacy, wearing the Brooks Brothers of their onetime political antagonists, recognize the lesson of Hellenic culture under Roman dominion. As a long as the ideology holds, the sons and daughters of Stars and Bars – mostly adopted, all devout – wait until Rome burns, with cans of kerosene and a simple lighter in tow.
Respect for the family unit, moral absolutism, spiritualism, stratified gender roles, strong national defense and adoration for human life are not secessionist perspectives – ignorant fanaticism without logical reason towards promoting those perspectives are. Will and Grace is not the enemy of the American family, AIDS is the real villain. The American Civil Liberties Union is not the enemy of American religion –Ten Commandments judicial sponsorship (evangelical Protestant-approved King James Version, of course) is the real problem. Marilyn Manson is not the enemy of the American teenager – absentee parenting is the real culprit. Martha Stewart the corporate executive and successful businesswoman is not the enemy of the American feminine ideal – Martha Stewart the loving homemaker and devoted domestic is the real demon. Whoopi Goldberg is not the enemy of the American military – Condoleezza Rice is the real antagonist. Roe v. Wade is not the enemy of the American unborn – institutional poverty and inadequate condom availability are the real cancers. To save a dying nation, today‟s Christian conservatives must offer practical solutions that both unify a disparate, desperate domestic divide and eliminate costly and ineffective public policy initiatives that leave our poorest citizens more destitute and our alienated citizens more ostracized. At present, they do not, content to corrode our civil liberties and civil rights from within. Free speech is useful only to support a controversial Mideast war, applaud a nonexistent Mideast peace, and lavish accolades and faint praise on highly trained and highly dissatisfied American troops who can‟t hear your useless support regardless. We have no more time, energy, or blood to waste for their culture war! Our national resources are precious, yet to corrode a more perfect union, the Christian conservatives have internationalized their useless modern Culture Crusade to
carve Western cultural imperialism through distant sands with the M-16 and the bunker buster. This absurd endeavor to force peace upon fundamentalist Islam avoids with all the arrogance of a former slave state the first rule of peaceful cosmopolitan cohabitation – communication. Whatever one can say to disrespect the liberal Democrats, the one reason that African Americans have supported them so uniformly for so long is that the liberal Democrats are willing to talk to Black people. They won‟t accomplish much, or speak unless election season approaches, but they are willing (some more than others, of course) to have the conversation, some of the time. The Religious Right has promoted itself as both religious and right without bothering to talk to people based on race alone. Jerry Falwell and Al Sharpton are both Christian reverends: exactly why are they such polar opposites ideologically? Simple. The Christian conservatives, drenched in the blood of their Confederate forefathers, hate and condemn difference. African Americans, since 1619, represent difference in our society, and the Christian conservatives must eliminate difference, or sacrifice their very souls. Simple communication would save so much ritual knifework. Blood stains the sands of Mosul and Fallujah and Tikrit, just as its crimson siren blares upon the gravel of Brooklyn and Washington and Los Angeles. Our founders' American experiment lies upon cold white linoleum, a discarded laboratory failure crashed against the inflexible Christian fundamentalist fanatics, who fly Boeing jumbo jets of blame and judgment and scorn into the glass and steel constructs of a scared, shivering, emaciated population who fight heroically to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States of America from all enemies foreign and domestic, and fail miserably. Silence allows terrorism victory. So does simplicity.