I was about 12. My father worked at Logistics Command at WPAFB. There was a cassette tape circulating there, of all places, he brought home that criticized our involvement in Vietnam, based on cultural knowledge. I don't remember specifics, but it argued we had no idea what the fuck we were doing. Dad had concluded, I believe, that Dayton might be the Siberia of the Air Force. Step on the wrong toes in Washington and there you go. The base, in any case, was impressive.
He said they got some brilliant people. He wondered what they were doing there. I thought there might be a hierarchy of Siberias. Anyway, I was an instinctively conservative kid but I wasn't stupid. The info in the cassette made me mad. And made me a lifelong liberal though I was a preservationist, interested in the old ways and cultural continuity. So, a weird mix. I would have identified as a Democrat because of Kennedy. I stayed a Latin Mass sort of preservationist but never bought the broad brush.
Not after the cassette. I wanted to look deeper. I mistrusted positions backed by enthusiasm and emotional appeal. I hated unloading, putting your baggage on someone else and lighting them on fire. It infuriates me. I don't know where that came from. Again, I was 12. My rust-belt city was beginning to fail. The Catholic Church threw out Gregorian Chant for the most insipid guitar music ever. I remember arguing in grade school the National Guardsmen at Kent State needed to be considered, that they couldn't be that different from the students. Something went horribly wrong.
I felt incredibly alone. Maybe every kid does, I don't know, in their individual way. I disliked Nixon. More confusion. I couldn't understand how he got elected, but when he got caught I said we needed to own our role in it. We elected the fucker. Who did we think it reflected on? He won, a real landslide. A super-humongous, incredible, never-before-seen or to-be-repeated landslide by a certain standard. But, no, we needed to feel better about ourselves by making a bonfire out of Nixon.
So I'm dying these days. Unloading is the new America. Bonfires worldwide. We were always vain, in an innocent, rah-rah, everybody-look-how-great-we-are way. Now it's horrible. Worst unloading I've ever seen. Calvinist, witch-hunt shit. Life-hating shit. Kill the messenger, his entire family, and blow his country to bits shit. Did somebody hurt our feelings? Awwww. We hurt our own feelings. We sensed an end to an imagined, idealized America and threw a tantrum not wanting to grow up.
We're stuck in a frat house phase. Another thing, I evolved an attitude about the south. Confusion, bordering on bigotry. To my Catholic sensibilities something was off. I didn't like how southerners, like Lyndon Johnson, presented. I saw the preachers on TV, when that started, and thought, this is religion? As ever enthusiasm put me off. Unloading, self-righteousness and a lack of balance concerned me. And, in this puritanical context, their women went to church looking like prostitutes.
Confusing! I ended up in the south. My assessment has been solidified. I understand now why the women dress that way and the makeup. I read books, by southern women. It's an expression of white male power. Of privilege. They don't work in the fields! You want to be as obviously, pretentiously far from that as possible. I wonder why. Somebody was happily working there on their behalf, we're told, and being treated very well. That's unloading at a structural level. Ask black people.
The whole country is the Confederacy. Read about the Confederacy. Notice the fixation on ownership. Property. Listen to black people. They're the experts. And stand in awe of the injustice. If it's a byproduct of something larger, like authoritarianism, or religious fundamentalism, or a hatred of creation that encompasses everything, the bigotry being a product of that because women and minorities are archetypally perceived as being closer to nature, then fine. But the interface, for us, is injustice. Horrific injustice, and it's the leading edge of the thing.
Our conservatives aren’t conservatives. The country is innately liberal. Democrats are conservatives. Republicans are insane.
