So much language, so little communication. So much engagement, so little engaged. My new fashion magazine, Vague, will spill into cultural criticism. Republicans, avowed haters of 'moral relativism' and modernism, are intent on fighting declining standards and ambiguity of any kind, but in a bifurcated life where good is definitive and the word means nothing. Good is definitively what they say it is.
They're absolutists, not contextualists. Their world embraces no gray areas, but the world is gray. It's pixelated, little definitive islands of black and white, many tiny examples of right and wrong, good and evil, that add up to nothing. That add up to shit, because life is unintelligible. Stepped back the pixels disappear. All is gray. No morality. Rather, arbitrary authority -- rule by violence, force and decree.
Liberals didn't know what liberalism meant. They're finding out, as it's being defined against its opposite, compulsion and intolerance. Liberalism got hijacked like everything, and pixelated into analytical ooze and froth, compromised and corrupted by selfishness and greed meaning more for them, the already-haves who wanted for nothing, and less for everyone else. Step back. No right and wrong, a morality of manners. The little things must be right, a perfection of the parts adding up to horrors.
Perspective is everything.
Republicans were always relativists. Big picture relativists. Relativists of the macrocosm. Liberals were relativists of the microcosm, the freedom to choose how to live within a community that provided context, latitude for self-expression, love and security. And accountability, which Republicans couldn't stand. They wanted to be predators. Without the risk. Predators in a rigged game. Rigged by nature, rigged by God. The same thing, because power is its own justification, life is shit, and nothing means anything.
