How to Interpret Conservatives

This post by one E. Fulton on the Salon.com chat pages is making the rounds, and worth it:

Conservatives omit several important words in their whining about being oppressed, so in order to understand them you have to add those skipped words back in. For example:

Liberals are against people of faith forcing their faith on other people and intruding on the constitutional notion of religious freedom for all people.

Conservatives can't say anything openly offensive to minority groups, factually incorrect, and otherwise lacking any substance these days without hearing other people say that hate-filled and meritless comments are inappropriate, which is really just more speech, not a limit on anyone's free speech at all, and having to hide behind some faux-rebel posture by claiming victimization from non-existent political correctness being "forced" on them.

We have to use wedge issues to spark a fight to distract from our inability to create sound economic, social or foreign policies and preserve our political dominance among people for whom morals is an easy shorthand for "homophobia," and we hope that our family members and staff won't expose our hypocrisy and lack of integrity, so that we can lie about doing things we say we're against and continue our craven approach to the attacks by us against homosexuals and liberals, whose behavior is no more immoral than ours, but our agenda is more important, because it gives us power, even if our use of it will ruin our country.

Christians are most assuredly not the most persecuted group in the country, and what we want to do with liberals is to claim their call for social justice by making sure that we keep harping on false claims that no one can say "Merry Christmas" and insisting on inappropriate and sacriligious uses of our own religious iconography to force the prohibiting of any religious display by government entities, which we know shouldn't be displaying religious messages anyway.

See? They're really just using a shorthand that makes interpreting their messages a little trickier, but once you see what's not being said in context, it makes perfect, if Machiavellian and totalitarian, sense.

April 30, 2005 1:14 PM |

Categories:

Sites To See

Postclassic Radio! - Kyle Gann's internet radio station that accompanies the blog; see the playlist at kylegann.com

American Mavericks - the Minnesota Public radio program about American music (scripted by Kyle Gann with Tom Voegeli)

Kalvos & Damian's New Music Bazaar - a cornucopia of music, interviews, information by, with, and on hundreds of intriguing composers who are not the Usual Suspects

Iridian Radio - an intelligently mellow new-music station

New Music Box - the premiere site for keeping up with what American composers are doing and thinking

The Rest Is Noise - The fine blog of critic Alex Ross

William Duckworth's Cathedral - the first interactive web composition and home page of a great postminimalist composer

Mikel Rouse's Home Page - the greatest opera composer of my generation

Eve Beglarian's Home Page - great Downtown composer

Just Intonation Network - a meeting place for people interested in alternative tunings

Erling Wold's Web Site - a fine San Francisco composer of deceptively simple-seeming music, and a model web site

The Dane Rudhyar Archive - the complete site for the music, poetry, painting, and ideas of a greatly underrated composer who became America's greatest astrologer

Utopian Turtletop, John Shaw's thoughtful blog about new music and other issues

About this Entry

This page contains a single entry by PostClassic published on April 30, 2005 1:14 PM.

One of the Pleasures of Life in Upstate New York.. was the previous entry in this blog.

May Lentz? Lentz May is the next entry in this blog.

Find recent content on the main index or look in the archives to find all content.

AJ Ads

Introducing
AJ Arts Blog Ads

Now you can reach the most discerning arts blog readers on the internet. Target individual blogs or topics in the ArtsJournal ad network.

Advertise Here

AJ Blogs

AJBlogCentral | rss

culture
About Last Night
Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City
Artful Manager
Andrew Taylor on the business of arts & culture
blog riley
rock culture approximately
CultureGulf
Rebuilding Gulf Culture after Katrina
Dewey21C
Richard Kessler on arts education
diacritical
Douglas McLennan's blog
Flyover
Art from the American Outback
Life's a Pitch
For immediate release: the arts are marketable
Mind the Gap
No genre is the new genre
Rockwell Matters
John Rockwell on the arts
Straight Up |
Jan Herman - arts, media & culture with 'tude

dance
Foot in Mouth
Apollinaire Scherr talks about dance
Seeing Things
Tobi Tobias on dance et al...

jazz
Jazz Beyond Jazz
Howard Mandel's freelance Urban Improvisation
ListenGood
Focus on New Orleans. Jazz and Other Sounds
Rifftides
Doug Ramsey on Jazz and other matters...

media
Out There
Jeff Weinstein's Cultural Mixology
Serious Popcorn
Martha Bayles on Film...

classical music
The Future of Classical Music?
Greg Sandow performs a book-in-progress
On the Record
Exploring Orchestras w/ Henry Fogel
Overflow
Harvey Sachs on music, and various digressions
PostClassic
Kyle Gann on music after the fact
Sandow
Greg Sandow on the future of Classical Music
Slipped Disc
Norman Lebrecht on Shifting Sound Worlds

publishing
book/daddy
Jerome Weeks on Books
Quick Study
Scott McLemee on books, ideas & trash-culture ephemera

theatre
Drama Queen
Wendy Rosenfield: covering drama, onstage and off
lies like truth
Chloe Veltman on how culture will save the world
Stage Write
Elizabeth Zimmer on time-based art forms

visual
Aesthetic Grounds
Public Art, Public Space
Artopia
John Perreault's art diary
CultureGrrl
Lee Rosenbaum's Cultural Commentary
Modern Art Notes
Tyler Green's modern & contemporary art blog
Creative Commons License
This weblog is licensed under a Creative Commons License.