Hello again

Hello again. I know that I re-launched this endeavor by promising to be more consistent with my posts, but I’m just now starting to recover from a pretty nasty bug. So, fortified with Gatorade, fresh fruit and peanut butter crackers let us forge ahead. I stumbled across a piece on WSJ.com by James Taranto entitled Oikophobia. I’m always interested in the lines of attack that media establishment types are directing at Progressives, so of course you know I’m going to subject myself to this disingenuous right-wing blather. He begins by quoting neo-conservative Sith Lord Charles Krauthammer’s response to recent left-right engagements over immigration, gay marriage and Cordoba House. “Now we know why the country has become “ungovernable,” last year’s excuse for the Democrats’ failure of governance: Who can possibly govern a nation of racist, nativist, Islamophobes?”

Taranto concludes that what motivates the “cognitive elite,” is “contempt” and “snobbery” for and toward the poor rubes they are destined to lead. He references a term, Oikophobia, as a way of providing a clinical diagnosis for some malignant psychosis infecting the liberal over-class. The term coined by British Philosopher Roger Scruton is outlined as the fear of the familiar, and can be thought of as basically the inverse of xenophobia. With this nifty rhetorical sleight of hand, Taranto has defined the entirety of the conservative world view as inherently American, and views to the contrary as not only alien, but clinically diagnosable. He points to the recent rise in Republican support as evidence of a backlash against a kind of cultural bigotry, rather than the entirely predictable response to a sharp economic downturn. He decries attempts to point out the correlation between the poor performance of the economy, and the rise in populist fervor as “Marxism Lite.” Color me shocked that the business friendly Wall Street Journal thinks that discussions of politics in terms of material deprivation during an economic downturn are illegitimate.

So while you’re out there looking for a job, trying to pay for college, or simply working to make the rent payment this month remember this one thing; conversations about economic inequality are a Marxist plot to destroy America and turn you Muslim, and the only legitimate political cause to champion is the protection of those, whose consistent defense of this country against so-called minority groups (immigrants, gays, African Americans, women, the poor) leads to their defamation as intolerant bigots. If you believe that, we are in bigger trouble than I thought.