conservatism

Save the American Small Town?

JarretR 9 Comments

“Well I was born in a small town, And I can breathe in a small town”

— John Mellencamp

“There is only one good thing about small town, You know that you want to get out”

— Lou Reed

America is a vast landscape, both in its geographic expanse and its demographic diversity. But if there’s one place in which, culturally speaking, the signifying torch of “America” still burns brightest, it’s in the small town. Not a single small town, of course, but the thousands upon thousands of Mayberrys that dot the American landscape — from the oldest New England settlements, to the Midwestern corn baskets, to the Southern white-picket fence farmsteads, to the West-Coast logging villages.

If you grew up in a heathen-infested big city like New York, Boston, or (gasp!) San Francisco, then you likely can’t appreciate the potent brew of aw-shucks Americanness that supposedly streams in the blood of every red-white-and-blue hayseed. Being from a small town is like being born with microscopic Lee Greenwood midichlorians in your circulatory system; it’s an instant indicator of authentic Americana. In much of the popular imagination, a small-town provenance means you’re from — in the infamous words of a former red-state governor and notorious airhead — the “Real America.”

Or so goes the popular myth. But if small-town America is the “Real America,” then Real America is in serious decline. The American small town ain’t what it used to be, and that’s both a good thing and a bad thing.

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The Occult Roots of Modern Conservatism

JarretR 7 Comments

Quick, off the top of your head, who’s the intellectual founder of modern conservatism? Maybe you think it was Edmund Burke, the 18th-century Irish statesman who critiqued the French Revolution and served as an intellectual foil for leftist radical Thomas Paine. Or perhaps you think that modern conservatism stems from the 20th-century British political philosopher Michael Oakeshott, who ruminated on the “conservative disposition” that was supposedly “cool and critical in respect of change and innovation.” Then again, maybe you think modern conservatism goes back to Sarah Palin, who once saw Russia from her house.

If you picked any of these figures, you’re wrong. Modern conservatism doesn’t stem from a well-known political philosopher or a politician. The foundations of modern conservatism lay in the teachings of a disembodied spirit-entity known as “Seth,” as channeled through the writings of a mid-20th century occultist named Jane Roberts.

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Make the Great Lakes Sick Again

JarretR 2 Comments

A long time ago, Jesus and Ronald Reagan took some time off from cracking the skulls of petulant Berkeley protestors to write the Christian Bible. After receiving divine inspiration from the prophets in the oil, gas, and coal industries, Reagan wrote the now famous verse in Genesis 1:26: “Then God said: Let us make human beings in our image, after our likeness. Let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, the birds of the air, the tame animals, all the wild animals, and all the creatures that crawl on the earth.”

Ever since that sacred meeting between The Gipper and Hey-Zeus, the unofficial Republican platform has loosely revolved around the Dominion Mandate, which supposedly gives man (and maybe woman, if she asks politely and still has supper ready) the right to exercise dominion over the earth and plunder its natural resources at will for the glory of God and Exxon Mobile. Of course, not all Christians subscribe to this hollow interpretation of Scripture, and not everyone who wants to defile the natural world is a Christian. Consider President (“I got 3 million fewer votes than Hillary Clinton”) Trump.

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Dependency in the Age of American Fascism

JarretR 2 Comments

Conservatives harbor an aversion to all-things “public.” They tend to see the world through a deeply individualistic lens in which there’s no public interest, only private gain. Their world is one in which capitalism is not a system created by human beings that’s subject to human flaws and shortcomings, but a sanctified doctrine received from atop Mount Sinai for the purpose of separating the worthy from the unworthy via an unassailable “market” that capriciously decides who shall rot in shantytowns and who shall lord from golden penthouses.

Of all the ideas that come together to “make” conservatism, chief among them is that the pursuit of material wealth and social power through capitalism constitutes the ultimate human purpose on this earth. In other words: it’s the money, stupid. For the Right, wealth is both the means and the ends to measuring human worth. This is why, during the long buildup to the 2016 presidential election, protests from warbling scribblers like Charles Krauthammer, Cal Thomas, and Peter Wehner that Donald J. Trump was “not a conservative,” did little to damage Trump’s appeal to legions of Republican voters.

The Big Orange Tyrant now sits in the Oval Office as the leader of a conservative party that dominates American government at the federal, state, and local levels. Either Donald Trump isn’t a conservative, or he hoodwinked millions of conservatives into supporting his lurch towards the presidency. I’m willing to give conservative voters more credit than are conservative pundits. Voters know that Trump is conservative. His wealth is all the proof they need.

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Donald Trump, Florida’s Wild Hogs, and Capitalism’s Final Triumph

JarretR 1 Comment

The hogs seemed terrified that night. A few days after Christmas 2016, I decided to take an evening walk in the balmy December air that, for a few weeks a year, makes the state of Florida a bearable place to inhabit. The problem is that Wesley Chapel, the Pasco County census-designated place (CDP) where my in-laws live, isn’t especially hospitable to the notion of pedestrian traffic. There are some sidewalks, but not enough of them, and most of the time you’d be hard-pressed to see them populated by anything but the odd Acura RL piloted by one of the state’s billions of confused retirees.

Nevertheless, there’s a long stretch of sidewalk snaking alongside Wesley Chapel Blvd., the multi-lane thoroughfare that connects the town’s residents with their sacred auto dealerships, buffet chains, and a Wal-Mart Supercenter the size of Estonia. I decided to make use of this sidewalk for a bit of evening exercise. With my iPod blaring the synthwave sound of 80s retro-future act Gunship, I ambled along as the gas-guzzlers blew past until I arrived at a bridge that separated the marshy natural bushland from the seemingly endless sea of new pavement and big boxes. Suddenly, along the roadside where cement gave way to scrub grass and treeline, two wild hogs — a common wildlife sight in Florida and throughout the South — scurried from the roadside brush and disappeared back into the trees.

Those hogs were as lost, scared, and confused as America was in 2016.

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How the Classic 1980s Film “Gremlins” Predicted Trump’s America

JarretR 5 Comments

‘Tis the season to be jolly, unless you’re a loser. That’s right, the end of 2016 is upon us, and aside from remorselessly swiping David Bowie, Prince, and Natalie Cole from the world of the living, 2016 also installed a boorish orange Philistine into the highest office in the land. There have been numerous watershed elections in U.S. history, but the race that hacked the astringent Trump loogie out of the dankest corner of America’s collective nasal passage and spat him into the Oval Office will surely rank as one of the rankest examples of American democratic excess.

Donald J. Trump — he of the speed-bumped squirrel bouffant and Tang-tinged rice-paper skin — rode a tidal wave of white resentment that allowed him to give high-school swirlys to the aloof establishment nabobs in both political parties. But anyone who cared to pay attention to the festering cloud of amorphous fear mixed with shoulder-chipped resentment that has floated across the Heartland for decades should have noticed that Trump wasn’t some new development in American politics; rather, he’s the culmination of a long-building new American identity: that of the hopelessly besieged.

One seemingly silly movie from the 1980s perfectly envisioned the idea of a besieged America that would push voters into Trump’s charlatan claws some three decades later. I’m talking about the 1984 Steven Spielberg-produced, Joe Dante-directed holiday horror/comedy Gremlins.

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White Riot: President Trump, Capitalism, and the 2016 Election

JarretR 3 Comments
Fuck. Just...fuck.

You’re fired, America!

President Donald Trump. Let that sink in for a minute. If you haven’t yet leaped in front of a bus or fled to Canada, New Zealand, or some other former British colony that uses “ou” in words like “labour,” then you’re probably aware that Donald J. Trump is now President-Elect of the Unites States of America. After writing about the great orange dictator for over a year now, I never once went out and predicted that he would actually pull off the biggest political upset in American history. But I never ruled it out either.

I’ve called Trump a blowhard, a demagogue, an exclusivist tool, a middle-class radical, an authoritarian, a historical revisionist, a Know Nothing, an ethnic nationalist, a sham Evangelical, a rural populist, a faux American Exceptionalist, the Second Coming of Ross Perot, a world-class asshole, and the near inevitable end-result of Movement Conservatism. Now I have to call him president. So let’s try and unpack how America ended up crawling down the deepest, dankest hole since South Carolina decided to form its own republic in the name of preserving Dixie’s former coerced labor force.

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Trump’s Candidacy Reveals the Sham of American Exceptionalism

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Donald Trump bends othe epublican PArty over and makkes it cry "Uncle" in Cleveland.

Donald Trump bends the Republican Party over and makes it cry “Uncle” in Cleveland.

Something smells foul in Cleveland, and for once, it isn’t Lake Erie fish die-offs, the polluted Cuyahoga River, or the Indians’ post-All-Star Break performance. Nope, the stench wafting above the city’s majestic brown and gray skyline came from the Quicken Loans Arena, where the Republican Party officially coronated its own version of a mid-20th century authoritarian Strongman on July 21, 2016.

Historically, America’s conservative party has been no stranger to political scare-tactics, but in his speech to officially accept the Republican presidential nomination, Donald J. Trump — he of the bombastic ego and even more bombastic roadkill coiffure — laid out an apocalyptic vision of America that was beholden less to Ronald Reagan that it was to Immortan Joe.

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Why the Triumph of Trump is Historic…and Totally Expected

JarretR 7 Comments
Donald Trump is going to be the GOP nominee for President. But please finish reading this before you move to Canada.

Donald Trump will be the GOP nominee for President. But please finish reading this before you move to Canada.

Well, Republican America, you asked for it, and now you’ve got it. The Trumpocalypse is officially upon us. A certain Oompa-Loompa-toned, tumbleweed-domed, opulently pecunious, braggadocious real-estate developer, reality TV star, and one-time professional wrestling promoter will officially be the Republican Party’s presidential nominee in the 2016 general election.    

When Donald Trump crushed last-remaining GOP lizard man Ted Cruz in the Indiana primary, he breezed well past the required 1,237 delegates needed to clinch his party’s nomination. In the aftermath, every pundit in America who dismissed the Trump Train as the biggest political carni act in a generation that was doomed to fail worse than New Coke instead issued their confused mea culpas. The list of talking severed heads now stuffed into The Donald’s money bag includes New York Times statistics dweeb Nate Silver, University of Virginia political Nostradamus Larry Sabato, and pretty much everyone else who pays attention to the trillion-dollar sh*itstorm that is American politics.  

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Harriet Tubman, Andrew Jackson, and Making Change in America

JarretR 3 Comments
Harriet Tubman will eventually replace Andrew Jackson on the $20 bill specifically for the purpose of annoying Donald Trump.

Harriet Tubman will eventually replace Andrew Jackson on the $20 bill specifically for the purpose of annoying Donald Trump.

Ever notice how a lot of so-called “controversies” in American culture aren’t actually controversies at all, but instead the externally manifested angst of conservatives who are highly skilled at snatching persecution from the jaws of privilege?

For example, you may have heard that the United States Treasury plans to replace former president, slaveholder, and Indian-wiper-outer Andrew Jackson on the $20 bill with abolitionist and civil rights icon Harriet Tubman. The change to $20 notes won’t occur until 2030, but it’s the first successful result of a concentrated effort to get some female representation on U.S. currency. This is a welcome change that reflects intensely shifting racial, ethnic, and gender demographics in American society, so it stands to reason that some people would complain about it.

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