Robert Manners

The Right is so wrong!

This evening after dinner, Grandmother went out to the living room to watch television while I remained at the table ensconced in my two new books that arrived today from Amazon (Gowns by Adrian: The MGM Years and Marlene Dietrich: Photographs and Memories); as I reveled in the glamour and gorgeousness of my big new coffee-table picture books, I couldn't help noticing that Grandmother was indulging in the one vice I wish to get her away from — watching The O'Reilly Factor on the Fox News Network (I won't provide a link — if I disapprove of Grandmother watching it, I'm certainly not going to let you). Why won't they develop a V-chip that filters out bad journalism? I loathe the reactionary, alarmist, conservative bent of that network, and I really loathe the pseudo-reasonable whining of that balding demagogue Bill O'Reilly. But what really got me was that O'Reilly was tele-interviewing that wild-eyed lunatic who tried to be President, Pat Buchannan, on the topic of his new book (The Death of America or some such tripe).



What really bothered me, besides the fact that this utter crap was being broadcast into my home, over the cable wire that I pay for, is that even Bill O'Reilly, that "No-Spin-(just-Distortion)" shill for the Power-Through-Widespread-Ignorance Conspiracy, couldn't make Buchanan sound like anything but a rube with a thesaurus and a next-day appointment for frontal lobotomy. This man not only ran for public office, but he actually had supporters! The very thought makes me queasy. And to move me from plain queasiness to throbbing heartsickness is that this freaking fool has four books in print while I have to pour out all my brilliant ideas for free in a blog.



In the brief part of the interview I heard before I had to choose between tearing the cable out of the wall or leaving the house (I chose the latter), I heard this moron state that the American Way of Life that we are currently fighting a war to preserve (oh, is that what we're doing...) was going to cease to exist within the next generation because Americans weren't having babies as fast as other people (and by "Americans," Patty-poo implies "Straight White Christian Conservatives"). O'Reilly asked if he had any solutions to suggest for the correction of this and the many other evils he cites in his book, and the old idiot did exactly what most reactionaries and fundamentalists do: he gracelessly changed the subject, hotly defending the veracity of his statistics and citations, as if the information was in itself the answer.



Ooooh, it just makes me so mad!



These people who agitate against planned parenthood, against abortion, against welfare, and against Medicare-paid birth control seem to believe that the answer to all of our problems of overcrowding, poverty, violence, and strained resources is to have more and more children...which the taxpayers should not have to support. Why is this? Do they actually believe that the world should be overpopulated? Do they believe that the poor and ignorant should continuously bear children that will starve to death in the streets of big cities? I would be very interested in hearing what logical train of ideas led these people to this bizarre conclusion.



Personally, it seems to me that if Medicare paid for birth control, abortions, and tubal occlusions (tube-ties), the pressure on the Welfare system would decrease exponentially in ensuing years...and then forty to sixty years later, those savings would relieve the Social Security system. If half the resources we use to inculcate students with skewed facts about dead history and teaching them to add sums that any microchip can do in one-millionth the time (with a million times the accuracy) was spent teaching them that having children is the biggest responsibility any living creature can undertake...and really prosecuting people who take that responsibility lightly or abuse it...then perhaps we'd see a more controlled population increase. These fundamentalists don't seem to realize that new people ("precious little lives") cost a lot money, use up physical resources like food and water, and increase the burden on institutions (such as public schools and hospitals)...and all of that expense comes out of the money and resources and institutions that those of us who are already here need...not to mention that they have to be paid for out of tax dollars that I would personally prefer to keep for my own use.



What I find funny is that Pitty-Pat's idea about third-world population explosions ending the American way of life that he currently enjoys is true: because it's not middle-class white people in the center of the country who are having all the children in America, it's the recently-immigrated, poorly-educated, socially-enfringed, economically disabled brown people who are producing the majority of children. The Minorities will become, by the end of the next decade, the Majority of our population. Those inner-city ethnic girls who the Republicans and Moral Majorities and Pro-Lifers want to prevent from having abortions and tubal occlusions and Nor-Plant on the Federal dime are the same people decrying the decline in the middle-American-white-folk-raised-on-a-farm Way of Life...and the former will outnumber the latter by quite a margin come 2020. Don't they see their own contradictions? And when you point out those contradictions, they usually change the subject.



I would feel overwhelming contempt for these people, but I'm related to a few of them...and there's so damned many of them! It makes me sick in my soul that such irrational and wilful ignorance passes as "down-home thinking" in so much of this country. That so many people point to their "faith" as if it were fact, refusing to question their own religion though they are perfectly willing to question God's will (side track: when you ask God to do specific things, you are questioning His will...God does what He intends to do whether you want it or not). That though Christ is quoted in their own Holy Bibles as demanding that you "Love your neighbor as you love yourself," they find more and more ways of hating, punishing, and hurting everyone that is different from themselves. There's just no rationality in it. And it makes me angry and sad.



Ooh, look at that...this is a very high soap-box I've climbed up onto, and the height is making me dizzy. I'd better step down now and go back to my Adrian book, to revel in the near-perfection that is our human attempts at emulating the Divine.