Warriors, Come Out and Play

A few days ago I was flipping through the latest entry on Roger’s blog, about the waning excitement of political conventions, and something from one of the mainstay commenters, a weirdly enthusiastic ultra-right-winger, caught my eye. In the midst of some vacuous interpretation of the Punch-and-Judy-esque Republican primaries (he refers to it as “the best show on earth right now,” I guess because his religion prohibits The Vampire Diaries), the reader digressed to share a teary-eyed conservative nostalgia nugget:

“My favorite convention moment is Pat Buchanan's speech in 1992. The culture war speech. It could be given again today, harder, and Newt [Gingrich] would be the guy to give it.”

In case you’re not familiar with that speech, here it is:

I don’t really care about “culture war” as it pertains to elderly white men’s strident ideas of propriety in civil life. For one thing, this is a blog where I mostly talk about TV shows I dislike; political demagoguery isn’t really my forte. But mainly I’m just emotionally uninvolved with the populist right-wing majority. The other day I turned on the TV to some paid local program sponsored by the Knights of Columbus, reporting on a pro-life march, and I was struck by how distinctly less incensed I was compared to how I’d feel about a similarly motivated action on a major, national scale by an organization with a face. I’m unmoved in any sense by a parade of 70-year-olds in silly hats talking about the sanctity of life. It’s unimportant for the same savage, shameful reason that you don’t share most popular culture with your grandparents: they are pretty unimportant. Their advanced age has eroded their sense of scale and perspective; even if dementia has not set in, delusion has become reality. They’re not bad people, they just grew up in a time where critical thinking wasn’t a priority, and “morality” was just a synonym for the context-free mantras of their religious lives. If the overwhelming success of the Obama regime (at least in 2008-09) proved anything culturally, it’s that the sexless, regimented style of life that governs this huge chunk of society’s members is no longer the driving force of its front page, its façade.

In the context of the recent inundation of that “front page” conservatism’s clash with mainstream civil rights issues, it has become even less natural to consider the entirety of “traditionalist” America as a serious entity in some supposed conflict. Last week, when the Susan G. Komen foundation was forced to rapidly recant its discontinuation of support of Planned Parenthood due—as the piece I linked would have it—to the outcry of liberal supporters via Facebook and similar platforms, the subsequent corresponding accusations of liberal strong-arming from pro-lifers did not result in any equivalent anti-abortion action. And how could it? Apart from the fact that most weren’t really concerned so much for PP’s abortion services for its myriad other health supports for low-income women, the culturally-divided component of the issue was hopelessly lopsided to begin with. Even if pro-life agents were as numerous and vocal (in theory) as their opponents, the ability to leverage the tools of change weren’t in their hands.

As the Komen Kontroversy occurred, PP’s fellow low-rent provisions organization J.C. Penney was forced to defend itself against One Million Moms (that’s probably a lowball figure) who blasted the department whores for hiring militant homosexual activist Ellen DeGeneres as spokesgay. If you’ve been following and agreeing with my train of thought, none of this is surprising or very meaningful. Ellen is the embodiment of bland, non-partisan pop media appeal, and she happens to like Vs instead of Ps, so of course she is enemy number one to the pie-eyed banshees that are conservative mothers. They flipped their shit, the company more or less ignored it, Earth keeps spinning. But what’s more telling is that, on Tuesday, none other than Bill “Thing Fucking Sucks” O’Reilly came to J.C. Penney's defense. His argument was basically that OMM’s attack is tantamount to a McCarthyist crusade that impinges on the rights of a private enterprise to do whatever it wants. That happens to be an incorrect figurative analysis, but no matter: O’Reilly is one of the few conservative bullies who seems like he could pull off snatching your lunch money, so good on him for sticking up for the lesbian, or at least her right to push cheap perfume. But it’s right to feel disoriented by his position, much as he’s maintained a pinky grip on his “independent watchdog” persona so long post-Lying Liars and How They Are Bad (whatever that boring Al Franken screed was called). Five years ago, O’Reilly published Culture Warrior, some kind of folksy pamphlet—he’s wearing a windbreaker on the cover, what an everyguy—outlining the machinations of the ACLU, real and perceived socialists and rich media moguls (besides… his bosses, I guess) seeking to undermine traditional values with their godless hedonism by being real sneaky about it. I don’t know, I didn’t fucking read it, but it seems like pretty boilerplate keep-the-hippies-down stuff. The point is that Bill O’Reilly really is Bill O’Reilly: the voice of the generically racist, homophobic mass who masquerade their reactionary nonsense fear as reasonable, realistic fear.  He made his first, worlds-colliding appearance on The Colbert Report to promote the book, where he claimed to be an “effete, sensitive” charlatan—I wonder if he himself knew whether or not he was being sarcastic.

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Bill O'Reilly
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog Video Archive

Watch that clip of O’Reilly’s Tuesday show and hear the tone of ambivalent submission in his voice: if the number-one-rated conservative bulldog, the mayor of White Patriarchville, is like, “hold on, stop being assholes,” it clearly can’t mean what he wants you to think—that he’s his own pundit. Nobody thinks that, especially not Fox News; he wouldn’t still be on the air if anyone believed the lie. The qualm is in fact an evidentiary model for the ineffectuality and farcicality of “traditionalism,” in any time frame, as a cultural force.

That’s even prior to the fact that the Ellen thing stands as proof of the farce of traditionalism in the techno-modernist age. Am I crazy for thinking that the rise of social media as a predominant force for popular socio-political organization seems to preclude the serious inclusion of anti-progressive missives into the popular comment? How can there be a cultural war that is in any way real when “culture” as we process it is mostly populated and entirely informed by secular progressivism? Note that when I parrot any of this CNN-speak I’m just trying to temper my general argument that the other “side” of the “war” seems to have virtually no intellectual ammo. Another reader on Roger’s post threw back at the Buchanan fan Elie Wiesel’s comment on the speech: “I could see the swastikas,” to which the original guy merely claims the prescience of Pat’s speech by citing the “tragedy” that some more abortions have happened since then. (He’s right! Time does move in a forward, linear fashion.) Later he resurfaces to accuse the left of stoking the culture war (to the right’s great dismay, of course) via the above events, plus Obama’s recent Catholics-n-contraceptives ruling* along with the next-level Prop 8 shutdown. I spent five minutes trying to figure how that was a counter-argument to an accusation of veiled bigotry until I realized that it’s not even a response. The non-committal jibe—I guess I would call it “manipulative,” but that implies normal brain function—is uniform with the character of defenses provided continually by such types. It becomes impossible to argue with the pro-family crowd because, like those geriatrics waving their homespun banners about issues that have nothing to do with them, they’re not real players in this arena, this portion of reality. Twenty years since, Buchanan appears in that speech to be the villainous college dean from a third-rate Animal House rip-off, railing against nothing so much as the concept of “being cool.” But did the passage of time dull the relevancy of his message, or just its impact? The fascistic comments directly below the video (hey, don’t read them) are dully felt, because the delivery mechanism is itself a tool and product of progressivism, literally built by innovation and free thinking. Don’t blame the racist assholes for being hypocrites, though: they simply have no other channel on which to be heard. It’s like bemoaning the marketing of calorie-heavy food while somebody offers you a Big Mac as you walk out of a barren desert.

I’m working under the assumption that the real American schism between progressives and conservatives is even more pronounced than it was when “the culture war” was coined, judging from the practically interdependent rise of the Tea Party and the Occupy movement, both radical and “radical” in their ways. But what the hell is the culture war? Why should I be bothered to pay attention to it? In ’92 Buchanan named it the central, decisive war “for the soul of America.” Would that phrase, of the impassioned “soul,” even have rhetorical meaning if it weren’t for the efforts of radical creatives throughout history (the Walt Whitmans and Boyz II Mens of American culture) whose impulses would have been reviled by the modern religious right? The question isn’t whether the war is over—it’s whether it really ever began in the first place. I’m a young man, and I’m fairly privileged, but the economy isn’t so good and I’ve still got to hustle to make something of my life. So don’t waste my time—if I want an imaginary war, I’ve got an Xbox.

*This was amended yesterday to allow institutions to defer the birth-control provisions to the insurers themselves. As my above tirade hopefully accommodates, this absurd bureaucratic loop-de-loop serves no material purpose and will probably appease few of the rule’s opponents.