Reflections of a Life-Long Republican

March of the Elephants

26 Reasons Why I Don’t Like, or Trust, Democrats. I was raised Republican by a stubborn Irishman who, by every indication of birth, faith and culture, should have been Democrat, but when his father was fired from a government job during the Great Depression, my father simply refused to trust Democrats from that day forward. To him they were mobsters, thugs, lowlifes. He never got past that, never apologized for it, and never backed down. I watched that beautiful man get called names, suffer ridicule and take a lot of heat from far, far lesser minds than his. How did he meet it? With humor and grace and manly strength. That’s how.The community I grew up in was solidly working class, union, Democrat. Period. Man, that was the 1960s. Every one of them, to the last man and woman, suffered 10 years — many, like my father, their entire lives — of grinding poverty followed by a “goddamned dirty war.” Funny thing about things now: lots of folks glorify World War II — with good reason. The folks who raised me hated everything about war, and were quick to say it. A friend of my Dad’s was a Marine Corp tank driver who saw combat in the Pacific, and then in Korea. Said, “Burning Japs out of caves was the worst goddamned thing I ever saw, but I’d do it again, if my country called me.”

Democrat? Most of ’em. And oh so LOVABLE. Trustworthy. Men of spine; mothers who embraced you as their own, didn’t baby you, and told you straight up when you needed a whack; faith as deep as the rivers that ran all ’round us in my grandfather’s beloved Olympic Mountains. And they weren’t little twits.

I happen to be “of discretion” in the Age of Twit. Not long ago, on the blog I run, Washington Rebel, some folks advocated the abolition of the Food and Drug Administration. Of course I immediately placed myself around a summer picnic table, the summer of ’67, and tried to imagine how GROWN MEN AND WOMEN would have reacted to such a statement. Most would have met it in stony silence, hoping the Retard would find something to occupy himself with. One or two might have stepped in and tried a lively correction, but I imagine the bulk of them would have changed the topic to something sane. People simply didn’t tolerate twits. You just never saw it. There were twits, but they weren’t allowed to commandeer the conversation. Conversation was reserved for the adults.

See, they weren’t . . . . oh, how do I say? Weren’t full of themselves. They understood they owed a duty, to God, country, spouse, kids. An Ayn Rand, preaching that there is ONLY the individual, would have been regarded as a psychopath, only people didn’t use those words then. Some woman would have said, quietly, “Poor soul.” They weren’t all about showing you how smart they were. They had spent their youths on fields of battle, wondering, really, ‘Would I see my Mom again?’ My father’s nights were punctuated by bad, bad dreams. “I dreamed about Kraut tanks”, he might sometimes say, unaware that we could hear. Simple things: hoping for the picket fence, the wife and some bratty kids to give the business to. Oh, how they loved! How proud they were!

The Conservative atmosphere was beautifully and accurately captured by Bill Buckley in his Goldwater, the John Birch Society and Me. When I want to remember the moment exactly as it was, I pull that out and read it. Man, that was it! The Republicans had a problem on their hands: what to do with the Twits. If you’ve read anything I’ve posted on . . . . such things, you know where Group T has migrated to. I mean the folks with quick answers, tart tongues, stunted social development. Those guys. And yeah, numerically there are more of them who identify themselves as “liberal”, but you can find them anywhere.

Then came ’68 and the riots and the Student Commies and Dope and Daddy’s little girl putting out, not for the football team, but for the Commune, for guys who looked like girls, didn’t bathe, and needed, for the most part, to be shot, many of whom are now in Congress, running universities, funding “dissent”, advising Obama. Disease and mental illness and violence made a comeback like no one had ever seen. Where did America go?

To Doing Your Own Thing. To the Age of Twit. I have argued, and stand for, the proposition that we won’t think our way out of this. Like any alcoholic, drunkard, glutton or wastrel, we’ll learn the lesson at the cost of blood and peace of mind. I attempt to say that in Because of the Work You Do, uncertain, as I wrote the words, precisely what I meant or what I proposed to do about it. And see the comments to Trimming the Wick, and To My Libertarian Friends. The ones that shocked were those who said, ‘You don’t understand.’

I don’t?

I think I do.

I understand that, in the coming contest between Leviathan and the individual, we have those who claim to understand what “limited government” means, just as we have those who claim to be “progressive.” I make a different claim. I say you don’t know what you’re talking about.

I say events will decide for you, that the present age, the Age of Twit, will come to a crashing halt and, before the Twit-in-Chief is finally seen for what he is, far, far more damage will have been done. This is just a skirmish. Whether marijuana is legal or not will be seen as some sort of psychotic episode wherein reality was shoved aside in favor of King Denial. My advice, if anyone asked me, would be this:

Read Marcus Aurelius. Talk less. And scoff openly at twits.

[ad#insert-large]