Saturday, December 22, 2007

Saturday Reading: Regressive Conservatives Stuck in Junior High

Here's a perceptive, in a sad-but-funny way, essay from Common Dreams.

Regressive conservatives aren’t really so hard to figure out. You just need to know the key.

It’s junior high.

Remember those delightful years of comity and enlightenment, comradeship, maturity and social inclusiveness?

Yeah, me neither.

For most folks, those junior high years might as well have been a Wes Craven movie, full of Freddies and Jasons and metaphorical (not to mention the occasional actual) chain-saw murderers. And why wouldn’t they be? Throw a bunch of incredibly immature kids together into a big building, pump them up full of raging hormones and self-centered, consumer-driven, amped-up, self-absorbed me-ism, and see what happens. No need to even light a match.

I suspect that for most of us, these were the nightmare years of awkwardness, emotional pinball, and deep wounds over small slights. Oh, and zits, too - just in case you were somehow feeling too good about yourself on any given day.

But for those of you who have for some reason been wishing that you could return to those golden years, I’ve got news for you: You already have! That’s right, ladies and gentlemen. Courtesy of the regressive right and its Grand Old Party (and isn’t it just grand?), we’re reliving all those many joys again and again.

But here’s the good news: Once you understand this, there’s no longer any mystery to figuring out these clowns.

That’s ‘cause everything you need to know about the regressive right you already learned in junior high.

Junior High was nine kinds of hell for me, and I had no trouble at all recognizing the examples that follow. They ring so true it's painful. Go read and, um, enjoy, the whole thing.