Campanastan

V.B. Price's Weekly Column — American Conservatism 2021: Pointless, Hypocritical, Chaotic and Crooked to the Core

American Conservatism 2021: Pointless, Hypocritical, Chaotic and Crooked to the Core V.B. Price

It was naïve of me, no doubt, to believe as a kid that conservatives in America are supposed to preserve tradition, slow inevitable change to a pace the human mind can deal with, be the guardians of the national ethos and conserve resources with the spirit of enlightened frugality. It’s the way my mother and some of my older relatives thought about conservatism in the 1940s. Even then, though, conservatives saw poverty as a moral failure and really didn’t like foreigners very much, or people who didn’t look like white people. They did, indeed, champion hard work but saw “labor” as the “enemy” and were miserly with wages, benefits and social safety nets, as if effort was enough to ensure success without good luck and the leg up of status, class and the “right” race and gender. Still, there seemed to be something honorable about their frugality and their belief in the virtue and practicality of work and saving. My late father-in-law was as honorable and as conservative a person I’ve known. We agreed about virtually nothing when it came to policy. But there wasn’t a crooked bone in his body. He was, in the best sense, an American gentleman — kind, respectful of women, hardworking, generous, neither a spendthrift nor a hoarder and a staunch Republican. He was a straight arrow and an environmentalist. He truly believed it was your duty to leave your camp site cleaner than when you found it. So what happened to his political party? How did conservatives become aligned with a profligate, egomaniacal, misogynist gold-faucet jockey, a tax evader and grifter like Donald Trump, a man who thrives on bankruptcy, who doesn’t pay his bills, who stiffs contractors, who thinks environmentalism is a form of communism, who is a sexual predator and who is adored by white supremacists and bigots, a person who would flagrantly taunt and stalk and mock his female presidential opponent during a televised debate? It has something to do, I know, with a combination of the entitlement of patriarchy, a political party that has shown itself to be generally anti-feminist, embracing a greed for power that is bonded in the psychology of self-righteousness, blaming the other, rationalization and sense of privilege that stimulates hypocrisy at every turn. What could be more hypocritical than the posturing of a Reaganesque Gentleman Cowboy like the conservatives who run the Texas legislature, who recently created an abortion ban that is as deeply disrespectful of women, and as profoundly threatening and dangerous for them, as any misogynist law in America? And on top of that, these conservative gentlemen, the upright guardians of conservative American culture, authorized in that same law private citizens becoming snoops, moral police, prying and spying on their neighbors and more than likely accusing them of being accessories to illegal abortions, all without probable cause. And to top it off, the conservative gentlemen on the Supreme Court refused to give the women of Texas a chance to contest the constitutionality of such law before it wreaks havoc on their private lives and reproductive health. So much for the gentlemanly respect for women. Hypocrisy drives people crazy. Young people in particular find it maddening, especially when adults tell them not to do something then turn around and do it themselves. “Never hit or hurt or disrespect a woman,” is the cowboy gentleman’s code. But not when it comes to abortion in Texas. Hypocrisy used to be hateful, and hypocrites used to be seen as reprehensible moral vagrants trading on their privilege while indulging their worst vices. But we don’t seem to mind much anymore. In fact, hypocrisy seems to be the dominant MO of a vast segment of our business and political leadership. Not all of it, but a troubling great swath of it. Some pundits say it has to do with American “exceptionalism” and the arrogance it spawns. But virtually every nation thinks it’s the best. The Chinese do, so do the Russians; certainly the British and the French and the Brazilians do. No nation can live up to its own hype, especially if it’s so riddled with hypocrites that its national pride seems pointless. Can a whole culture be without purpose? It can be if it’s become the victim of a class of parasites willing to say anything and do anything, damned be the consequences. We seem to be a culture that’s come to waste itself pursuing, as political scientist Richard Fox has said, “endless wars to achieve endless peace.” We’re a culture that allows whole cities to be nearly destroyed by flood and storms, like New Orleans, because we — and the Chinese, the Russians, the Indians and virtually everyone else in the industrial world — denied climate change and its dire predictions for so long that we’ve actually let them come true. We live in a culture in which a large minority of our people have been hoodwinked into believing, by arch hypocrites, that wearing masks and getting vaccinated in a deadly pandemic is an act of political coercion, a con game of “junk science” swindling them of their freedom. We live in a culture that demonizes people from other cultures, that is still racist, practicing segregation in multiple gross and subtle ways, a culture of crippling poverty and obscene wealth, a culture in which poor people are lambasted for using food stamps and rich people are thought to be clever for evading taxes, a culture that boasts of its democratic form of government while working strenuously in some states to make it next to impossible for people of modest means to vote, a culture in which a class of charlatans with political power claim the validity of “alternative facts.” Yes, we also live in a culture in which a still slim majority of us believe what Rabbi Danya Ruttenbergsays that “our job is to take care of one another. To fight for a world where everyone is safe, is free, is whole. All of us. In this together.” But ours is the same culture in which a large minority apparently believe we should only take care of ourselves and let the devil take the hindmost, a world in which even good men, seemingly selfless servants of the people can offend, threaten, sexually molest and generally abuse their female associates and employees while supporting policies that further the cause of economic and environmental justice. Hypocrisy isn’t just the province of conservatives. *Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it Comments can be left at the Mercury Messenger. They can also be posted on this blog, but V.B. Price won't see them.   "Do you mind if I sit back a little? Because your breath is very bad." - Donald J. Trump.

Pausing to Remember: Twenty Years Gone

I am usually at a loss for word on this date. It's been like this for quite some time. In the early years after 9/11 I would get calls from journalists. Those calls stopped after a few years, although I believe I got one in 2011.

This year has been different. It's a decadal anniversary so more people seem to be engaged. I have received the usual messages from those who frequently send them but I have received some from people I have not heard from since the first one. It's been quite enjoyable.

I am providing a copy of a one-pager by editor Susan Goldberg from the September 2021 issue of National Geographic. Its title is 'Pausing to Remember'.

If you’re age 30 or older, you probably remember what you were doing when you heard about the events of September 11, 2001. It’s one of those indelible, where-were-you moments, like the attack on Pearl Harbor or the Kennedy assassination for earlier generations.

This month, we commemorate the 20th anniversary of “9/11”—that instantly recognizable, vastly inadequate shorthand to describe a day that killed nearly 3,000 people and launched the longest war in modern U.S. history.

Two stories in this issue explore 9/11. One’s an on-the-ground report from Afghanistan. The other features still life photography of seemingly ordinary objects—a pair of boots, a watch, a snapshot—that aren’t ordinary at all. These objects, some never before displayed, came from the rubble of the World Trade Center in New York, a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, and the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia. Those were the sites where al Qaeda terrorists crashed hijacked planes, instantly creating a frightening new world.

The plane that hit the Pentagon was American Airlines Flight 77, bound for Los Angeles. At 9:37 a.m., five hijackers slammed it into the building’s west side, killing themselves, 59 others aboard, and 125 on the ground. Among the dead were eight people traveling to an ecology conference sponsored by National Geographic. Every year on September 11, at our Washington, D.C., headquarters, we pause to remember them.

Three of the National Geographic travelers were 11 years old: Bernard Brown, Asia Cottom, and Rodney Dickens, each with a future whose promise would never be realized. Each child had been selected to attend the conference. Each child, according to tributes written at the time, was smart, determined, kindhearted. Today, when Bernard, Asia, and Rodney would be 31 years old, it’s devastating to think of our collective loss.

On 9/11 we also lost three caring teachers: Sara Clark, James Debeuneure, and Hilda Taylor, who accompanied the students. Sara, 65, and her fiancé were making wedding arrangements. James, 58, a father and grandfather, enjoyed golf and collecting art. Hilda, 58, a mother and grandmother, loved to cook and work in her garden.

The others whose passing we mourn were National Geographic employees. Ann Judge, 49, arranged trips around the world for our journalists and executives; Joe Ferguson loved teaching children about geography. He was 39.

We salute those we lost 20 years ago with this quote from the Pentagon 9/11 Memorial: “We claim this ground in remembrance of the events of September 11, 2001. To honor the 184 people whose lives were lost, their families, and all who sacrifice that we may live in freedom. We will never forget.”

Ann Campana Judge was my younger sister. She is on the far right in the picture. I was teaching my Environmental Studies class at the University of New Mexico Tuesday morning when I saw Mary Frances standing in the back of the room. I knew something was amiss. She told me that American Airlines called to say that Ann had a boarding pass for flight 77. They could not verify that she was on the plane. They called later that night to verify that she was. I miss Annie each day.

 

"A little bit of irreverence is good; a lot is better." - Ann Campana Judge (1951-2001)