Conformity

"The average man is a conformist, accepting miseries and disasters with the stoicism of a cow standing in the rain." -- Colin Wilson

Here's to you, the blind conformist, the jingoistic patriot. You don't want to rock the boat. You know who you are ... you're the guy who is so unconfident in yourself that you have to sway with the prevailing winds of popularity. You don't have any real opinions. You don't need them. Someone on talk radio or Fox News is happy to give them to you. Who cares if what they say is as fickled as your allegiances.

You do not want to be burdened down by the facts. The facts that you are given are repeated like a mantra ... even though they have no basis in fact or are dubious at best: Sean Hannity

Just one example:

HANNITY: "It doesn't say anywhere in the Constitution this idea of the separation of church and state." (8/25/03)

FACT: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." (1st Amendment)

The Document Sean Hannity Doesn't Want You To Read

But that doesn't bother you either. Your own president uses the same techniques of repitition and attacking the messenger. If you disagree with something he does, you "hate" the president. If you're not with us, you're against us. If you disagree, you are a terrorist. Blah, blah, blah.

Your congressional leaders join in the fun too. People like Bill Frist give new meaning to the phrase flip-flopper. He has never met a prevailing wind that he didn't sway to. For the president when it was fashionable and against when it would help his own presidential run. For or against stem cell research depending on which week you ask him. For or against the Dubai Ports Deal depending on what his colleagues say.

And when real rebels, like Senator Russ Feingold, actually calls the President on one of his many errors, Bill Frist makes an asinine statement, "I was hoping deep inside that the leadership in Iran and other people who really have the U.S. not in their best interests are not listening because of the terrible, the terrible signal it sends.". Let me get this straight ... he is worried that pointing out how the President is violating our Constitution will send the wrong message to other countries. You, Mr. Frist, with your riches and your exagerrated southern drawl to seem like a "common" person, are embarrassing.

"Patriotism is a pernicious, psychopathic form of idiocy." -- George Bernard Shaw

You all have what is called cognitive dissonance, buyer's remorse if you will. You bought what Dubya was selling 6 years ago. You were fooled into supporting an unsupportable war. You are afraid to admit you were wrong, so you keep changing your tune to fit the facts. Who cares if when the war started, you said:

Chris Matthews: “We’re all neo-cons now,” he crowed on April 9, 2003, hours after a Saddam Hussein statue tumbled in Baghdad.

“We’re proud of our president. Americans love having a guy as president, a guy who has a little swagger, who’s physical, who’s not a complicated guy like Clinton or even like Dukakis or Mondale, all those guys, McGovern. They want a guy who’s president. Women like a guy who’s president. Check it out. The women like this war. I think we like having a hero as our president. It’s simple.”

Tony Snow of FOX News: "Tommy Franks and the coalition forces have demonstrated the old axiom that boldness on the battlefield produces swift and relatively bloodless victory. The three-week swing through Iraq has utterly shattered skeptics’ complaints."

You like to float out weak-minded centrists like Matthews and Alan Colmes and call them liberals. Colmes said - "Now that the war in Iraq is all but over. Should the people in Hollywood who opposed the president admit they were wrong?"

War-Loving Pundits

"Patriotism is the virtue of the vicious." -- Oscar Wilde

The temporary comfort of patriotism will be replaced by the embarrasment of history. Joseph McCarthy and those that supported him thought they were being patriotic too.

I heard a great interview with director David Cronenberg on NPR this last week. He talked of many things, including the nature of his movies. They generally address those unpleasant characteristics of each of our thoughts or personalities that we don't want to admit. He made a statement something to the effect that society needs both conformity and rebellion. Without the respect of being in a society, anarchy would prevail, but without those that would rebel and point out the limitations of society and it's leaders, dictatorship would prevail. It's the duty of writers, artists, activists, etc. to be vigilant. He's right ... but it's not only the duty of artists to do this. As former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor (and Reagan appointee) spoke of recently, it is the duty of citizens to be vigilant or else the balance of power of the government will be swayed by "naked partisan reasoning". It was her, not some wacked-out liberal like me, that spoke of the fear of us sinking into a dictatorship:

O'Connor, a former Arizona state senator, is accustomed to political jostling. But, as she rightly said last week, democracy itself is jeopardized when critiques metastasize into threats over specific rulings. Such judicial bullying, O'Connor pointed out, is how dictators thrive in former Communist and Third World countries. She reportedly added, "It takes a lot of degeneration before a country falls into dictatorship, but we should avoid these ends by avoiding these beginnings."

Retired Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor speaks up against political attacks on courts

Take solace in the fact that civilization requires both conformity and rebellion. Unfortunately, we have way too much of the former and not enough of the latter. You are fulfilling your role all too well.

"One of the great attractions of patriotism it fulfills our worst wishes. In the person of our nation we are able, vicariously, to bully and cheat. Bully and cheat, what's more, with a feeling that we are profoundly virtuous." -- Aldous Huxley

With much cudos to Great White Bear and his recent rant: WHY I AM SO F***ING ANGRY!!!!!. His passion and intelligence are always inspiring to me.