Via Rod Dreher, ‘Rednecks And The Two Randys’
‘That’s how I felt listening to Terry Gross and the other NPR show after listening to Jackie talk briefly about the Squad. Our media elites will fall all over themselves to defend and celebrate people like Ilhan Omar and Randy Rainbow, but guys like the middle-aged man who came down from my attic today dripping sweat, and who can’t bear people like Ilhan Omar — in the eyes of our liberal elites, they’re what’s wrong with this country.’
I’d rather not have to choose between ‘Jackie’ and ‘Randy Rainbow, ‘ personally.
Unfortunately, however, choices can be very real when it comes to people, coalitions and politics. Often these choices boil down to the lesser of evils, or certainly, compromises of and more compromises. When a lot of change overwhelms our instititutions, at a time when those institutions are arguably seriously over-built and over-leveraged, well, arguably, here we are.
Where did I put that hobby horse? Beneath the appeal to experts (some ‘studies’ professors, some social scientists, and some scientists) is a constant showcasing of activist concerns at NPR (the assumption of moral rightness and truthfulness of activist causes, mostly, the vague moral suspicion of religious belief, conservation of established traditions, corporations etc).
I find myself disagreeing often, despite the high production value.
As I choose to see the world, when it comes to politics, much activist logic is, well, radical and revolutionary, the truths activists have to tell coming with destabilizing dangers and deadly serious risks (they can be important truths). Not only change but maybe even violent change. Certainly liberatory.
If I go looking for ignorance, in-group/out-group dynamics, a desire to believe, I can look no further than myself, frankly. Such urges never really go away, though they can be channeled better; mediated and expressed through love, family, friendships, work and some attention and care with one’s own mind through deeper reasoning and ‘big ideas.’
Looking for and working hard to get at the truth really matters.
What I’m pretty sure of: Such impulses certainly can’t be directed towards what I see as modern Selfhood tribalism (from tattoos to Romantic Primitivism to political idealism and identity coalition-building) without consequences for everyone.
What is true of religious organiziations, traditions and corporations, of course, is also true of political orgs and missionary secular humanists.
Also from the American Conservative, ‘Wendell Berry Goes To Indiana:’
Wendell Berry, on “tolerance and multiculturalism,” from his essay “The Joy of Sales Resistance”:
‘Quit talking bad about women, homosexuals, and preferred social minorities, and you can say anything you want about people who haven’t been to college, manual workers, country people, peasants, religious people, unmodern people, old people, and so on.’
Addition: The search for religious purity through a relationship with God, purity of the spoken word, and purity of of the perfectibility of Man and the Human could have some serious overlap, here, folks.
