All right, my latte-lapping liberal loverfriends. Put down your hashish and drag your lazy-assed, Birkenstocked feet over to my hemp sofa. Now listen up, ‘cause I’m only gonna say this once—‘cause my biodegradable, green-powered laptop only has four minutes of flower juice left. It’s time for a status report on—
THE VAST LEFT WING CONSPIRACY
Ahem. I know some of you don’t like capitalist letters, but I think we all need to recognize the importance of being as edgy and outspoken as possible nowadays, what with the jingoistic Bush hegemony setting the final phase of its “Fuck Everything” campaign into motion.
Whenever something turns out wrong,
The Decider is to blame-O;
It’s George Bush’s fault!
It’s George Bush’s fault!
It’s George Bush’s fault!
The Decider is to blame-O!
Whoo wee, I never tire of that one! Anyhow, what follows is Top Secret, for liberal elitists only. (Not that the wingers know how to read anything with more than two syllables or three paragraphs…) We’ve got some good news, some bad news, and a lot of group hugs to pass around.
Item 1. EvolutionStatus: Decisive Position Advantage, No MomentumThis is one of our biggest success stories. We have the young-Earth creationists and the intelligent design creationists on the run. They sought battle, and now that we have defeated these lunatics frontally in the courts of law and public opinion, their strategy has imploded into a series of tactical denials and finger-shaking. These techniques are not likely to persuade impressionable bystanders. As long as we keep pounding the evolution message and they keep shooting themselves in their last remaining foot with their vitriolic rejection of science so easy that a second-grader could figure it out, then we will continue to own this theater of the Culture Wars.
Item 2. Gay MarriageStatus: Moderate Position Disadvantage, Strong Momentum AdvantageThe American public is still not ready for Adam and Steve, and the wingers have made gay marriage one of their top two offensives (along with abortion). With gay marriage they have won a long series of tactical victories that has, in effect, kept the battle more cultural than political. However, the wingers are undermined by their impressive legal victories and political ownership of the battlefield, because while they have clamped down on the legal oppression and silencing of gays, they have utterly failed to stamp out gay culture itself—which has sewn the seeds of popular discontent. Our hero in this is Hollywood; they have popularized gay culture and continue to show Americans that gays are not bogeymen—although they do know how to party hearty. Meanwhile, simultaneous with this, mainstream American culture has become so homophobic—especially for men—that some natural resistance has arisen. Men are going to want to embrace each other again, without having to deal with the “gay” factor, because embracing one another is something that human beings naturally do. For many people whose own sensuality is repressed on grounds of their culture’s hypersensitive attitude toward sexuality, the gay issue is going to become old and boring, and, then, forgotten. Therefore, even though today we liberals are in a bad position on the battlefield, the momentum is strongly in our favor. If the wingers continue to focus on this issue so fervently, then Americans will continue to tire of homophobia. At the same time, gay rights activists will continue to popularize gay culture and teach other people that gays deserve the legal and cultural benefits of marriage.
Item 3. Global WarmingStatus: Slight Position Disadvantage, Decisive Momentum AdvantageThe science kept building and building, until in the last two years the cultural dam finally burst, and now global-warming deniers are utterly collapsing. Corporate America is turning around on this almost overnight, although the institutional momentum of the private sector (and the private greed of well-positioned individuals) will continue to be an enemy for years if not decades. At least some of the major environmental realities of global warming may already be too late to avoid, but politically this battle has finally turned in our favor after many years of a trench-style stalemate. Our battlefield position is still weak, with the polluter philosophy currently much more entrenched in our everyday lives than the environmental one, but with the corporatists, libertarians, and other traditionally antagonistic factions now joining us liberals to fight global warming, our momentum has become unstoppable and change ineluctable.
Item 4. Stem Cell ResearchStatus: Moderate Position Advantage, Slight Momentum AdvantageLiberals were mostly successful in communicating to the people that the issue of embryonic stem cell research is a healthcare issue, while separating it from the losing issues of abortion and cloning. This has resulted in major public support. Once Bush is out of office, the Democratic Congress and the next president will almost certainly lift most of the federal bans now in place, allowing scientists the freedom to research this promising field with much greater freedom. However, the science continues to progress rapidly, and the battlefield is still fluid. It is still possible for the fundamentalists and wingers to seize the initiative and associate stem cell research with their house-of-horrors portrayal of modern science. Look for them to stage a counteroffensive by focusing on other biogenetic fields of research in the near future.
Item 5. Racial & Ethnic RelationsStatus: Slight Position Advantage, Slight Momentum DisadvantageAfter decades of huge strides, our efforts at racial integration have stalled and are now even suffering small setbacks. The wingers have stirred the ugly waters of xenophobia and religious fundamentalism, targeting everybody from Mexicans to Arabs. Their rhetoric against blacks has intensified, and black-white relations are deteriorating from an already tenuous state. This theater of the Culture Wars is in a stalemate, and the momentum will go to whomever succeeds in popularizing a message. The likeliest battleground for this struggle is now the Mexican border and the topic of illegal immigration. If we can build public sympathy for immigrants, and foster support to show these people some American hospitality rather than the barrel of a gun, we will win.
Item 6. Women’s RightsStatus: Moderate Position Disadvantage, Slight Momentum DisadvantageOur most serious losses in the Culture Wars have come at the expense of women’s rights. Hollywood—our ally in the gay rights cause—has in this case actually
hurt the liberal cause for promoting women’s rights, by fostering stereotypes that reinforce misogynistic themes such as women as objects, women as less serious than men, women as less capable than men, women as sexual appendages, and women as sexual creatures in all circumstances. The media have joined in, perpetuating the myth that it is unnatural for women to stay in the workforce once they have children, and by focusing on women in their reporting with a very different and particular lens than the one they use for men or gender-neutral subjects. The fundamentalists, for their part, have continued to emphasize the destiny of women as second-class citizens whose existence should be centered in the home, whose autonomy should end with her husband or male guardian, and whose primary pursuits in life should be petty and superficial—“women’s stuff” like gardening, shopping, and striving toward a particular body image. None of these things are superficial in their own right, but have successfully been used as red herrings to advance the argument that women’s ambitions are fundamentally different than men’s, and should thus be expressed in feminine ways—like shopping. As liberals, it is essential for us to get our own house in order first, and rebuild the feminist movement. Until we begin to succeed in that, we will continue to play defense against the religious onslaught against women.
Item 7. AbortionStatus: Slight Position Advantage, Strong Momentum DisadvantageAbortion is our single greatest defeat of the Culture Wars. We are within sight of losing it entirely, and in many states it is practically prohibited already. Abortion is the iconic metaphor for women’s rights, and our losses here are the most worrisome of all. Our best news right now is that a majority of Americans continue to support abortion rights. However, the fundamentalists have succeeded in qualifying that expression with “in the case of rape or incest, or when the life or health of the mother is threatened.” Democrats have now conceded that fight and few people on our side of the political arena are devoting much energy to the defense of unlimited abortion rights anymore. True liberals find themselves without a major ally in the government, even as the American public remains complacent on this most crucial issue. Meanwhile, those who oppose abortion rights are very active, highly organized, and have many allies in the government. In South Dakota we were saved from a near-total ban only because of a soft sigh by the slumbering, silent majority. Elsewhere in the country, women have to drive hundreds of miles to get an abortion, embryos are considered people, doctors are harassed, children are taught lies about the effects of having an abortion, and, of course, the churches rail against abortion. It is the wingers’ strongest and most zealous attack in the Culture Wars, and it is also their greatest success. Frankly, things are going to continue to get worse for the foreseeable future. We are one vote away from a federal ban by the Supreme Court, and the religious establishment is not encumbered by the realities of money or science like they are in topics such as global warming and evolution. Meanwhile, America clings to its remaining abortion rights even as those rights erode by the day. This issue alone has burdened or even destroyed the lives of millions of people.
Item 8. HealthcareStatus: Moderate Position Disadvantage, No MomentumLike evolution, this issue doesn’t seem to be going anywhere now. However, unlike evolution, the place where it’s stuck ain’t good! Tens of millions—including yours truly—have no health or dental insurance, and a majority of the population suffers burdensome expenses relating to their medical or dental care, or prescription drug costs. The most technically competent medical apparatus on the Earth continues to acquit itself as a weak purveyor of health to the American people. And in the government, there is so little movement. American healthcare is a money-munching monstrosity; the government doesn’t know how to control it, and the private sector doesn’t want to—because they’re getting most of the profits. This is the Democrats’ top issue—even if we true liberals have higher priorities—and in the future we are likely to see some gains in our favor, but for the time being we will continue to flounder until health becomes a human right and not a for-profit industry.
Item 9. LattesStatus: DeliciousLatte consumption continues to increase this year, with Starbucks now moving ahead with an aggressive plan to open a
two stores for every one American. The coffeehouse culture has begun to catch on in spots all over the country, thanks largely to the big green mermaid, and in liberal bastions like Seattle the coffee is getting fresher, fair-tradier, and ever more grande. Winger jealousy of our beverage monopoly has increased by 66 percent in the past three months alone.
Item 10. Church & StateStatus: Slight Position Disadvantage, Slight Momentum DisadvantageIn America today the enemy has two factions which are the most virulent and threatening. They are the neoconservative moment, and the Christian fundamentalists. The fortunes of the neoconservatives rose when the World Trade Center towers fell, and fell when the civil war in Iraq rose. I no longer consider them a long-lived threat, although they will continue to be a short-term enemy until their ideology finally is purged from the government. The fundamentalists are another story. They are older than the country itself, and have become especially intense from the early 1980s onward. Their power stepped into the fore in 1994 when Republicans swept Congress, and eclipsed in 2001 under President Bush, the Republican Congress, and the War on Terror. With the confluence of those three powers, fundamentalists had a crusade for the modern times, and, permanently embittered by the liberal successes of the 1960s and ‘70s, were as strongly conservative as they have ever been. Their evangelism has lit the country on fire; America is becoming even more religious than it already is, even as most of the rest of the developed world continues to shy away from its religious past. It is the fundamentalists who are our primary opponents in many of the preceding items listed in our liberal agenda. They are the Nazis of our day: ruthlessly efficient, incomprehensibly cruel, incapable of reasoning or compromise, enthralled by their own rhetoric into a single unified caucus, and
always, perfectly wrong—no matter the issue. It stands to reason, therefore, that our liberal efforts to preserve the separation of church and state are paramount, standing above all others. This theater of church and state is the main event of the war. The war…this right-wing fabrication known as the Culture Wars. There is a war, all right, but in fact it is a war of religious conquest. It is a philosophical war, pitting secular civilization in defense against the delusions of fanatics. When we succeed in keeping Christian fundamentalist ideology out of the government, all our other causes are aided. The Vast Left Wing Conspiracy recognizes this, and will continue to make every effort to defeat, reverse, stop, slow, or, if nothing else, harass the efforts of fundamentalists to use the government as their tool in imposing a truly horrible way of life upon us all. Item 10 on our agenda is, in effect, a summative evaluation on the entire conspiracy. As you can see, we could be doing better. In our favor is the fact that the elements of American society that exist beyond fundamentalism are continuing, like their international counterparts, to become less religious in their everyday lives. In our favor is the fact that the courts—especially at the federal level—still retain enough judicial integrity to present an effective obstacle against the fundamentalists, which has slowed their advances into the government—although sometimes at the expense of popular opinion, which is always dangerous. In our favor is the overzealousness of the fundamentalists, who, in their implacable closed-mindedness, sometimes mount campaigns so ridiculous that the public just laughs, and remembers how foolish these people truly are. In our favor are the economics and politics of a progressive world where change is the only option, individual freedom is becoming more highly valued, the pursuit of a better material quality of life is dominant, and companies stand to make more money by playing secular than sacred. And in our favor, need I say it, is the United States Constitution—the manifesto of our Vast Left Wing Conspiracy.
Against us are the current administration, a timid Congress, a complacent and all-too-easily influenced public, a great deal of religious money, a strong evangelical propaganda machine, and a wealth of charismatic religious leaders, from James Dobson to Jerry Falwell. “Secular civilization,” in the other corner of the ring, suffers from the understandable paralysis that comes from not recognizing the threat to its very existence. There is not nearly as much money on our side, not nearly as strong a propaganda machine. There are few charismatic leaders. Most of us who are not fundamentalists, do not realize that we are the intended victims of those fundamentalists, and therefore we do not mobilize in our own defense. We liberals must take up the mantle and fight, fight to keep the fanatics away from our government. That, together with a sustained program of secularization, is the grand strategy of this conspiracy.
Now…get back to your lattes and your orgies. And when you wake up tomorrow afternoon, remember that you are the few and true elites who will save this world from the Christofascists!
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