I get this a lot: Hey Mark, you nefarious and perverted liberal commie tofu-hugging sex-drunk San Francisco medical experiment gone wrong from the land of fruits and nuts (or some iteration thereof — so cute, my hate mail can be), hey, I notice you love to ridicule those creepy Christian megachurches and you enjoy spanking wide-eyed Mormons and tweaking the litigious nipples of the cult of Scientology and you recoil from toxic Bush policy like a vegetarian recoils from undercooked veal.
- Mark Morford
Those of y’all on the Right seem to think that we Liberals are some sort of wishy-washy, granola-munching, wheat-grass-drinking, live-and-let-live, anything-goes collection of moral reprobates devoid of a coherent, discernible ideology. The reality is that we are nothing like that- not even close. Yes, the truth is that we can be, and are, very intolerant when circumstances dictate. Speaking for myself, I have no tolerance for corruption, ignorance, or demagoguery. I detest the lockstep ideology that our political leaders have fallen into in the support of Our Glorious Leader. I detest the fact that so many so thoroughly support George W. Bush in spite of the fact that he undeniably and openly lied to us regarding Iraqi WMDs and his motivation for going to war against Iraq.
I am incensed that Americans have swallowed the Administration’s propaganda that “it’s better to fight terrorism in the streets of Baghdad than the streets of New York”. I am beyond angry that a Democratic President can be impeached for getting his pole greased by a female intern, yet a Republican President whose lies have killed almost 1900 young Americans is treated like some sort of freakin’ hero.
There is no room in my way of thinking for those who lie frequently and openly in the service of self-interest and well-heeled donors. I rebel against the thought that we have learned NOTHING from our experience in Vietnam. Sadly, it appears we HAVE learned nothing.
If this makes me intolerant, than it’s an appellation I will wear proudly and openly. We deserve better, and I have no problem with voicing that expectation, even if most Americans are so drunk on Republican Kool-Aid that they neither know nor care they’ve been propagandized and lied to.
You, hate-mailers from the sanctimonious Right and even some of you morally paralyzed middle-grounders from the Left, are correct. I am, in fact, deeply intolerant. It is true. I can hide my deep biases and predispositions no longer.
I cannot, for example, tolerate the dark and violent road down which this nation seems intent on careening like an Escalade on meth. I cannot tolerate brutal never-ending unnecessary wars and I cannot allow gay rights to be bashed and I truly loathe watching women’s rights be slammed back to 1952. Or 1852.
I really have little patience for the gutting of our school system and the decimation of science and mysticism and the human mind for the sake of a handful of militant Christian zealots who truly believe the Second Coming will be arriving really soon but hopefully not before the next episode of HBO’s “Cathouse: The Series,” which they watch in secret with the lights off while clutching a Bible in one hand and a big tub of Country Crock margarine in the other.
I cannot tolerate an American president, ostensibly meant to be one of the most articulate and intellectually sophisticated leaders on the planet, mumbling his semicoherent support of the embarrassing nontheory of “Intelligent Design,” to the detriment of about 300 years of confirmed science and 10 million years of common sense to the point where America’s armies of dumbed-down Ritalin-drunk children look at him and sigh and secretly wish they could have a future devoid of such imbecilic thought but who realize, deep down, they are merely another doomed and fraught generation who will face an increasingly steep uphill battle, who will actually have to fight for fact and intellectual growth and spiritual progress against a rising tide of ignorance and religious hegemony and sanitized revisionist textbooks that insult their understanding and sucker punch their sexuality and bleed their minds dry.
Yes, there is a high level of anger that I feel when I look around and realize what is being done in our name. I am incensed that so many seem so willing to stand idly by as the Religious Right attempts to turn this nation into the Second Coming of “Pleasantville”, where never is heard a discouraging word, and the skies are not cloudy all day.
How else do you explain 51% of Americans voting for a man whose response to the 9.11 attacks was to continue reading “My Pet Goat”? It’s not the fact that John Kerry lost the election that bothers me (the fielding of a poor, inept candidate is a mistake the Democratic Party will have to live with). What bother me is that a majority of Americans are so ignorant of reality and so thoroughly undemanding of their President- as long as he’s a Republican. I am angry that Republican propaganda is so quickly and easily swallowed by Americans. How else would you explain Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage, and Fox News Channel? Truth, it would seem, is the first casualty of politics.
I have surpassed my allowable limit for how much environmental devastation I can willingly swallow or how many billion-dollar tax subsidies our cowardly CEO president gives his cronies in Big Energy while doing nothing to ease our gluttony for foreign oil, all the while trying to tell us how many undereducated misguided American teenage soldiers we have to sacrifice at the bloody altar of oil and empire before we can call ourselves king of the bone pile again.
But I am perhaps most intolerant, not of Christians per se, not of faith, certainly not of radiant self-defined spirituality, not even of organized religion, though I do fully believe more independent spirits and raw human souls and moist sexual licks have been lost to its often narrow-minded and cosmically rigid brainwashing techniques than have ever been saved. But hey, that’s just me.
I am most intolerant of, well, of those who allow such intolerance. Of those who would, based on their narrow views of sex, God, love, hope, war, the mind, the Earth, soil and animals and air and water and fire and love and spirit and drugs and guns and dildos, work to legislate those neoconservative beliefs, codify them, make them the law of the land, force their regressive beliefs on everyone else under punishment of violence and beatings and prison. I am, in short, intolerant of intolerance.
I have no problem with those who think differently than I do- as long as they think. I do not expect everyone to share my views, but is it too much to expect people to think instead of merely and reflexively reacting instead of swallowing Our Glorious Leader’s propaganda hook, line, and sinker?
Oh, let us be clear. I love diversity, religious pluralism, peace and love and pacifism and good drugs and open-mouthed sensuality, happy to let you believe in any god you like and marry any gender you like and let you love how you will and be in full control of your sex and your body and your mind.
This, to me, is the America worth fighting for. These are the laws I support. Don’t believe in abortion? Don’t understand gay people? Sexuality make you rashy? Think Harry Potter teaches kids evil and witchcraft? Don’t marry a sexy gay witch abortionist. But don’t you dare, based on your limited understanding of God and life, make laws declaring that I can’t.
Indeed. There is nothing wrong with living your beliefs. Honestly, I find that an admirable quality. What I resent are those who feel they have the perfect right, based on their own narrow, fear-based theology, to force me to follow those beliefs by turning them into the law of the land. If that makes me intolerant, so be it. If you’re going to toss that epithet in my direction, though, you might want to first take a good, long look in the mirror.
keep up the good work. But i dare say that the reasonable juices will really get flowing once the expletives are done away with. The mind tends to be taxed even more when it is not allowed recourse to such words to express oneself. Then, one is actually forced to consider the issue beyond the point of sentiment, which is where vulgarities express themselves the best. Anyway, other than that, your points are indeed sharp. Cheers!
p.s. did you get the flag into the picture via photoshop or is it a real and flapping part of the scene? Think it was the former. The tree's a lot more blurred than the flag. Good idea though.