Letters to the Editor
XOXO
Published Letters: 30 Editor's Choice: 3
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Uhh...
[Read the article: Fantasies in black and white]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Poverty is complicated. Let's do a thought experiment. Say that you are a member of the upper classes, with all of the entitlements and responsibilities that go along with that. Say you want to completely drop out, and be a penniless drifter, a member of the under-classes. For spiritual reasons, perhaps. Maybe out of some sense that there is a kind of spiritual poverty that surrounds you, that demoralizes you, that you cannot abide and cannot seem to rise above, as long as you are participating in that world of J. Crew and nannies and compulsory vacations and whatever. You think you could be a better, happier person, if you had the courage to follow that dream.
The problem is, you actually have feelings for some people, and they are all people who belong to that world. There is your family. Maybe they mean something to you. Maybe you mean something to them. This happens, I hear, even in the upper classes. And maybe you have some friends, people who know you and have been there for you at different times in your life. Maybe you made friends in college, and graduate school. These are all people who you understand. You all smell the same, you eat the same foods, you look related, and when you talk you share a language and a set of associations that makes communication, real communication, feel possible.
How hard would it be to move away from all that? How many people would be deeply hurt? Who will come with you? How well do you think you'll do, away from that structure you were bred into? How easy is it going to be, to find something that feels like home, among people at the other end of the social scale, people who judge the place you came from with harsh contempt, and have no experience or appreciation of any of the real qualities that belong to that world, people for whom you are a total alien?
If you are sufficiently fueled by contempt for your own people, and have no personal ties that you don't mind breaking, and are hot to maximize your spiritual potential, (God have mercy on the rest), then maybe you could do it. Or try. To really succeed, you'll have to convince those new people to accept you as one of them, and to do that, you'll have to be able to hide all the markings of where you came from, or else make it clear that you despise it at least as much as your new milieu does.
Poverty is complicated. So is wealth. It's a combination of virtues, vices and habits, that keep people where they are, wherever that is. Any thought that there is more virtue and less vice at the top half of the social ladder than the bottom is worth a long, hearty laugh. Sure, some of the vices that we know in poverty are more thoroughly criminalized, and much more thoroughly prosecuted. That doesn't make them uglier, though, and it doesn't mean they do more damage to people. It means we know who holds the stick.
The man with the stick explains himself by saying, "It is the laziness, wickedness, and poorly developed character of the slave/African American/ person living in poverty that compels me to beat her. I weary of the exercise, but my commitment to virtue is so great that I must persevere, in service to Truth, and my Christian unwillingness to abandon this creature to its iniquity."
I strongly suggest that the moral and intellectual courage to judge others is a lot easier to acquire than the ability to understand others. And that it's not a good shortcut to take.
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Aghast
[Read the article: "We're all fascists now"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]It is scandalous, utterly scandalous, that a "serious" discussion of this topic could occur (and in SALON, of all places) without making reference to the astute and widely disseminated political commentary of Jello Biafra and the Dead Kennedys. "California Uber Alles" hit this nail on the head decades ago, and hit it hard. In the tightly constructed lyrics of that song we have a compelling, and damning, analysis of liberal fascism, launched from the left.
Judging from the interview, and my personal biases, I do not think that Goldberg argues convincingly that conservativism is free from the taint of "fascism", (a problematic and laden term, as others have noted). But for liberalism's defenders to blithely (and venomously) insist that liberalism is everything that is good, and nothing that is not good, is a bit silly.