[extropy-chat] Europes smugness its own downfall

[Mike Lorrey]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2004/11/07/do0704.xml
 from the Daily Telegraph:

Believe it or not, it wasn't just rednecks who voted for Bush
By Mark Steyn
(Filed: 07/11/2004)

The big question after Tuesday was: will it just be more of the same in
George W Bush's second term, or will there be a change of tone? And
apparently it's the latter. The great European thinkers have decided
that instead of doing another four years of lame Bush-is-a-moron cracks
they're going to do four years of lame Americans-are-morons cracks.
Inaugurating the new second-term outreach was Brian Reade in the Daily
Mirror, who attributed the President's victory to: "The self-righteous,
gun-totin', military-lovin', sister-marryin', abortion-hatin',
gay-loathin', foreigner-despisin', non-passport-ownin' rednecks, who
believe God gave America the biggest dick in the world so it could
urinate on the rest of us and make their land 'free and strong'."
 
Well, that's certainly why I supported Bush, but I'm not sure it
entirely accounts for the other 59,459,765. Forty five per cent of
Hispanics voted for the President, as did 25 per cent of Jews, and 23
per cent of gays. And this coalition of common-or-garden rednecks,
Hispanic rednecks, sinister Zionist rednecks, and lesbian rednecks who
enjoy hitting on their gay-loathin' sisters expanded its share of the
vote across the entire country - not just in the Bush states but in the
Kerry states, too.

In all but six states, the Republican vote went up: the urinating
rednecks have increased their number not just in Texas and Mississippi
but in Massachusetts and California, both of which have Republican
governors. You can drive from coast to coast across the middle of the
country and never pass through a single county that voted for John
Kerry: it's one continuous cascade of self-righteous urine from sea to
shining sea. States that were swing states in 2000 - West Virginia,
Arkansas - are now solidly Republican, and once solidly Democrat states
- Iowa, Wisconsin - are now swingers. The redneck states push hard up
against the Canadian border, where if your neck's red it's frostbite.
Bush's incontinent rednecks are everywhere: they're so numerous they're
running out of sisters to bunk up with.

Who exactly is being self-righteous here? In Britain and Europe, there
seem to be two principal strains of Bush-loathing. First, the guys who
say, if you disagree with me, you must be an idiot - as in the Mirror
headline "How can 59,054,087 people be so DUMB?" Second, the guys who
say, if you disagree with me, you must be a Nazi - as in Oliver James,
who told The Guardian: "I was too depressed to even speak this morning.
I thought of my late mother, who read Mein Kampf when it came out in
the 1930s [sic] and thought, 'Why doesn't anyone see where this is
leading?' "

Mr James is a clinical psychologist.

If smug Europeans are going to coast on moron-Fascist sneers
indefinitely, they'll be dooming themselves to ever more depressing
mornings-after in the 2006 midterms, the 2008 presidential election,
2010, and beyond: America's resistance to the conventional wisdom of
the rest of the developed world is likely to intensify in the years
ahead. This widening gap is already a point of pride to the likes of B
J Kelly of Killiney, who made the following observation on Friday's
letters page in The Irish Times: "Here in the EU we objected recently
to high office for a man who professed the belief that abortion and gay
marriages are essentially evil. Over in the US such an outlook could
have won him the presidency."

I'm not sure who he means by "we". As with most decisions taken in the
corridors of Europower, the views of Killiney and Knokke and Krakow
didn't come into it one way or the other. B J Kelly is referring to
Rocco Buttiglione, the mooted European commissioner whose views on
homosexuality, single parenthood, etc would have been utterly
unremarkable for an Italian Catholic 30 years ago. Now Europe's secular
elite has decided they're beyond the pale and such a man should have no
place in public life. And B J Kelly sees this as evidence of how much
more enlightened Europe is than America.

That's fine. But what happens if the European elite should decide a
whole lot of other stuff is beyond the pale, too, some of it that B J
Kelly is quite partial to? In affirming the traditional definition of
marriage in 11 state referenda, from darkest Mississippi to progressive
enlightened Kerry-supporting Oregon, the American people were not
expressing their "gay-loathin' ", so much as declining to go the Kelly
route and have their betters tell them what they can think. They're not
going to have marriage redefined by four Massachusetts judges and a
couple of activist mayors. That doesn't make them Bush theo-zombies
marching in lockstep to the gay lynching, just freeborn citizens
asserting their right to dissent from today's established church - the
stifling coercive theology of political correctness enforced by a
secular episcopate.

As Americans were voting on marriage and marijuana and other matters,
the Rotterdam police were destroying a mural by Chris Ripke that he'd
created to express his disgust at the murder of Theo van Gogh by
Islamist crazies. Ripke's painting showed an angel and the words "Thou
Shalt Not Kill". Unfortunately, his workshop is next to a mosque, and
the imam complained that the mural was "racist", so the cops arrived,
destroyed it, arrested the television journalists filming it and wiped
their tape. Maybe that would ring a bell with Oliver James's mum.

The restrictions on expression that B J Kelly sees as evidence of
European enlightenment are regarded as profoundly unhealthy by most
Americans. When one examines Brian Reade's anatomy of redneck
disfigurements - "gun-totin', military-lovin', abortion-hatin' " - most
of them are about the will to survive, as individuals and as a society.
Americans tote guns because they're assertive citizens, not docile
subjects of a permanent governing class. They love their military
because they think there's something contemptible about Europeans
preening and posing as a great power when they can't even stop some
nickel'n'dime Balkan genital-severers piling up hundreds of thousands
of corpses on their borders.

And, if Americans do "hate abortion", is Mr Reade saying he loves it?
It's at least partially responsible for the collapsed birthrates of
post-Christian Europe. However superior the EU is to the US, it will
only last as long as Mr Reade's generation: the design flaw of the
radical secular welfare state is that it depends on a traditionally
religious society birthrate to sustain it. True, you can't be a redneck
in Spain or Italy: when the birthrates are 1.1 and 1.2 children per
couple, there are no sisters to shag.

What was revealing about this election campaign was how little the
condescending Europeans understand even about the side in American
politics they purport to agree with - witness The Guardian's disastrous
intervention in Clark County. Simon Schama last week week defined the
Bush/Kerry divide as "Godly America" and "Worldly America", hailing the
latter as "pragmatic, practical, rational and sceptical". That's
exactly the wrong way round: it's Godly America that is rational and
sceptical - especially of Euro-delusions. Uncowed by Islamists,
undeferential to government, unshrivelled in its birthrates, Bush's
redneck America is a more reliable long-term bet. Europe's media would
do their readers a service if they stopped condescending to it.
 
 


=====
Mike Lorrey
Vice-Chair, 2nd District, Libertarian Party of NH
"Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom.
It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves."
                                      -William Pitt (1759-1806) 
Blog: http://www.xanga.com/home.aspx?user=Sadomikeyism


		
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