Sacred Honor

One of the appeals to becoming conservative in the 1970s was the idea that we were defending ideals and institutions which were under assault from those who had abandoned themselves to indulgence, excess, crudeness, rudeness, and general maliciousness -- that the left was composed of grown-up children who had never been disciplined. It seemed the honorable thing to be attached to, for young idealists looking for a set of principles to defend against popular derision.

Those of us who fell for it were like Henry James' heroines, who fall for aristocrats fallen on hard times or vain shallow aesthetes who affect tragic disillusionment, but are just fat spiders or conscienceless parasites who've degenerated into complete indifference to decency, even while they decry a 'deficit of decency'. They simply hate the feeling of powerlessness, the loss of privilege, the fact that they & their kin are no longer treated with defence by people they once held to be inferior, and the social obligation to treat those persons as equals. Resentment over loss of status, the furious feeling that progress is achieved at expense of one's own moral & social complacency, these were the fuels burning at the dark heart of the old conservative movement, and in 1964, the American public was well aware of what toxins fed the right wing.

Re-coding the old racism, wealth-worship, self-centeredness, and jingoism became the primary job of right-wing speechwriters, journalists, mass-mailing gurus, think-tank welfare queens, and the lawschool hustlers of the Federalist Society fratboys and sorority skanks. They did it effectively; and they were joined by the frauds of the Democratic Leadership Council who deliberately de-clawed the old liberal establishment, which had been exhausted by its combats with the left, and put in place a network of political consultants whose only job was to become rich or become indispensible to the rich.

The aftermath of the Cold War & Gulf War I, closely followed by Clinton's deliberate deliverance of economic activity into the hands of the megacorporations, as they drove thousands & hundreds of thousands of small businesses into the ground, his acceptance of consolidation of public media into the hands of a few autocrats, and engineering the destruction of the old barriers to grand fraud in the banking sector, weren't sufficient for the right-wingers, who wanted more, and who pursued him because he represented what they hated most, the 1960s student radical -- tho' he wasn't radical, just interested, like everyone, in how he could save his skin.

I was still a conservative enthusiast in the '90s, imbibing the worst most poisonous nonsense about the Clintons, till I finally vomitted it all up & realized that what had been passed off as vintage wine was nothing more than sour grape juice tainted with other, less mentionable liquids.

There are many ex-cons seeking to atone, in some ways, for their misspent years of pledging honor to hucksters without the faintest glimmer of what honor could mean. We may spend our remaining years trying to repair the damage we helped do.