Yankee Memes, Liberated Conservatism, and Mitt Romney

Of course even a self-serving, fact-fractalizing, Jurassic back-ward demagogue like Palin makes Romney look bad to my eyes. At least Palin's the sort to actually share a home with her own severely deformed baby she wouldn't abort due to her misguided ideas. A collected, straight-forward, icy-blood villain would not be so deluded nor prone to see Russia from her balcony, (and neither seems she a genuinely depraved "psycho-path,) but rather Palin is a silver-tongued monstrosity, a Demosthenes for dummies, one more industrious Frankenstein creature bourne of today's bizzare modern mutanity... a lip-sticked warning shot over the bow of national sanity.

Romney, I believe, has little capacity for such "idealistic" self-sacrifice or deep suffering. Politically, he's a manicured strawng-man, the candidate of nannies and Rolls Royces, and personally he's the product of a strange American cult which seeks to all but destroy all that is intellectual or individual in its followers. Within the LDS subculture, democratic elements are not encouraged, and there are not so many checks on the powers or cupidity of those at the top of the rigid, formal hierarchy. So in his billionaire Mormon social bubble, he's not used to encountering the egalitarian resistance nor liberal impudence he now must face in the white-hot spot-light of a presidential campaign against a fierce and eloquent orator, a nobel-laureled master of real-politik... a half-Kenyan Augustus Caesar who's just tossed the the gory-locked head of Osama Bin Laden into an open ocean of applause from an America glowing with signs of economic recovery. But despite devoting this chunk of his life to chase a personal ambition he's highly unlikely to catch, Romney is unlike Palin in that neither his reason nor his intelligence are particularly impaired nor inferior... some time spent on the unseen end of a perceptive psychologist's couch would come up with a silent diagnosis of ruthless narcissism of the Plutarchian variety, a rubber stamp sanity upon a page blank of soul. Allowing his lack of imagination and Puritan/Mormon culture to prohibit him the diverse and wondrous fruits his wealth trees would gladly bear him, he seeks the tainted fruits of massive "respectable" fame and a long shot at an office of immeasurably immense power, calling, and responsibility... an office he belongs nowhere near.

Honestly, the more I see of this world, the more I believe that private property has necessarily been the dominant organizing principle of humanity since before the Industrial Revolution and even more so after. Wealth is not the only vital social currency(others include learning, artistic achievement and social reputation,) but it is indispensable... and the propertied classes deserve their influential voices in the halls of power. I say this as a man who's long lived, albeit not uncomfortably, far below the official U.S.A. poverty line.

The trouble is that the wealthy have long already had a hold on power, not only through the Republican Party but through tentacles that reach deep into the Democratic Party as well. And yet certain plutocratic elements(represented by for example Paul Ryan and Marco Rubio) act with a brash and warlike fanaticism. They want to take away from the truly disadvantaged, diseased, and disabled what scarce resources we have.

So, while philosophically I grow more and more conservative(in my own eccentric, socially liberated way,) I nonetheless see a Republican Party increasingly dominated by leaders of base and rank quality, men of great moral and ideological flexibility... painting their etch-a-sketch visions to divided and oft guillible American peoples. But I would love to have a dialogue with many of the wealthy individuals such politicians must represent... I'd try to convince them that free market capitalism cannot accomodate certain minor exponents in the elaborate formula that is prosperous and stable human civilization. I'd try to tell them that a diseased but learned artist-poet-philosopher like myself living on government disability is neither threat nor insult to their world of ivory towers and ivory picket fences, shiny black helicopters and black boot-straps which a healthy person might pull themselves up by.

I'd propose to them that a vigorous monitoring and philosophically daring pruning of the size and scope of government(clearing of the dark cold-war bureaucratic thorn bushes to make way for the bright humanitarian poppies,) that such a pruning must not recklessly risk the maiming of that civil tree of life that IS humanity... but finds proper root in the Rome-old ancient soil of government. Though limited by the magna carta that is our Jeffersonian tradition and eroded Bill of Rights, that is our Yankee distrust of any unchecked authority, though so limited the propertied classes will always rule America... as they did from the free-market drum-and-fife revolution they cleverly orchestrated out of a Midas-touched British province and its semi-barbaric young civilization feasting on the fruits of mass black slavery, of profoundly fertile garden-realms and princess-virgin wildernesses, of a vast continent full of game, gold, timber and farm-land to be battled from icy mountains, with packs of wolves, and vast dark forests roamed by relentlessly warlike nomadic tribes. The totality of this new world situation called for a high valuation of the business-like spirit... our majestic mountains and fruited plains were pioneered by Kit Carson and Daniel Boone, but they were turned into Midas-kissed estates and townships by another kind of person entirely, as well as by the neo-feudal order natural to harsh and wild territory ruled by local gentry far from direct control by the imperial center of government.

Can't we build a culture in America that accomodates the freedoms of wealth along with some social safety net for rough-handed laborers, some security for those who become genuinely disabled? Can't we find, so to speak, a yin-yang of the memes of Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton... a protection of the freedoms of wealth balanced against a protection of the human rights of common citizens, an acceptance of a reasonable scope of government but not without a re-strengthening of the civil liberties that protect individuals of every class from the curious tentacles of big-brother authority, whether such authority is exercised by individual, corporation, or government agency.

Described by but not derived from the constitution, human rights are sacred, ancient, threatened, limited in nature, real, and so much the same from the breadline to the controversial ivory tower to the multi-millionaire in his factory. Only by protecting each others' rights are we free... and what pursuable liberty is more worth exercising than carefully considered charity?