Originally posted by: cwjerome
Are you seriously disputing the notion that the US has not gotten more conservative over the last 25 or so years?
He may not be, but I am. Come out of your pillow fort bunker and visit any major American city and go to the openly gay section. Turn on HBO. See the bare boobies and hear the once taboo word "fvck" flung around. Or go watch Howard Stern's show. His T&A&FartJoke extravaganza couldn't have gotten on ANY major or minor media outlet in 1979. And I am shocked, SHOCKED I tell you, to learn that the internet is, almost more than anything else, one big pron delivery device.
These times, they are ALWAYS changing.
Something is happening, and you don't know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones?
You, your aged grandmother, and John Ashcroft can decry this all you want,
and, often enough, I'd gladly join you at the crumbling cultural barricades (except for the fact that I can't stand your pompous self certitude) against the more mindless changes, but, in toto, they're here, sometimes they're (gasp) queer, and there's money to be made.
And nothing, cw, NOTHING, stands in the way of commerce.
You know what I particularly hate, cw, in this tsunami of irrestible cultural leveling? The debasement of the English language. Now everything is a transitive verb, like "Beer me".
But you don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.
Cultural change happens slowly, but it DOES happen
inexorably, and you are on the losing end of that equation. Do your happy dance that GWB won in large part piggy backed on the red state horror over the prospect of affording gay Americans the diginity and legal safety of marriage with which to consecrate their unions. It will not last.
The world moves towards inclusion. This is the real teaching of Jesus, metaphorically, in action.
Oh, yes, I know that all accross America, a majority would deny gays marriage. In the late '50's and the early 60's, do you not know that any ballot iniative outlawing miscegenation would have passed by huge majorities in every Southern state, and, I suspect, in most Northern ones as well? And today, a scant few decades later, no one except the KKK and Stormfront would publically object to a black marrying a white.
Shift happens, and over the long run, it is ALWAYS towards tolerance and inclusion.
My guess is that you haven't lived long enough to viscerally know that the political penduluum always swings in the short term. I remember a time in the mid 60's when the Republicans were left for dead as a party, FAR more marginalized than the Dems are today. Look it up on Wikpedia or something, cw, before you crow too long and too loudly about your coming conservative thousand year Reich.
For in the long run,, blacks are no longer slaves, women get the vote, and gays will get the legal right to marry. In the long run, as it becomes a smaller and smaller planet, both antipodal "conservative" myths, the myth of rugged individualism and the hubris that you can legislate your particular morality over others and make it stick long term will be swept away, even from your eyes.
In your social and political certitude, cw, you have much more in common with the Taliban and the House of Saud and Fidel Castro than you could ever imagine. You are all serious true believers fighting hopeless rear guard actions against change.
Lastly, cw, nobody like a sore winner, or a pompous one. Enough with the "advice for the lowly Dems". Do your little dance and get on with it. Every dog has his day.
Yeats knew it, the cyclical rise and fall, in 1939 facing the specter of an all powerful Hitler. "All things fall and are built again / And those that build them again are gay" [old meaning]
Confucius knew it 4000 years ago. Yin always transmuting into Yang transmuting into Yin, each contually presaging and presupposing
and containing the other, with change the great leveler and only true constant.
Donovan knew it, too, "First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is."
Enjoy your transient ascendancy while you may. Easy on that crappy noisemaker and that garish party hat, though.
But never forget, my friend, that over the long run, it's all about inclusion on a level that would blow your bigoted mind.