A reader just forwarded me one of those whimsical emails that people pass around the Internet. I usually don’t post such things, but it’s a slow night…
I’ve been saying for a while that the problem facing America today is no longer a problem of conservatives and liberals learning to get along — we’ve gone beyond that. No, the problem is that although the ideological division between the two factions has widened beyond any hope of reconciliation, we still can’t get away from each other.
I have just received an email that outlines a practical solution.
DIVORCE AGREEMENT
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Dear American liberals, leftists, democrats, social progressives, socialists, regressive, Marxists, and Obama supporters, et. al.:
We have stuck together since the late 1950s for the sake of the kids, but the whole of this latest election process has made me realize that I want a divorce. I know we tolerated each other for many years for the sake of future generations, but sadly, this relationship has clearly run its course.
Our two ideological sides of America cannot and will not ever agree on what is right for us all, so let’s just end it on friendly terms. We can smile and chalk it up to irreconcilable differences and go our own way.
Here is a model separation agreement:
1. Our two groups can equitably divide up the country by land mass, each taking a similar portion. That will be the difficult part, but I am sure our two sides can come to a friendly agreement. After that, it should be relatively easy. Our respective representatives can effortlessly divide other assets since both sides had such distinct and disparate tastes.
2. We don’t like redistributive taxes, so you can keep them.
3. You are welcome to the liberal judges and the ACLU.
4. Since you hate guns and war, we’ll take our firearms, the cops, the NRA, and the military.
5. We’ll take the nasty, smelly oil industry and you can go with wind, solar, and bio-diesel.
6. You can keep Oprah, Michael Moore, and Rosie O’Donnell. You are, however, responsible for finding a bio-diesel vehicle big enough to move all three of them.
7. We’ll keep capitalism, greedy corporations, pharmaceutical companies, Wal-Mart, and Wall Street.
8. You can have your beloved lifelong welfare dwellers, food stamps, homeless homeboys, hippies, druggies, and illegal aliens.
9. We’ll keep the hot Alaskan hockey moms, greedy CEO’s and rednecks.
10. We’ll keep the Bibles and give you NBC and Hollywood .
11. You can make nice with Iran and Palestine and we’ll retain the right to invade and hammer places that threaten us.
12. You can have the peace-niks and war protesters. When our allies or our way of life are under assault, we’ll help provide them security.
13. We’ll keep our Judeo-Christian values.
14. You are welcome to Islam, Scientology, Humanism, political correctness, and Shirley McLain. You can also have the U.N., but we will no longer be paying the bill.
15. We’ll keep the SUV’s, pickup trucks, and oversized luxury cars. You can take every Subaru station wagon you can find.
16. You can give everyone healthcare if you can find any practicing doctors..
17. We’ll continue to believe healthcare is an earned luxury and not a right.
18. We’ll keep “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” and “The National Anthem.”
19. I’m sure you’ll be happy to substitute “Imagine”, “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing”, “Kum Ba Ya,” or “We Are the World”.
20. We’ll practice trickledown economics and you can continue to give trickle up poverty your best shot.
21. Since it often so offends you, we’ll keep our history, our name and our constitution and our flag.
22. Would you agree to this? If so, please pass it along to other like-minded liberal and conservative patriots and if you do not agree, just hit delete. In the spirit of friendly parting, I’ll let you answer which one of us will need whose help in 15 years.
Sincerely,
John J. Wall
Law Student and an AmericanP.S.: Also, please take Ted Turner, Sean Penn, Martin Sheen, Barbara Streisand, and Jane Fonda with you.
P.S.S..: And you won’t have to “Press 1 for English” when you call our country.
**If you can’t stand behind our Military, Please feel free to stand in front of them! **
8 Comments
PPS: Happy Valentine’s Day.
Yes, the timing’s a little awkward…
we’ll keep Apple & the vineyards, you keep dell and whatever else it is ya’ll do.
We’ll keep bacon; you keep granola.
We’ll keep beer; you keep Perrier.
You keep Obama. It’s a freebie.
There’s a million of these …
Sorry but I just threw up a little bit in mouth. One of those horrible burps that include some stomach acid and leaves an awful taste in one’s mouth.
Here’s the real problem, not that the ideological difference between “liberals” and “conservatives” has grown but that neither side seems to want to do anything but bash the other side as “un-American.” I’m sick and tired of the defeatism that this tact implies. I’m sick and tired of the straw men that get created to make the other side look as deranged and as stupid as possible.
During the Bush years liberals were just as bad. It is as if both sides have given up on their powers of persuasion because they no longer have any faith that the other side has the same goal of the advancement of the collective good.
It should be no wonder that more and more citizens are screaming out “A plague on both your houses!”
That’s just it, DSL; I, for one, no longer have any such faith, though about a decade or so ago I still did.
I am also disgusted by it, as you are, but, limited as my powers of observation are, I am convinced that the left has little interest in the advancement of the collective good, despite their loud protestations to the contrary. What they seem to be most interested in is elbowing their way to a good spot at the wealth-redistribution trough.
Sorry this dumb little email provoked your peristaltic mishap, Strangelove. It’s just lowbrow japery.
I have to disagree with you, though, about the ideological divide. Of course there has always been a hard Left and a hard Right here in America, but this period of U.S. history is new and different, for a number of reasons.
First of all, the Left have won an awful lot of territory. They have always been the aggressors in the culture wars (that is almost tautologically true in any struggle between conservatives and advocates of change), and have fought and prevailed on many fronts. Some of those battles — like the civil-rights movement of the postwar years — have clearly made the nation a better place.
But the assault on core American traditions never seems to end, and one casualty in particular has been America’s historic emphasis on a life of individual responsibility under a limited government with carefully enumerated powers. The size and scope of government has grown far beyond what anyone would have imagined possible not so long ago, and for many it seems we are approaching, or have already passed, the point of no return. What was once just an object for dinner-table debates and business-as-usual Congresional dealmaking has now become, in many peoples’ eyes, an existential crisis.
Another sea change has been demographic. The cultural and social cohesion of the nation has been badly eroded by waves of mass immigration and a new ideology that emphasizes multiculturalism, group differences, and a politics of identity-based grievance. Gone is the feeling that “we’re all in it together”; American society has become a Balkanized and mutually mistrustful jumble of ethnic, cultural, linguistic and religious factions.
Another factor is the Internet, which allows immediate and large-scale networking among like-minded people. In the old days the world was like a cold liquid, or a rarefied gas — collisions between particles, and therefore chemical reactions, were rare. But the Internet has radically diminished the effective volume of the container, and the average distance between particles. The number of “collisions” has increased exponentially. In such a regime, particles begin to collide frequently enough to react and stick together, and new structures begin to form. At the same time, the pressure and temperature increase.
All of this makes for a far more volatile and energetic social and political environment than we’ve ever had before.
You wrote:
I’ll disagree with Henry here: I think that both sides still have the goal of advancing toward the good. The problem is that increasingly solid and cohesive social and ideological factions have coalesced as a result of the changes I’ve just described, and they have utterly contrary (and more and more obviously irreconcilable) definitions of what that “good” actually consists of.
This is not an argument about the best means to achieve a common end. The problem is that when the American Left and the American Right are asked “What is the good? What sort of America are we trying to create?”, they give fundamentally incommensurable answers. And because the stakes are now higher than ever, our plugged-in citizenry are much more likely now to choose sides.
Perhaps I managed to skew my own opinion by commenting succinctly, as is my wont. If I allow myself an uncharacteristically longish comment, then here is what I view to be the crux of our Nation’s ideological divide:
The left/gauche side views society as a collection of humans whose altruistic tendencies are perfectible through the good offices of big government, the latter presumed devoid of all flawed-human intentions. This confidence in the intrinsic benevolence of one and all leads the left to form special interest sub-groupings of individuals with a common allegiance to its sub-group primarily and to the whole of society only secondarily.
The right/adroit side, however, is less sanguine about the perfectibility of human kindness, not to mention the benevolence of any governmental body of flawed individuals. It, therefore, favors less government and more reliance on free-market capitalism to allocate goods and services in as equitable (and as successful, as measured by wealth-generation) a manner as imperfect humanity has been able to devise to date. This skeptic view leads them to greater individual accountability and less reliance on special-interest associations, which, in turn leaves their principal allegiance to the Nation intact.