The Conservative Past Perfect
10/15/05 10:30 AM
It's
hatred. There's no polite way to put it. When I
read old excerpts from the National Review in which
William F. Buckley proclaims the inferiority of
blacks, and white men's right to deny
them...anything--when I read this I feel hatred
toward this man, toward those who think like him,
and sometimes toward a country that has bred such
men. But then I remember that these are humans.
Millimeters away from chimps on the evolutionary
scale. Cerebral cortexes chock of full of lizard
parts still influencing their actions and reactions
in ways that they are loathe to admit.
And then I ask 'why their insistence on denying their flawed humanity, their human propensity toward prejudice, their ability to see those who look different from them as a foreign, suspicious "other."'
On the willingness among blacks to believe that their skin color impeded aid during Katrina, Buckley wrote:
Do you believe that a helicopter looking for men and women in desperation would give preferred treatment to someone whose hands flailed for help because those hands were white, not black? No doubt that consanguinity plays a role in human affinities (that’s why Ebony magazine features black models), but it is blasphemous to suppose that organized official aid discriminated in New Orleans against blacks.
This belief in the impossibility of race-based contempt from a man who once wrote:
The question, as far as the White community is concerned, is whether the claims of civilization supersede those of universal suffrage. The British believe they do, and acted accordingly, in Kenya, where the choice was dramatically one between civilization and barbarism, and elsewhere; the South, where the conflict is byno means dramatic, as in Kenya, nevertheless perceives important qualitative differences between its culture and the Negroes', and intends to assert its own.
He once espoused a rabid, Klan-ish racism based on nothing but his contempt for those not of his tribe. (He admits that he cannot make a case for white cultural superiority. He simply believes it). Yet he finds it impossible to believe that black hands reaching for help would be treated differently from white ones. A paper by Vence Bonham in the Journal of Law, Medicine and Ethics stated, "Research studies have identified inequalities in the treatment of black Americans for early stage lung cancer,[3] ischemic heart disease,[4] and access to invasive cardiac proceduress as well as cadaveric renal transplantations.[6] Studies have shown that a patient's race has a substantial effect on the treatment provided and the mortality rates among Medicare beneficiaries[7] and veterans."
The same paper also cites a 1993 study that "found that Hispanics with isolated long bone fractures were twice as likely as similar non-Hispanic whites to receive no pain medication in the emergency department."
So doctors, trained to heal, can be less sensitive to a patient's pain due to ethnicity, yet FEMA apparatchniks cannot be less sensitive to people's pain due to their ethnicity.
I'm sorry. The logic doesn't follow.
So then I'm left to wonder why a man with a supposedly logical mind, would make so illogical a statement? And that led me to an understanding of what it means to be a modern conservative in America.
Look at the moralist Christian right and at the intellectual academic right. What binds them at the nexis of power seems to be a belief in--a desperate need to believe in--some perfection. God, the Constitution, America, Western Culture, White Men--they elevate one or all of these things to absolutes--grails that have been achieved and cannot be let loose. Any attempts to alter or refine the understanding of any of those things is blasphemous, as Buckley put it. One cannot suggest that God is fallible, or that the Constitution might be a living document, or that America or Western culture have flaws without being called a traitor, a blasphemer.
Some will suggest it is a sign of their humility and their morality--their belief in standards. I suggest it is a sign of their arrogance and solipsism. These objects of their own creation that they wield like whips to lash everyone who disagrees with them are simply reflections of their largely white, male selves. All of these absolutes of theirs -- they all reflect a time when there was no challenge to their absolute supremacy.
Conservatism is a belief in the past perfect. It is a desperate fear of the unknown future--a future outside their own creation. Thus they insist that we build the past out of nothing more than the past's recycled bricks. Conservatism is an absolute faith in the perfection of the world over which they've held sway and seek to preserve, the God who put them in charge of it, and those in whom God placed his charge--themselves.
And then I ask 'why their insistence on denying their flawed humanity, their human propensity toward prejudice, their ability to see those who look different from them as a foreign, suspicious "other."'
On the willingness among blacks to believe that their skin color impeded aid during Katrina, Buckley wrote:
Do you believe that a helicopter looking for men and women in desperation would give preferred treatment to someone whose hands flailed for help because those hands were white, not black? No doubt that consanguinity plays a role in human affinities (that’s why Ebony magazine features black models), but it is blasphemous to suppose that organized official aid discriminated in New Orleans against blacks.
This belief in the impossibility of race-based contempt from a man who once wrote:
The question, as far as the White community is concerned, is whether the claims of civilization supersede those of universal suffrage. The British believe they do, and acted accordingly, in Kenya, where the choice was dramatically one between civilization and barbarism, and elsewhere; the South, where the conflict is byno means dramatic, as in Kenya, nevertheless perceives important qualitative differences between its culture and the Negroes', and intends to assert its own.
He once espoused a rabid, Klan-ish racism based on nothing but his contempt for those not of his tribe. (He admits that he cannot make a case for white cultural superiority. He simply believes it). Yet he finds it impossible to believe that black hands reaching for help would be treated differently from white ones. A paper by Vence Bonham in the Journal of Law, Medicine and Ethics stated, "Research studies have identified inequalities in the treatment of black Americans for early stage lung cancer,[3] ischemic heart disease,[4] and access to invasive cardiac proceduress as well as cadaveric renal transplantations.[6] Studies have shown that a patient's race has a substantial effect on the treatment provided and the mortality rates among Medicare beneficiaries[7] and veterans."
The same paper also cites a 1993 study that "found that Hispanics with isolated long bone fractures were twice as likely as similar non-Hispanic whites to receive no pain medication in the emergency department."
So doctors, trained to heal, can be less sensitive to a patient's pain due to ethnicity, yet FEMA apparatchniks cannot be less sensitive to people's pain due to their ethnicity.
I'm sorry. The logic doesn't follow.
So then I'm left to wonder why a man with a supposedly logical mind, would make so illogical a statement? And that led me to an understanding of what it means to be a modern conservative in America.
Look at the moralist Christian right and at the intellectual academic right. What binds them at the nexis of power seems to be a belief in--a desperate need to believe in--some perfection. God, the Constitution, America, Western Culture, White Men--they elevate one or all of these things to absolutes--grails that have been achieved and cannot be let loose. Any attempts to alter or refine the understanding of any of those things is blasphemous, as Buckley put it. One cannot suggest that God is fallible, or that the Constitution might be a living document, or that America or Western culture have flaws without being called a traitor, a blasphemer.
Some will suggest it is a sign of their humility and their morality--their belief in standards. I suggest it is a sign of their arrogance and solipsism. These objects of their own creation that they wield like whips to lash everyone who disagrees with them are simply reflections of their largely white, male selves. All of these absolutes of theirs -- they all reflect a time when there was no challenge to their absolute supremacy.
Conservatism is a belief in the past perfect. It is a desperate fear of the unknown future--a future outside their own creation. Thus they insist that we build the past out of nothing more than the past's recycled bricks. Conservatism is an absolute faith in the perfection of the world over which they've held sway and seek to preserve, the God who put them in charge of it, and those in whom God placed his charge--themselves.