One of these things is not like the others

One of these things is not like the others

I can’t believe it.

Sarah effing Palin strikes again.

Every time I try to open the lines of communication with a liberal friend about how it feels for everyday conservative America (including people like me, who are really just the teensitinesiest bit conservative) to be constantly on the receiving end of name-calling, mockery, thinly veiled threats, and real live ACTUAL death wishes coming from the left (hint: it’s bad, mmmkay, and leads to intolerable shit like Donald Trump getting elected) this happens:

“Welp Sarah Palin once called liberal America Not The Real America, herp de derp, and I cried lots of supersad tears over it.” 

Fuck you, you did not.  Seriously, most liberals don’t care one flying FIG about being called Not The Real America or unAmerican or any of that.  In fact, a pretty healthy chunk of them take at least a little delight in being unAmerican. I know this because I used to be a liberal and I admit freely I hated America with the passion of 1000 fiery suns and went 4 whole years not saying the Pledge of Allegiance in high school and feeling exceedingly self-righteous about it because I KNEW that America sucked a$$ even worse than the Class of ‘87 did.  I remember absolutely despising America – the concept, the execution, the fireworks, Hank Williams, Jr, the Osmonds, Arnold Schwarzenegger movies, trailer parks, Christianity, barbequed meats, becobbed corn, all of it right down to that goddamn bald eagle. Did you know it’s a scavenger? It eats GARBAGE, just like America. America IS garbage and eats garbage and spreads its garbage like disease, and just like garbage the American experiment should be buried under tons of dirt and allowed to ferment until it rots away and ceases to exist or burned into ashes maybe instead and replaced with something better like Europe or maybe Portland.

I remember with crystal clarity having those feelings daily for years.  I hated America with more passion than I felt for mostly anything except perhaps Duran Duran.  Thus I am just not buying that the average liberal is losing any sleep over being torn up re: Sarah Palin’s opinion.

I believe most liberals trot out that stale ol’ Sarah Palin quote (that was ten years ago, people!) because they think it gives them political traction with conservatives.  It’s like fracking, you don’t really care about it because it doesn’t really affect you, but you think WE care about it because it affects us, so you talk about it. (37% of all readers just said “Well I for one actually care about fracking because blah blah blah STFU YOU DO NOT)  It’s as if because conservatives value “being American” (whatever that even means), liberals believe that by invoking Sarah Palin’s horrific decadesold verbal transgression maybe conservatives will think “Well gee whillikers, I’d certainly be upset if someone called me unAmerican, yup, you’re right, that was a low blow, she probably shouldn’t have said that.  Our bad.” And maybe that actually worked for a while there between the Dawn of Sarah Palin (who contrary to popular belief, was an absolute NOBODY among right-leaning voters when she came out of Wasilla to sink the McCain campaign like an impossibly upbeat torpedo and didn’t represent or speak for conservatives, the group at that point in time and barely does now) and today but heads up, it doesn’t work any more, not on me anyway.

Because the fact is, liberal chums, quite a lot of you DO hate America.  Maybe not YOU personally, I’ll take your word on that, ol’ buddy ol’ pal, but a lot of your compatriots actively hate America.  At least the red part of it, anyway. The American American stuff.  Statement of fact: you will never find a flag or a cross or a gun or an eagle or a Harley Davidson motorcycle embossed on anything belonging to a liberal.   All that red white and blue bullshit I used to hate so violently and vehemently in high school and college (and still don’t particularly love TBH, an aesthetic viewpoint you may be shocked to learn is not at all unique amongst conservatives who are actually far more diverse in thought and opinion than we are made out to be), you hate it just as bad as I did.  

You demonstrate your hatred constantly in every way you possibly can – in music, in books, in tv shows, in cartoons and bumperstickers and slogans on T-shirts. The people who speak for you say it – the politicians and celebrities and reporters and college professors. There are a kajillion tweets a day with some important lefty mouthpiece saying how much they despise America and how they wish the United States was more like Canada or Australia or Sweden and how embarrassing it is to be an American and all those kajillion tweets get a kazillion retweets.  You’re not fooling anyone with your crocodile tears over Sarah Palin saying this that or the other thing, it’s a nonsense political ploy, your ace in the hole that you think proves some point but it’s all lies and bullshit just like 90% of all the other stuff you say.

Let me digress for a minute to talk about cunts.   

You know that recent Samantha Bee thing where Roseanne said some awful thing and then Bee said “cunt” (which is like NOTHING compared to what Roseanne said) and some conservatives suddenly flipped their shit and y’all were left scratching your no-poo’d man-buns in perplexity about the hypocrisy of it all?  Well, that’s you over this Sarah Palin thing. I mean seriously, Sarah Palin saying “not the real America” is so utterly minor in the grand scheme of political barbs (political barbs are ALLOWED, people, barbs are not off limits! Hillary calling people in red states deplorables is a dumb as b@lls but it too was a political barb and allowed just the same as Palin’s “not the real America” should have been allowed).  

Yet you trot “not the real America” out like it’s some magical totem you can invoke to shut down the VERY LEGIT point that the left en masse is doing an awful lot of ugly talkin’ here and maybe-just-maybe conservatives have valid reason for being a little bit concerned about the long-term implications of your guyses present mindset. You’re scared, concerned, feel threatened, conservatives?  Well, Sarah Palin, case closed, check and mate, Elvis has left the building.  Your argument is invalid, Sarah Palin’s hair is a bird.  U throwing Sarah Palin in my face is Sam Bee saying “cunt” only writ large, since it is STILL going on and on and Sarah Palin happened forever ago in the grand scheme of things.  You and yours are insulting and even outright threatening me and mine every day via 100,000 different mediums and when asked about it you blink stupidly and pretend that you don’t know what I am talking about and have the audacity to ask me to list my sources to prove this outrageous claim.  

ARE YOU FREAKING KIDDING ME?  My SOURCES? How about everything and everyone on your side for like, oh, I don’t know, the last mywholeentirelife?

But ok, whatever, I’ll play.  Let’s just go over a FEW of the more notorious things that are just a wee bit more…shall we say, in your face…than Sarah Palin saying “not the REAL America” during the course of a political campaign, shall we?

Famous singer says she hates America, later explains it’s because America is fat

Reporter says coal miners should die and they deserve it

Childhood icon says old people need to die to protect the environment

Tech company founder says Middle America is a shithole filled with stupid people

Television writer says it’s good that Congressmen he politically disagrees with were shot

Hollywood royalty calls for mass execution of NRA members

Hollywood royalty calls for woman to be raped…

…and child to be molested.

Actor bullied and forced to apologize for saying conservative writer has good intentions

Anointed celebrity golden girl and Friend of Hillary celebrates the extinction of white men

Congresswoman calls for members of presidential cabinetto be publicly harassed/bullied by the private sector to force political agreement

Failed presidential candidate calls those who did not vote for her backwards, pessimistic, racist, sexist, jealous, and very obviously worst of all, poorer than her voters

I could sit here and post like a hundred of these, a thousand of them, a million even, and I could back them up with a BILLION examples from fictional sagas where conservatives or Christians or Republicans or country folk were mocked as stupid/inbred/ignorant and/or portrayed as bad guys and terrible people and it would still be a drop in the bucket really.  And remember, these are NOT just random yo-yo’s on the street, these are famous people putting together thoughts that they KNOW will be highly scrutinized by millions of people. The average everyday liberal yo-yo’s are also posting similar sentiments, I’ve read them, and honestly, YOU’VE read them too. You like to pretend you haven’t read them when I press you on the issue, but you’ve read them and a good many of you have written them yourself.  I read these sentiments on social media all the way back into the Obama administration when you were winning and winning wasn’t good enough, oh no, you had to also stand over the virtual corpses of gay-marriage-opposing Christians WHO YOU WERE FRIENDS WITH and instead of being magnanimous, conciliatory, generous in your triumph, you pushed your digital foot into their cyberchest and screamed victory into their avatar’s face.  (and I happen to agree with you on gay marriage but the gloating and mercilessly unkind behavior to people who didn’t agree after gay marriage was legalized was one of the most troubling things I’ve ever witnessed).

When I say “we’re scared” you bloody well know why or you are the stupidest, most inside of a bubble person ever.   

Yet again and again, I emerge from hiding like a little shy mouse to try to explain this to you, to tell you my concerns, to express the concerns of my friends and neighbors out here in Shymousepeopleland and in return you give me Sarah Palin?  REALLY? Is saying “not the real America” during the course of a political campaign really equivalent to calling for murder and rape? Is ur complicated feelz about hearing “not the real America” one time 10 years ago REALLY equivalent to millions of mousy conservative folks being actually afraid to talk about their deeply held political beliefs because they know they’ll be stomped on by a thousand combat boots and maybe even lose their little mice jobs at the cheese factory if they do?

I don’t think it’s unreasonable paranoia for conservatives to have some concerns in light of the many troubling statements that YOU, liberals, both everyday folk and those in your leadership, are making every. damn. day.   The people you are surrounded by and look up to are saying that I am evil. Not wrong, evil. And evil things are to be eradicated. ERADICATED.  The moldy, outdated past that had nothing good in it at all whatsoever should be eradicated utterly from the history books, ushering in the glorious, flawless, golden Future of Tomorrow in which everything will be perfectly utopian and everyone will be happy all the time.  Or else.

This is happening, it is real, and I don’t need to post 10,000 examples to prove that it is real every time we chat, because you gotta be living at a Helen Keller level of oblivious if you don’t see it.  And you – who are ostensibly my friend, right?? I thought so anyway – telling me that it is unreasonable paranoia on my part because Sarah Palin, makes me even more concerned. Because one of these things is NOT LIKE the others.  

And this is not me calling for censorship!  Not EVEN! I think it’s fine for Samantha Bee to say “cunt” and Robert DeNiro to say “fuck Trump.”  (even though, again, it’s dumb as b@lls if you wanna win elections IMVVVVHO cause you’re gonna need the moderate people like me and I for one will never vote Democrat again not even for the freaking dog catcher).  Feel free to call me a cunt or a gash or a deplorable and I’ll defend to the death your right to say it. But don’t you even dare, for a single solitary minute, talk to me condescendingly like I’m a fucking idiot born yesterday and try to conflate a minor political jab that happened 10 years ago with high school teachers casually suggesting burning down a pizza parlor over some people’s political and religious beliefs.  And this shit is happening CONSTANTLY from you people and it’s bad and making our country less and less pleasant and worse, less and less unified.



Now I know there are people on the right who have done and said some terrible shit and yep it’s indefensible.  But for some reason you never bring those people up, do you, preferring instead to resort to bitching and moaning about Sarah Palin and her ilk.  Why? I suspect it’s because deep down inside you know that those people are not mainstream. Alex Jones is not mainstream and you know it and I know it.  Alt-right trolls are not mainstream. But on your side? The extremists RULE. Lena Dunham, who was once put in charge of Hillary Clinton’s Instagram account for a whole fucking day that’s how much of an insider she is, made a cheery video about how great it was that white males would go extinct.  You cannot disavow the extremists in your midst because 97% of you ARE extremists and the other 3% of you have your heads so far up your own asses that not even the soothing sounds of NPR can lure you out.

God, I miss Dick Gephart.

I have a child who’s an instigator.  He will push and push until finally one of his siblings flips their shit, usually over the most minor, mundane, innocuous thing but it’s because he’d been doing that same thing and worse for the last 17 hours straight.  Then he will profess shock and outrage that he’s being punished for this microaggression that he of course never even meant to do. He’ll point a quavering finger at whoever it is who had simply responded in kind out of exasperation since he’d been provoking them for a good long while prior.   Then he cowers behind “but Johnny did so and so” and gets all offended and claims to have no idea why anyone is even angry with him when everyone knows it was Johnny all along.  You know the type. He’s not a bad kid and I believe that HE mostly believes what he says and probably cannot understand why he is in trouble most of the time because he also has a selective memory and seems to immediately forget the bulk of all his small but obnoxious transgressions.  

What my child fails to understand is that we, his parental units, have been watching his behavior lo these many years and we KNOW that whenever one of his siblings blows up at him, it’s usually entirely justified because he’s such an unremittent little passive-aggressive pissant.  That is YOU, liberals. You poked us and poked us and poked us for decades and we took it in good faith, with good humor, in the spirit of a pluralistic society, but now ya done poked us one too many times and you cannot, CANNOT run back and hide behind “but Sarah Palin!!!  Fox NEWWWWSSSSSS!” any more.  Even though I suspect that you have the short-term memory issues of any garden-variety unremittent passive-aggressive pissant and you don’t even know why we’re mad at you because you didn’t even DO anything, trust me, you did.

Better start keeping score because we have started keeping score.

AKA check yourself before you wreck not only yourself, but everything.  We got a good deal here, America. We got a good thing going. We got freedom and a world of choices and technological shit that was unimaginable when we were children and you can absolutely reject the trappings of “America”, the bald eagles and Jell-O salads and deer heads on walls and Little League baseball and toddler beauty pageants while still embracing freedom and the marvelous stuff that freedom has created for us.  Because the freedom stuff is the stuff that really matters to us right-wing wackos. Believe it or not we don’t care if you like the same home decor and extracurriculars we do if you’d just stop telling us how problematically awful the stuff we like is and writing thinkpieces on how our every preference reveal us as much-dumber-than-u monsters. I promise we don’t want to force our way of life onto you.  That’s your department.  

The stuff y’all think of as “the real America” is just aesthetics. We can share the American stuff – freedom and tolerance and respect for individual rights and civil liberties – without sharing the aesthetic trappings. Conservatives do it every day – I assure you, my daughter has never been in a beauty pageant nor does the severed head of an animal adorn my home, and I don’t even LIKE apple pie. But I don’t go around judging and insulting my comrade-in-arms who does like those things, and our relationship works.  

Sooo, I’ll do me, and you do you, and Bubba McLardass or whoever you think lives out here in the red states can do him, and we could all live happily side by side in peace and harmony but ya gotta quit with the demonizing everybody who doesn’t like everything that you like all the time.  And if you can’t do that, if you can’t change, I get it, change is hard. But at the least you need to ADMIT that a lot of the people on your side of the aisle are saying some things that are beyond the pale and way outside of the boundaries and that we on the right have reasons to feel afraid of these people and fear makes some people who are already halfway there, get totally cray-cray. 

Please, PLEASE just admit that your side’s rhetoric, from the very bottom right on up to the tippity top, has gone way beyond something mild and minor Sarah Palin said in a speech 10 years ago because by pretending these things are in any way the same, you are then compounding the matter with deceit and condescension and making me question the motives of everyday people I genuinely like.

That’s right, dudes and dudettes of the left, I LIKE YOU.  We ARE all totally the real America and I like you bubble-headed Coasties from Haight-Asbury all the way to Greenwich Village.  We have way more in common than you think. I believe you mostly have good hearts and some of you even mean what you say which makes you wrong, not evil.  I don’t mean you any harm and I don’t ~think~ u mean me harm either, but when you piss on my leg and tell me it’s raining, I start wondering if you’re really my friend or if you’re just looking for a convenient place to drop a dook.


One thought on “One of these things is not like the others

  1. You scared of liberals? I scared of EVERYONE. Everyone got a bat, and most people’s hurtin’
    And hurt people lash out.
    Can’t take a flippin’ car out to hike, ’cause someone might have a bad day and bust it up.
    Can’t wear that flippin’ shirt, because someone might think I’m a conservative.
    Can’t wear this flippin’ shirt, because someone might think I’m a liberal.

    You think the liberals are bad? 88, sucker. Or how about Roll Coal?
    Dicks ain’t got a party, dicks are everyone these days.

    Do yourself a favor, honey, and don’t ever say “I won’t vote for a party again” — that’s what the liberals did, and now they’re voting for slavery (time was, that was a conservative cause. way back in 2003 — you still wanna say we all share the same values? Ms. Feminist, sweatshops run on women, because women don’t organize, women don’t fight back.). Because money talks, and politicians listen.


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