In the movie Constantine, the title character flips off Lucifer at the very end of the movie, which some have noted is fairly lame (as if the devil is offended by profanity). I don't really recommend the movie (except, as has been noted, that I like Tilda Swinton--check out The Chronicles of Narnia, even though it isn't really that much better of a movie), but this was an interesting point.However, there have been several occasions in my life when the relatively mundane takes on new meaning (not quite like flipping of Lucifer, but as close as I care to get). This was one of those times: the addresses had been such an irritating focal point in Mai's nagging that I couldn't resist.
On a vaguely related note, a friend of mine who is an economist had a disagreement about my characterization of liberals and conservatives, noting that (my words, not his) they often act with short-sighted idealism. I think this is true and unfortunate; but not really my point. I hate to dig too deeply into actual issues on this trivial little cartoon-posting ground, but here's one example: needle-exchange programs. Should people be using drugs? No. Should people be sharing needles? No. I don't think there's much disagreement on this: even many libertarians tend to draw a line at needle-drugs (not all, of course). How should we proceed? We can either let disease spread, because after all it's illegal in the first place (the conservative response), or we can try to help people struggling with addiction. The second seems like the compassionate response. I know there are problems involved, but punishing people (i.e., letting them share infected needles) further seems unnecessarily callous. By all means, shut down the drug trade (heroin is more available now that we've ousted the Taliban, but that's another story); but the users suffer enough.
I don't want to focus on that particular example so much as the pattern in the differences between the liberal and conservative response, and not just in terms of politics.
3 comments:
Perhaps this unnecessarially clutters your question, but a distinction could be made between "we" the people who are interested in bettering society and whatnot, and "we" the federal government in charge of allocating tax dollars. Lots of conservatives engage in realistic attempts to improve the world. I think of Jerry Falwell's home for young unwed mothers as a realistic attempt to offer counseling, health care, job training and parenting classes to women who might otherwise seek an abortion. Whatever one might think of the underlying ideology, he seems to be dealing with the situation as he sees it, trying to make it better. In the current bizarro climate within conservativism, maybe he's seeking federal funding for this, but traditionally a conservative would be someone who wants to the government to enforce the law, and wants people to band together in other ways to save the world.
In this regard, I'm not sure it's always the conservatives who forget why we don't mix church and state. Pessimism about the possibility of fixing social problems plays a role in the conservative mindset, but most conservatives I know are not so much pessimistic about social reform as unwilling to see the government as an agent of moral good. This makes neoconservatism a variant of liberal thought in my mind, but that's a different issue entirely.
There's a part of me that wants to argue that there's a gender imaged diachotomy within conservativism, with the government doing 'male' things and the church/charitable institutions doing 'female' things, but this would take too much work so I'll just raise the possibility.
Amanda links to a list of supposed conservative rock songs that might help you think this through further. Probably not, I'd imagine, but consider it offered in good faith.
I don't really like the list (surprise!). Of course, I'm not the only one: the comments on the list are very informative. A few thoughts of my own: "My City was Gone" by the Pretenders, for instance, points to a "government that had no pride," but is obviously pro-business (what sort of environmentalist takes paradise and puts up a parking lot?)
There certainly are songs that express typical conservative positions, but in general I think the medium is anti-authoritarian and as such liberal in the classical sense.
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