Saturday, July 26, 2008

Panty Waste-ism

Up on Kos right now is a diary titled God D*amn South Carolina. A heartfelt and compelling story about a miscarriage of justice. A young gay man was murdered by someone who got off with a 5 year sentence, suspended to 3. His killer will be eligible for parole in 10 months. 10 months for murder. Sorry, murder of a fag in South Carolina. So the author of the diary chose what in my estimation is a most appropriate title, if a little low key. Good gracious, he even bowdlerized "Damn" to "D*mn". I may not know what Dasteriskamn means, but I grew up in the South and as far as I'm concerned there are a baker's million of reasons to damn every former member of the Confederacy to hell for all eternity plus life, even ignoring this latest outrage. Et alors, motherfuckers, the diarist was more than justified in expressing himself the way he did. But this being Kos...

The aggrieved diarist was soon forced to update:

UPDATE: As I wrote in the comments, the title is aimed at a state government which would object with outrage to a gay tourism ad, but react with silence to this gross miscarriage of justice. I am not condemning the entire state, but rather, the government which allowed this to happen.

Which begs the question, Why the flip flop and fuck are Kossacks leaving comments in defense of South Carolina's honor? Is it because they imagine other Kossacks are so pig ignorant we might actually take the title literally and believe him to be damning - Jeremiah Wright-style - every member of the polity? Every last gun-toting, bible-thumping, flag-waving, wife-beating, cow-tipping, mouth-breathing, mullet-wearing, immigrant-bashing, fag-slaughtering one of them? Pishaw! We're far more sophisticated than that. Do the commenters really think we'd condemn an entire state by abusing the crudest of stereotypes? Double pishaw! We know better than that, my friends.

My question is, given that we know better, who are the servile little shits, the boot-quakers, ass-lickers and panty wastes who get so dern skeered about a Kos diarist besmirching the honor of a state whose greatest honor is firing the first shot in the Civil War? So skeered that they rush to warn the diarist he might be offending a few of the Palmetto State's more glaringly vacant minds? Who are these commenters and where and for how long have they been held captive by the Right's FARC of the mind? Because they display the classic signs of Democrat Stockholm Syndrome, defined in DSM-V as the need to see, sympathize with and sub-consciously support the Christian Falangist side of the argument, despite their own position being as reasonable and non-threatening as a rainbow-colored rabbit fucking a unicorn. I understand that the Overton Window has been moved so far to the right these last twenty years of Republican rule that once centrist or even center-right positions are now likely to be seen as quasi-Marxist by the corporate commentariat and the Entertainment Industrial Complex. But there is a reason Lenin thought it more important to kill Social Democrats than Monarchists. The former were the only force capable of undermining the revolution from within.

So I call bullshit on the captives of phony bipartisanship and Mutually Assured Disrespect. I call out the panty wastes and cowards. If they think the citizens of South Carolina are somehow better than the government they elected, let them install their sorry butts in Charleston - or better yet Spartanburg - and find out.

If we hope to move the Overton window back to the left (formerly the center) and our national conversation back to a potentially post-nationalist, post-chauvinist sweet spot of sanity, the last thing we need to be doing is hand-wringing over a diary title on Kos because it might upset the citizens of a state whose government considers a man's (homo)sexuality a mitigating circumstance in the trial of his murderer.

And honey, don't even get me started on the lynching that went on way back in the...oh snap! The twentieth century.

1 comment:

MACSONIX said...

Hear ye, hear ye - again we have successfully cowed to the might of that reigning wisdom which states that it's okay for folks like Imus and O'Reilly to spout racism and suggest lynching parties be held for the likely future first lady... but son, we jus' cain't STOOP to that level by actually saying anything that might be construed as - gasp - OhFENsive, don't ya know. Naturally, those genteel southerners won't take kindly to a good old tongue-lashing, they are fully invested and well-steeped in the more Romanesque traditions of physical torture and violence.

Never bring a knife to a gunfight. Panty WASTES, indeed. Bravo, Howie.