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Friday, December 23, 2005

The right-wing war against American families
Posted by Jill | 7:02 AM

I've always been very lucky in terms of family and politics. When I was growing up, my parents worshipped two deities: Adlai Stevenson and Edward R. Murrow. They weren't crazy about the Kennedys, but they were good old fashioned New Deal liberals all the way.

Sure, some of the 1960's stuff freaked them out, but I think some of that was inevitable when raising kids in a world seemingly gone mad. Some of it also was envy, because I think my parents both really wanted to be bohemians and didn't have it in them to buck the expectations of the system.

Mr. Brilliant wasn't as lucky. His dad was the kind of right-wing conservative who had a photograph of Ronald and Nancy Reagan on his TV instead of one of his kids, so family gatherings with him tended to be the sort of tense affairs in which everyone tries mightily to stay away from politics.

Wil Wheaton (yes, THAT Wil Wheaton, of Star Trek and Stand By Me fame writes in Salon today about dealing with parents who used to take him to nuclear freeze rallies and then were snatched during the Reagan years and replaced by bloodthirsty pod people:

I think the change began in 1980, when my parents both became Reagan Democrats. My mother took me with her into the booth when she voted for Mondale in 1984 (she was still an anti-nuke activist then, after all), but when talk radio exploded in the late '80s, it caught my parents and took them away. The people who drove me all over the American Southwest in their 1971 VW bus to visit our national parks were replaced with RNC talking-points pod people. As a result, I don't just tune out O'Reilly and the rest of the Republican screaming heads. No, I don't just tune them out: I hate them. I hate them with the same passion and the same fury that my dad exploded at me, because before those people got rich exploiting Karl Rove's (er, excuse me, I mean George Bush's) black-and-white, with-us-or-against-us fantasy world, my parents and I could discuss issues and amicably agree to disagree with each other.

But not anymore. I thought Tookie Williams was probably guilty and deserved to spend the rest of his life in prison. I wasn't defending him; I was just voicing my opposition to the death penalty. My dad acted as if I loaded the gun for Tookie and helped him aim it at my sister. We weren't able to have a respectful discussion about the death penalty, because my dad wouldn't allow it. Bill O'Reilly must be so proud of the world he's helped to create.

Now here is the terrifying thing: my dad is a really smart guy. He's so smart, in fact, he should see right through it when these right-wing noise-machine guys throw out facts in favor of emotional arguments to manipulate their audience. He should know when Rush is full of shit the same way I know when Michael Moore is full of shit. He is a perfusionist who holds people's lives in his hands every single day when they have open-heart surgery. He helped develop a process called ECMO for newborns, which reduced the infant mortality rate by something like 90 percent. He is a brilliant accountant, too, handling all the finances for everyone in the family, while running his own very successful business. And he is a great dad. He loves all of us (and my brother, sister and I all love him), and there is nothing in the world I like more than getting a call from my dad to blow off work and go to a Dodgers game together, so we can holler at the bums from right behind their dugout, where my family has had seats since the stadium opened. He's also a surfer, a fly-fisherman and a hell of a blackjack player. If I haven't made it clear, I love and admire my dad ... but when it comes to politics, whatever critical-thinking ability he has just vanishes, and he becomes an editorial cartoon caricature.

[snip]

I want to make something clear, here: I know I'm not the only 33-year-old liberal who has watched his parents grow older and more conservative, and I know that I'm not the first guy to have political disagreements with his father. In fact, I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with people who don't see the world the same way I do. My best friend, a libertarian who thinks he's a Republican, is living proof. But I also think it's worth identifying who is really waging the war on Christmas -- and it's not Target, for having the temerity to wish its shoppers "Happy Holidays." And it's not people like me, who use "Merry Christmas" and "Happy Holidays" and "Season's Greetings" interchangeably, hoping that the recipient of my good wishes will understand that I'm really saying, "I'm not religious, but I hope you have joy and love in your life, good health and happiness." The one waging the war is right-wing talk radio and its relentless drive to polarize and divide our country, and our holiday dinners, and make a nice profit while it does. Come to think of it, maybe I'll get my dad an iPod and a stack of Surf CDs for Christmas. It'll be a gift for both of us.



Wheaton touches on the corrosive effect of the kind of political polarization we're seeing in this country. When people like Bill O'Reilly and Joe Scarborough and Rick Santorum and Pat Robertson set aside the doctrine of "intelligent people of goodwill can disagree", and insist that everyone who doesn't toe the right-wing party line is somehow an enemy of not just America, but all that is Good and Holy in the world, they make the kind of detente that makes it possible for millions of families to get through the holidays impossible. They set father against son, parent against child, sibling against sibling, husband against wife -- because to the culture warriors, dialogue is toxic and tolerant understanding is for pussies. They are about playing for keeps; they are about beating the crap out of anyone who disagrees.

They talk about family values, but they refuse to see what the political climate THEY have created is doing to very real American families. It's time American families stopped inviting these hatemongers into their homes.
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