Amy's Robot

America: Can't Tell Shit from Apple Butter

After a night of holding our heads in our hands as our bodies were racked with sobs, we're ready to wipe the tears from our red-rimmed eyes and lay into our moronic countrypeople.

ADM's entry below is a thorough dissection of what has gone wrong with our country. Even if Kerry had barely won this election, the fact that it was a close election at all demonstrates that America has already moved far down a path of dangerous self-righteousness. My personal favorite part of last night's election coverage was Steve Colbert's closing commentary on The Daily Show, in which he semi-jokingly noted that the hatred that each half of the country feels for the other half is now the greatest strength our country has. "Our identities have become wholly based on rejecting each other," he said. "Ours is now an anger-based economy."

My biggest surprise is this: Who would have thought this election would come down to issues like gay marriage? Both sides of the political landscape have at various times dismissed the gay marriage debate as a mean-spirited non-issue, one that served only to rile up the support of Evangelical Christians. Well guess what? They got riled up, alright, and they turned out in great masses of bigotry to "protect" a religious institution that has absolutely nothing to do with the government anyway.

A great many of voters who chose Bush in important swing states said that their main criterion for choosing him was "moral values". By which, apparently, they mean killing Iraqi women and children, degrading the environment, attacking the poor in our own country, eroding Americans' civil rights, cronyism in government, and threatening our basic social safety net. But these are probably not the "moral values" that Bush voters had in mind while at the polls yesterday. One of the biggest values that likely did get them to vote was homophobia. Which brings me to my attempt to describe the majority of America, who support such things.

As far as I can tell, most Americans who voted for Bush must be either ignorant, selfish, or stupid. Lets look at ignorance first. Because of the massive amounts of money and time and effort spent on informing the American public of what Bush and Kerry each stand for, what policies they support, and their vision for the future of the country, I doubt that all those people can truly be ignorant of what they were voting for.

Which brings us to selfishness. These voters, through their support for Bush, demonstrate that they don't care about anyone who is different from them. Poor people, people of races other than white, gay men and lesbians, and non-religious people are typically not Bush supporters. White Christian Evangelicals, who pulled together to win Bush this election, appear to not care about what happens to accused "enemy combatants," pregnant poor women, gay men and lesbians, poor people, and people living in any country other than America. The selfishness explanation, unfortunately, makes sense.

What about stupidity? Can non-wealthy Bush voters really be just too dumb to realize that Bush is not working for their best interests? I used to think that most Americans truly believed in the central tenets of our nation: freedom, community, self-determination, and moral leadership. Maybe they're truly too ignorant to realize what's happening to these American values, but I think they're fully aware of it--they are just too selfish and stupid to care.

categories: Culture, Politics
posted by amy at 11:15 AM | #