THOU SHALT NOT BE AWARE

I think it's informative to use the title of Alice Miller's book to introduce this short passage. As I've pointed out several times, conservatives are often haunted by their pasts, completely influenced by them but completely unaware of the devil in their backpacks, yet they fear psychiatry and counseling and make fun of those who go to counseling to make some progress in their lives. Brock notes this flaw in Norman Podhoretz. We've seen this fear of facing themselves in Rove and in Delay also. I know we saw it in Hitler and in Stalin also. Men who are afraid of their own shadows live shadowy lives.

"They wrote with an analytical precision that awed me; what I didn't see then were the unspoken passions underneath. Though his son John told me that his father's politics were deeply entwined with his conceptions of 'manliness' in Breaking Ranks, the most famous neocon manifesto, the short, flabby elder Podhoretz did not acknowledge that his defection bore any relation to his inner life. While revealing nothing about himself, Podhoretz claimed that he was forced to defect from liberalism by the intellectual weaknesses, cowardice, and sexual experimentation of his former friends." —David Brock, Blinded By The Right, p. 35-36

I would like to go one step beyond Brock when I say I think almost all analytic writing (i.e. reasoned writing) is writing that excuses actions or justifies one's own actions or justifies one's feelings about reality and events in reality. But it's all about feelings rather than thinking.

PS: Photo of my side yard back of house to front at 5:00 PM after days of rain and two sunny.

MORE DIRTY UNDERBELLY OF THE RIGHT

The next paragraph speaks for itself. You gotta wonder how the religious right can work with these supporters of theirs. This makes even further sense when you consider what the information above tells us about the right. Recall that the Nazis confiscated all the impessionistic art because they thought it was decadent, then kept it in museums for them to secretly peek at.

"The upper management tier at Insight was a nightmarish cult of personality within the Moonie cult, which I now experienced personally because I was one of them. Kirk was married to a woman named Linda Moore, Insight's managing editor, who was so degrading and foul-mouthed that no one wanted to speak to her, muh less work for her. It could not have helped Linda's disposition that Kirk abused his power by openly courting another woman editor right under Linda's nose. Kirk introduced me to a prototype of a certain kind of right-wing man, married or not, that I would encounter at the very highest levels of the movement in the years to come. To Kirk, women, including his wife, Linda, were "cunts," or "fucking cunts." Arnaud either had "no balls," or Kirk threatened to "cut his balls off." Men who didn't follow Kirk's orders were "prissy," "sissies," "faggots," "cocksuckers," or "fudge-packers." Kirk had a problem with alcohol abuse, rarely showing up at work until 4 or 5 PM., when we all jumped to attention and plotted to circumvent or upstage Arnaud." —David Brock, Blinded By The Right, p. 31