Doug Valentine offers a piece on the futility of much activism.

(Please note: The opinions in this piece are not mine. They are Doug’s. But his point was not to exclude himself or any other writer who claims to be an activist. Its something all of us feel one time or other. I know I do. Frequently. At some level, what writers do is perfectly useless and only a form of self-advancement, if that).

Why Don’t All You People Just Shut Up!

“As my friend Roger says, ‘Never have so many held Washington hangers-on office for so long and talked endlessly to each other for so much money and done so little as the Republic rotted. The utter impotence of the progressive think tanks, lobbies, etc. is a great unwritten story.’

The same can be said about the proliferation of progressive internet bloggers and opinion makers. And the sad fact that all their talk, talk, talkity-talk serves no purpose other than to spin the empty heads of their faithful listeners, and maintain the status quo.

The problem can be understood through the Hegelian dialectic of master and slave. The liberal and the wingnut meet at Walmart and are astounded that the other is buying the same worthless consumer good. They recoil in silent horror and slip back into the darkness from whence they came…….

This childlike state of conflict and product loyalty is the low level of consciousness enjoyed by bloggers, addicts of the internet, and basically anyone subject to the media, be it on or off Broadway…… one begins to see how one’s heroes on the left are as dependent on the status-quo as Colin Powell or Hillary Clinton.

And they are as perverse, within that dysfunctional status quo: They hate the way America dominates small benighted nations, but given a little power, they exhibit the same pathology in their inter-personal relationships.

This infantile, delusional hypocrisy characterizes the progressive left.

And it just gets worse. In one case, a group of frequent contributors to an internet magazine journeyed to New Orleans in the wake of Katrina to help the disadvantaged. Upon arriving, they commenced to serve vegan meals to the hungry. When the hungry protested and asked for jambalaya, they were lectured about the injustices of factory farming. (All political action has an ideological price.)

As the anger of the ingrates began to bubble over, the healers told them to breathe deeply and envision the French Quarter without saturated fats. After several years of such experiences, one’s thoughts tumble into place, as in the Hegelian evolution of consciousness into self-consciousness, and one experiences the synthesis of subject and object…

At this point, the progressive blogger’s identity is inextricably, albeit subconsciously fused to the thing she or he despises most. The left becomes dependent on the abuse of the right. And regresses……

In the Realm of Rant, this is business as unusual. Call this abnormal, symbiotic relationship of opposites a “circle jerk.”

Take Rush Limbo. He prefers the howls of the left over the hoo-rays of the right. And yet, every time he makes a racist crack, the progressives send forth an army of
critical analysts into cyberspace. Forget poverty in the inner cities! It’s easier by far to expend a little good energy crying about Don Imus exercising his right to free speech.

Take your Blackwater obsession. It doesn’t matter that, like alcoholism or anorexia, any obsession is harmful to you, or that in this particular case it serves only to distract attention from where it should be, and boost the popularity ratings of frequent Blackwater critics.

Would it be unfair too say that, by playing the Blackwater shell game, these critics are serving as de-facto propagandists and recruiters for the National Guard and the
CIA? Are they profiting from Erik Prince, like the mercenaries they are?

Is a Blackwater mercenary really any different than any Joe Schmoe from Pocono who joins the US army (because it seems cooler than working in a factory) and goes to Iraq or Afghanistan knowing full well that some ass-wipe officer is going to send
him into a village to kill every man woman and child who gets in the way?

No. And joining Blackwater and killing innocent people is no less moral than going to Air Force University, learning to fly fancy jet planes, and dropping bombs on innocent civilians. But if a group of GI Joes have a little mini-My Lai massacre, do Blackwater critics demand a congressional investigation?

How can you not connect the dots. How can this be?
It can be, because the progressive left is as brainwashed as the conservative tea-bagging right.

Truth be told, neither has any contact with reality. And the infection is
spreading. You see it on Facebook, on Twitter, anywhere people go to escape their class and race anxieties – the safe places where Mr Rogers holds your hand and tells you it will all be okay. But there is hope. You can turn these people off. And not just Tina Brown; you can turn off Mother Jones too.

It’s just that you don’t know how. You say, “But I like them. They are my friends, like Brad and Angelina and Jennifer Aniston.”

Yeah.

But maybe if you got to know, really know them, you might not feel that way.

Or maybe you prefer the illusion at any cost?”