More Refreshing Republican Shame
"[San Diego] has quietly dethroned itself and dropped the self-proclaimed title "America's Finest City" from its official Web site.
" 'We couldn't stake that claim anymore,' said Gina Lew, the city's director of public and media affairs. 'We were taking too many hits.' "
posted by Anonymous at 7:03 PM
4 Comments:
I remember my excellent Humanities professor at Reed distinguishing a shame culture like the Greeks from a guilt culture like our own.
I realize now that the Republican party is our shame culture party: obsessed with success, but with little internal morality, they're only worried about externally delivered shame, an emotion usually reserved solely for public failure.
Heavy, man, heavy. Or is it just barely possible that many people with different motivations and life experience may behave, think and feel in various ways, despite being on the far side of an artificial political polarity from ourselves? Naw... they all bad.
It is certainly not all good.
There is a short, shrinking list of national conservative politicians who act like they are driven by actual poltiical philosophy- fairly feeble echoes of a once reasonably honest conservative political movement. And increasingly, they're called "Democrats." (I believe that's Dr. X's line.)
But the drive to centralize econommic and political power in particular hands has overwhelmed everything, and the dwindling honest moderates have only peeped occasionally in response. The working philosophy for the Republican leadership is a kind of Delayian Social Darwinism - even the evangelicals, who are for the most part honestly deluded, are beginning to understand their betrayal.
My contempt is reserved largely for the leadership. We've all been shoved into a raw struggle for power, and among the GOP crowd nestled comfy on K st., I do not buy motivational equivalency.
Fair enough. Except the San Diego officials, as far as I know, were merely garden variety graft-meisters, an old, bipartisan American tradition whose great exponents include Richard Daley, Dan Rostenkowski, and many others. Do R's steal more than D's? It would make an interesting study. The old saw says that R's seek power in Washington for money and D's for sex.
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