For a few months now, I have been reading and enjoying a highly intelligent libertarian blog, Arcadia. A recent post sounds just like me, railing against moral decline, although the political polarities are reversed:
Paul Weyrich, Cal Thomas, and Ed Dobson recently announced that the culture wars are lost, that most people don’t defend, or even necessarily believe in, the values that characterized the Moral Majority and the Reagan revolution. They say social conservatives have failed politically since virtually none of their agenda items have seen the light of day in seven years.
I think we all have lost the culture wars, not right to left or left to right, but we all as decent human beings have all lost to the Machiavels, the think tank thinkers, the marketers, the pundits, the propagandists, the media for whom news is a product shaped by advertisers, the crowd for whom "getting results" for your own side, or company, is a justification for treating other human beings as means to your own ends. We have to stop playing Punch and Judy in a sideshow where others pull our strings. Spare your fellow citizens, and join me in tarring and feathering all those who invest for political return, or use the arts of rhetoric to divide us and deceive us. Since we cannot change the world, let us at least ape it. Dress as a paid liar and pretend you are telling the truth. I will be Rove and you can be Clinton, whichever Clinton you prefer. We can do it as light opera.
The liar we must perfect is in every one of us. Each of us is capable of art, or at least Carnival. Come, my fellow Arcadians! Let us join the Masquerade! The world is always upside down. It looks better when we are drunk and standing on our heads.
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