« Well, that explains everything | Main | Or I just like saying "Cuntabulous" »
June 23, 2002
Restricted Spaces
So when I was younger and more patient, there was this conservative guy I'd sometimes talk with. We were never friends, although he seemed conviced that we were. Which explains a statistic Time Magazine featured in their cover story on race relations a few years ago, showing a much higher percentage of white people who claimed to have one or more close black friends, than black people who claimed to have one or more close white friends. It's Sunday, the library is closed, and I have no intention of paying AOL Time-Warner for the privilege of looking up the stat. Violently dispute it and maybe I will just to shut you up. In the meantime, I'm riffing.
Some little folksinger (not the one you're probably thinking of) was doing a show in town, and somehow conservative guy found out about it and asked me if I was going.
It was early, and I hadn't had nearly enough coffee, so I screwed up and told him the truth: that the show was a woman-only space.
Predictably, he found this Sexist and Offensive and a violation of some bit of the Constitution that he couldn't name specifically, and I waited for one of the longer pauses in his diatribe, which in our conversations indicated the point where I was allowed to get a word in edgewise. Not that he actually listened, but it let me feel like a participant in some small way.
He mentioned, as one of the rhetorical examples people like him find so attractive, that if he tried to mark off an event as a white-male-only space, he'd be accused of racism and sexism, and there was a double-standard, and white men were the only group it was acceptable to discriminate against in politically correct America. . . It was quite a performance.
I suggested that white-male-only spaces were frowned upon because none of the rest of us (which would be the majority of the planet) particularly trusted the bastards, usually due to bitter personal experience, and felt that if they got together unsupervised, no good could possibly come of it.
The conversation went downhill after that.
There's a petition up at Cuntabulous about allowing trans(gendered/vestite)-women at MWMF, which controversy I remember my sister mentioning a while ago.
This is the sort of thing conservatives use to mock the Left, which is their little code word for the gendered/class/racial Other. They don't have the same problems dealing with diversity, because, frankly, they have none. Or at least very little; a running joke among black journalists covering the Republican convention is that they're going to end up in the tv broadcast, as the producers/cameramen try desperately to make the event look less like the Nuremberg Rally.
So they're quite upset at the idea of losing J.C. Watts. Not enough to actually, you know, pay any attention to him:
[Rep. Thomas M.] Davis said Watts told him he's frustrated about his role in the party and was ticked off that President Bush had not communicated with him during the debate over the Crusader artillery system. Watts, he said, felt that the White House should at least have given him a phone call to discuss his concerns over Bush's decision to cut off funding for the weapon, which is assembled in his district by United Defense Industries Inc.
because that would suggest they'd learned something from the Senator Jim Jeffords affair. Learning means change, and there's no reason to change if you're perfect. So there's no reason to learn anything, either. And there you have it, the conservative philosophy in a nutshell. That'll be five cents, please.
Posted by Aaron at June 23, 2002 09:52 PM