Ship of Fools

Being a suit-and-tied, clean-cut, white kind of guy, making big money deals in the business world, I have been in situations where everyone in the group (for example, at a Mergers and Acquisitions conference at the Beverly Hills Hotel) naturally assumed that everyone else there was, of course, conservative. In these circumstances, being warmly embraced by only members of the in-group, people can feel free to share what they really think.

I invariably will say something that clearly does not fit the script (it's the born troublemaker in me). People are at first surprised that I can think for myself (I don't happen to like being a part of any political tribe). Then I quickly become perceived as nothing more than a dressed up hippy with a haircut - a wolf in sheep's clothing. "Isn't this cute - the naive liberal. How did he get in here?" If I'm not with "us", then I must be with "them". I know, I know - it goes both ways. Silly humans. Still, it's fun to watch. Ah, the emptiness of it all!

Like a National Geographic article where the researcher is living with and documenting the interactions of the aborigines, here is a look at the native beliefs of the fracturing neo-con tribe at one such gathering:

". . . All the tropes that conservatives usually deny in public – that Iraq is another Vietnam, that Bush is fighting a class war on behalf of the rich – are embraced on this shining ship in the middle of the ocean. Yes, they concede, we are fighting another Vietnam; and this time we won't let the weak-kneed liberals lose it. "It's customary to say we lost the Vietnam war, but who's 'we'?" the writer Dinesh D'Souza asks angrily. "The left won by demanding America's humiliation." On this ship, there are no Viet Cong, no three million dead. There is only liberal treachery. Yes, D'Souza says, in a swift shift to domestic politics, "of course" Republican politics is "about class. Republicans are the party of winners, Democrats are the party of losers."