Only the other side fights "the culture war"

 I have a small observation for this morning, a sort of "did you ever notice" thing.  Imagine me with a microphone, in front of a brick wall doing 1990s ultra-safe stand-up.  Did you ever notice that it is only ever the other side fighting "the culture war?"  This morning's motivation is the silliness of the Gorman poem.  Poetry is not my preferred art, as my very few readers will know.  I prefer long-form prose (often excessively long-form prose), and absurdly pretentious music, but the beauty of the marketplace of ideas and art (such as a marketplace exists for art) is that you may enjoy the form of your choice.  That said, I vaguely remembered there being some sort of rah-rah about Amanda Gorman, yet I did not remember the poem itself.  Because we now live in stupid-ville, and someone complained about it, I went back and read it.  Note: read, rather than watched her performance of it.  There are real debates to be had about the best ways to consume and study poetry, but you do you.

I liked it.  It was a little sappy for my tastes, but it was not written as a general artistic statement.  Instead, it worked as a performance for an inauguration.  What I find most interesting about it is how thoroughly it rejects not only the kinds of divisiveness we hear from Trump and his disciples, but from the far left.  If you read the poem, and then read actual critical race theory, the retributive and vengeful ideas that follow from it, compare it to, say, Brittney Cooper, Gorman may have written from the perspective of the descendant of slaves because she wrote it, but there is no one, single American perspective.  It's the ideas that matter.  So I liked it, and the ideas in it are as dismissive of left-wing divisiveness as right-wing divisiveness.  It should have been unifying, which was the goal.

Yet because this is 2023, there must be a fight about everything.  If you inhabit the left-wing informational ecosphere, the response is as follows.  Do you see?  Do you see how they make us fight a culture war?

What are you not seeing in the left-wing ecosphere?  Any example of the left picking a culture war fight.  What do you see in the right-wing ecosphere?  The reverse.  See, for example, San Francisco's plan to pay every African-American $5 million as reparations for slavery.  That wasn't a typo.  This is a real proposal, to the degree that it is a real proposal.  If you have any knowledge of history, you may also know that when California was admitted to the US in 1850, it was not a slave state, even aside from any other aspect of the philosophical issues of "reparations."  And then there's the dollar figure.  As San Francisco literally turns to shit, or at least, some combination of shit and needles, which is all that will remain as the city ceases to do anything basic like enforce laws.

Is that $5 million thing going to happen?  No.  Not unless they have a plan to scoop up those street turds and sell them as artisanal fertilizer.  Locally sourced.  I'm sure some dumbass will buy it.  If not in San Francisco, then in Portland.

But it ain't gonna happen.  This is stupid culture wars nonsense, being fought by left-wing idiots.

Putting restrictions on Amanda Gorman's poem, posturing about a $5 million-per-person reparations plan that will never happen... yes, there are very bad people on both sides, to put a twist on a twisted phrase.  Funny, but it actually works when you put it that way.  If I wanted to put together a definitive list of stupid culture war offensive actions taken by the left, and the right, I'd never finish, but at least I can enjoy the play on words with "offensive action."

But it is only the other side crossing the border, launching missiles, 'n such.

There are several principles at work.  Within your own ideological ecosphere, the worst excesses will not be publicized.  Your side contains some hardcore culture warriors, some moonbats or wingnuts,* but that is not the entirety of "your side."  Think of it like scientology.  You cannot have Xenu everywhere.  Xenu is that secret shared and discussed only by the hardcore Hubb-ies.  Normal people are not very intelligent, but they are smart enough to know that when cultists start ranting about Xenu, it's time to get the fuck out of that place.

Your side's excesses, your side's attacks in the culture wars are its Xenus.  No one talks about them to the outer circle.  They are there, but if you knew about them, you'd understand that your own side is kind of fucked up.  You are kept in line by no one talking about them, thereby sparing you the cognitive dissonance that would be sparked by realizing that actually, your side does aggressively stupid shit fighting its own culture war.

Instead, you hear what the other side does to you.  There is a relevant concept here which makes my application of the scientology analogy more than a little apt.  The psychology of a cult relies on "phobia indoctrination," wherein cult members are kept in the cult by being instilled with irrational fears of those outside the cult.

We are the only ones who love you and support you, and those people are horrible and dangerous and out to get you, and if you stray from our loving arms, you will die, die, die!

Sound familiar?  If so, you may be in a cult, or at least in a social environment that operates using one of the most common and psychologically dangerous cult tactics.

Note how eerily culture war rhetoric follows phobia indoctrination, sometimes in mild form, sometimes in literal and strict form.

We're not fighting the culture war, they are!  We are under attack!  Why do they keep attacking us?!

This only works if no one talks about the mutuality of the culture war, and your informational bubble won't publicize your side's attacks because that's your Xenu.

Look for your own side's Xenu.  There's a Xenu somewhere.  Not in the real world, because Xenu is a batshit creation, but if you have a side, your side is doing shit and not talking about it.  It is much easier for the right to talk about Maia Kobabe's Gender Queer than Amanda Gorman's "The Hill We Climb," when discussing materials in schools because restricting one makes them look like parents concerned about legitimately eyebrow-raising material, and the other makes them look like illiterate, racist fucks.

It is much easier for the left to talk about drag queens dressed like Mrs. Doubtfire and reading The Little Engine That Could than it is to talk about "Drag Pedagogy: The playful practice of queer imagination in early childhood," by Harper Keenan and Lil' Miss Hot Mess, or things like this.  (MAJOR WARNING before you click on that link.  Seriously.)

Your side has a Xenu.  Look for your side's Xenu.  It is only selective news coverage within an informational bubble that allows each side to tell its flock that it is the other side that is fighting the culture war, yet as they do so, they perform the vital task of phobia indoctrination.

Now let us have a moment of national unity mourning the passing of Tina Turner, but celebrating that Ike did, indeed, "beat Tina to death."  Thanks, Grimmie, you did us a solid on that one.  May the domestic abusers always die first, preferably horribly.

Burn in hell, Ike.  This one's for Tina, whom every American loves, and if you don't, get the fuck out of my country.  (She died in Switzerland?  Um...)

*Recall the technical terminology.  A moonbat is a left-wing extremist, like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and a wingnut is a right-wing extremist, like Marjorie Taylor Greene.  Neither have any business in government, nor unsupervised in Walmart, nor in the seat behind me on an airplane.