Sometimes it gets personal...

The comments below on Kerry's speech are a hugely abbreviated and tamed down version of the tirade I originally wrote at three in the morning, reacting, um, shall I say rather strongly to my father actually calling my brother a "*expletive* hate-America liberal because you're opposed to everything this country stands for". An accusation I can say without reserve is entirely false. The depth of my loathing for such abysmally empty and self-righteous rhetoric is apparently without limit, as it renders me actually incapable of expressing myself coherently when I encounter it, which I suspect is its actual purpose. Conservative pundits - the bad kind, the inflammatory kind - seem to live for saying the most outrageous thing possible, just to see sensitive liberals quiver with indignant rage.

What mystifies me most is that my parents are genuinely, truly generous people. Both of them are active in their community, mom is very active in her church and dad works regularly with Habitat for Humanity. There is really nothing they wouldn't do for their kids if they were able.

All of which makes their particularly bigoted, blinkered brand of politics all the more incomprehensible. Without taking a breath, they have no problem at all relegating my brother, who is gay, to second class citizenship - in fact they agree with it wholeheartedly. He's not really gay, after all, it's a lifestyle choice he made, or sometimes this belief shifts somewhat and homosexuality is instead a kind of disease from which he can be cured, possibly by medicine some day or maybe by prayer. Their rationale for the Federal Marriage Amendment is that "well, you're not planning on getting married anyway." As though this were the point, and not that in this and so many other ways, gays are denied basic rights and protections of partnership that heterosexuals take so much for granted they don't even realize they exist. About Kerry, about any political issue really, my parents do nothing but mouth the Fox/RNC party line - there is not one word out of their mouths that you couldn't write for them after reading or listening to Ann or Sean or Rush or Bill. Will they even take the time to watch Kerry speaking, or listening to a word that anyone actually said at the convention to make up their own minds about these things? Will they even, for that matter, pay any degree of actual attention to the actions of their VERY OWN REPUBLICAN PRESIDENT AND HIS ADMINISTRATION? Absolutely not, when they've got their team of reliable conservative filters working in lockstep to reprocess it all in gloriously re-translated patriotic jingoistic form. And naturally, holding our government accountable for their actions is apparently UNPATRIOTIC and marks one as HATING ONE'S COUNTRY (unless of course that government happens to be run by Democrats). I never imagined "democracy" meant "fascism" but I guess that just must mean I'm a REVISIONIST HISTORIAN. It's all extremely frustrating and sad to see that this is what democracy in America has come to: rule by the fingers-in-ears, hear-no-evil, see-no-evil, speak-no-evil dittoheads, who no longer even take the time to hear what the other side might actually have to say, and where candidates have to deliberately dumb themselves down in order to gain the trust of large portions of the American electorate. It's all of course exactly how Karl Rove would want it to be.

So thank God the DNC has finally decided it's time to turn this misbegotten political machine around. Yes, I realize, I know, it's all politics, and they have their own self-serving purposes for doing so. But it's been a long long time since I felt so inspired about democracy the way I did hearing Barack Obama (for one small example) and Kerry as well lay it out plain and simple for all to see. It was almost like being a kid again, feeling the glorious promise I first felt when I visited DC as a nine-year-old and first got a feeling (naive and simplistic as it might have been) of the expansive, all-embracing, all-inclusive nature of democracy. And, I hafta say, it's a very good thing to feel.