FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: 10/7/22.

Kids on the back of the bus were listening to this.
I think Schoolly D would approve.

• Got a hot one for you at Roy Edroso Breaks It Down today: Inspired by the latest batshit-crazy rightwing ruling on guns, it’s an overview of evidence that conservatism is not so much a political or philosophical position as it is a death cult. Everything they push for is clearly calculated, not to help anybody, but to make life worse for people they hate – even if they have to make life worse for themselves as well in order to achieve it.

Their pretenses are hilariously shoddy. Look at the difference, for example, between their recent “constitutional” positions on abortion and on universal gun suffrage. In the case of abortion, in the Dobbs decision they read the constitution to mean that a generally popular and useful procedure may be banned because walla walla rhubarb rhubarb sanctity of life, buttressed by the wisdom of a 17th-Century witchfinder. Since they can’t (yet) affirm of behalf of our (so far) non-theocratic state that zygotes are people, they rule that the religious beliefs of a few Americans must trump the health and happiness of most. Our hands are tied – it’s in the constitution! 

But as to the right to brandish guns anywhere and everywhere – a license that very clearly has caused immense damage to our quality of life – their constitution tells them this right must be expanded ever outward, into churches and concert halls and fairgrounds and subway cars, whether we want it or not. Conservatives used to say the constitution is not a suicide pact; now they say, oh, yes it is. Your hands are tied – it’s in the constitution! 

Their constitution, in other words, is as peculiar and malign as their Bible. 

I will add that, along with all the other emotional infirmities that inform the actions of the conservative death cult, there is an important but generally unremarked one which I believe is a major force behind the gun mania: Desegregation. Having been alive during some of the sequelae of Brown v. Board, I recall how deeply conservatives resented having to live by the then-new constitutional order decreeing separate-but-equal an unacceptable accommodation of the civil rights amendments. For most of them, it was the first time a constitutional ruling had interfered with their lives – even if they weren’t subject to, for example, forced busing -- and I believe they never stopped resenting it; nor have they stopped resenting that it has become unfashionable (or, in their modern argot, "cancel culture") to say out loud in mixed company what they think about it. Thus, in the back (at least) of their minds, when they push guns into liberal cities that don’t want them, they consider it revenge for being forced to live with black people.