ACLU Socialist

Figurines from the Cuckoo Palace

I'm wondering to what extent you and I look like the equally irrational mirror image of the authoritarian conservative, always yelping about freedom except when it's freedom for people that don't have stock portfolios, or penises, or what have you, and then crying to the hated government to come and beat up all their enemies.

I call myself a rebel and a cynic, I cheerfully regard our elected leaders as nincompoops and narcissists, I'd no more willingly let an FBI agent into the house than a rhinoceros with muddy sneakers on, and yet I favor all these programs where the government comes and takes care of everybody, gives us our old age pensions and pays our medical expenses, sponsors our educations, builds cheap housing, runs savings banks in post offices, owns the best TV stations (totally without interfering with content!), and sends everybody that can't find a job into the forest to build swimming pools and write poetry. I think I can trust the people that brought me the Iraq war to give me socialism! Am I out of my mind?

Well, I'll tell ya. I can remember Nixon and narcs and Cointelpro. I can also remember the unemployment office where I repaired many years ago after an attempt to unionize the restaurant I'd been working in for four years blew up in everybody's face: a fair-faced female bureaucrat looked at me seriously and said, "You know, this is not charity. You deserve this."

She was right, I did.

And Germany, which has accomplished all the stuff mentioned above (they ended up privatizing the post office banks, though), was building up not from Nixon but from total Götterdämmerung. So I'm still a socialist. Don't like spies, though.