Why I Don't Exist

To be totally honest, my previous post suggesting that conservatives should be commenting at my site was a bit facetious.  Sure, conservatives should be reading my blog, but it’s only natural that they don’t.  Because I’m a fairly good description of the liberal they insist they’re waiting for.  The conservative’s Liberal Messiah, if you will.  And just as the appearance of Jesus supposedly ruffled the feathers of the Jewish leadership who had been waiting for him, to admit to my existence would undermine everything.  Perhaps had they ignored His blog, things would have turned out better for them.

All the stuff that I mentioned in my last post is exactly what they pretend they want in a liberal: A rational free-thinker with strong ties to the “true American” lifestyle, who also happens to be liberal.  That’s exactly what they say they want.  And that’s the reason they have to ignore me.  Because it totally blows their current theory of liberal-avoidance to smithereens.  Rather than attacking us for being unemployed, un-American, whackjob extremists; they’d actually have to deal with our arguments.  And that’s just not something they’ve been equipped to handle.

Heck, even my conservative parents don’t seem to believe in my existence and think of liberals and atheists as if they’re a foreign species of traitor they’ve only read about in textbooks; despite the fact that most of my brothers and sisters are also liberals and/or atheists.  Somehow, O’Reilly’s version of the liberal atheist has more hold on my folks than the people who visit during the holidays.  Even when we talk politics, it never seems to sink-in that I’m the dreaded enemy they’ve been warned about.  How could it?  I sound so reasonable.

But that’s really the point.  The liberal-atheist enemy they’ve been warned about doesn’t exist.  Conservatives have developed the ultimate strawman and they keep beating him senseless while actual liberals stand around waiting for someone to notice our existence.  The fierce arguments they imagine themselves waging are entirely in their own minds and they haven’t heard a word we said.  And while all conservatives gripe about liberals in general, the smarter ones can be persuaded to acknowledge that those absurd caricatures don’t really apply to anyone they personally know.  It’s only the other liberals who they’re describing as traitorous unemployed drug-addicts.

But not even the specific enemies like Michael Moore, Ted Kennedy, or Paul Krugman are anything like the traitorous fools that conservatives are told of.  But that’s entirely the reason why conservative talkers insist on labeling these people as extremists.  Because they’re reasonable people who have persuasive arguments which aren’t easily dismissed.

Fahrenheit 9/11 in particular was the exact opposite of the Choir Preaching screed conservatives were told it was; which was exactly why they had to label it as such.  Liberals already knew everything in the movie, and merely enjoyed Moore’s storytelling style; but much of it was a new perspective to the Fox News victims.  So it had to be dismissed as loony propaganda from a dangerous liar, because actual arguments were futile. Their efforts weren’t to give people counter-evidence against the movie, but to inoculate them from it completely.

But so it is with all of their dreaded enemies.  Their arguments are not to persuade, but to inoculate.  They don’t convince anyone; they provide rationalizations to what people are already convinced of.  Because the entire conservative belief system collapses if it admits the existence of reasonable liberals with honest but differing positions.  

So rather than betray everything they believe; they are forced to either pretend we represent the extremist bullshit they’ve been warned about or completely write us out of existence.  But in no case are we well-intentioned, intelligent people with differences of opinion.  That is one position that conservatives are simply denied.  Because it undermines the whole system.  And thus, I don’t exist.