Right and left are exactly the same February 6, 1985
Dear Terry:
It was wrong of me to attempt to express how Michael feels
about you when he has clearly done so for himself in our current issue of Scrap
Paper Review.
As for your claim about my “scrambled thoughts,” what can I
say? I lay no claim to be the intellectual you are.
I am full of rage and sit not on the edge of society, but on
the edge of a world gone insane.
I am Jew to march around Jericho with the hopes I might
bring down the walls of hypocrisy, but rather a simple man trying to bash it
down using my forehead, or my working class fingers to dismantle it brick by
brick.
I don’t think I deserved the A you gave me for your radical
history class last semester since you clearly think I am more in tune with your
philosophy than I really am.
Yes, like you, I lived through the 1960s, but unlike you, I never
had the radical beliefs that remain a stigma on society from that era, always
just a blue-collar kid swept up by popular culture. I didn’t need to read that
fraud Marcuse to understand the social pressure cooker we all live in or the
double binds which society creates for us.
My view of the world is that the political right builds the
walls, and the political left finds the cracks in which to make them crumble.
The left’s actions are not mindless, no more than pursuit of
power is mindless. But it is cruel.
Reagan builds walls based on the most basic human values,
appealing the most basic instincts such as greed, instincts the left also has
but is ashamed to admit, and so disguise their desire for power behind masks
like social justice.
But America – in fact all human kind – stand on the stones
of greed and self-interest, and the right more honesty reflects this than the
left.
I see Christ, Jefferson, even Lincoln as flawed me
struggling against basic human instincts – condemned by the left for their
flaws, not for their virtues because they failed to live up to the myths, we
created for them. If only we all got taught the whole truth about these men, we
would have been let down when we learn of their darker side.
The Gnostic Gospels hints at a much more revolutionary
Christ than the one homogenized in the accepted Biblical text.
Jefferson has become a target because as a slave owner and
the father of children by one particular slave he could not live up to the ideals
he created when penning the Declaration of Independence. Some radicals wrongly
condemn his work as a product of slavery when it’s just the opposite. Jefferson
simply couldn’t live up to the creed he helped establish.
The idea of Liberation Theology basically condemns the ideas
for the flaws of the men who helped create them.
We get a lot of talk about how the political right
manipulates people by the use of “moral standards” and yet we see the left
doing exactly the same only calling their standards “social justice.”
In both cases, if you don’t believe the accepted dogma, you
are a heretic or worse, and cast as something evil or racist.
In both cases, pursuit of power leads to inhumane deeds done
behind the cloth of righteousness.
As much as you hate Reagan, the left is no better, perhaps
worse because it claims moral high ground it does not have.
Yet even as Reagan rules, the left is reorganizing –
communist-like – rebuilding itself to eventually take Reagan’s place at the top
of the power pyramid, not because of any moral superiority, but because they have
adapted better to the political changes. We’ve seen this reinvention from before
the turn of the century, from the early labor strikes that destroyed places
like Paterson and Newark, to the red diaper crowd of the 1930s and the Stalinists
of the 1940 to the New Left of the 1960s. Each time, the left rises out of the
ashes of the past, rehashing old ideas for a new generation, and I expect the
same is taking place right under our noses as we speak.
This is not aimed at students of today – who are more
interested in careers than knocking down walls, but those of the future, the
still vulnerable masses that can still be indoctrinated with failed ideas which
are polished to make them seem new.
And it won’t be just in college that they are infected, but
in high school, maybe even from the cradle, molded properly so that when they
reach college, they will believe – as you believe – in a philosophy that has no
practical value except for the wizards manipulating the levers of power behind
the scenes.
The left is creating cracks in the American wall that
ultimately will bring it all down, yet with nothing to replace it, because the
left doesn’t build, it only destroys.
Reagan inadvertently helps them because he leads a movement
back on an already outdated morality, which few kids believe today, and still
fewer will accept in the future. And so, at some point, the right will fall out
of touch with the mainstream the left is creating, colleges serving as centers
of indoctrination for the left while the right lack anything it can counter it
with. After all, kids have to go to school and if the left controls the
schools, they win ultimately – unless some new right-wing movement emerges to
wrestle control of the kids back.
The left through its taxing power is rapidly destroying
alternate education such as the Catholic Schools, so as to have total control of
their vulnerable brains.
Still, what does the right want to bring us back to?
How does the right argue against concepts such as racial
equality (even when the left means racial superiority)? How do you argue that
in a free society people have a right to be racist or misogynistic as long as
they don’t impose those views on others, have a right to be homophobic or any
of the other phobias as long as they don’t use against individuals, block them from
jobs, discriminate in work place?
The left’s great flaw will be that it will go too far forcing
people to comply with its morality, just as the right has gone too far imposing
its own.
But then what remains if you tear down all the walls?
I fear we may both live to find out.
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