The other day we made the case that the major parties are not equally responsible for the mess the political system faces. But there is one area where equality prevails. The Purity Police.
Conservative or liberal -- pardon. Progressive -- are the American equivalent of the Muslim religious police in the Middle East.
It’s a little more developed in places like Saudi Arabia and what’s left of Syria. A woman is stoned to death for being raped. A man is beheaded for shoplifting a bottle of vitamins for his camel.
They don’t execute the heathens and the fallen here. Yet. But they do a lot of damage nonetheless.
Trump is impure. He’s not a “real” conservative. He doesn’t toe the party line. A loner. An outlaw.
The so-called Freedom Caucus in the House of Representatives is the 40 member tail wagging the much larger dog. The dog is impure! We must cure him/her/it.
Clinton is impure. She doesn’t want to break up the big banks, hypertax the rich in one sweeping step. She has a sneaky husband, a closeted Republican who used the Oval Office as a massage parlor.
Even St. Bernard has his Purity Police detractors. Bernie isn’t socialist enough. Let’s revive the zombie Occupy Wall St. movement to show him how it’s done. They sure had their impact. Mostly on extra overtime for those privileged storm troopers of the fascist riot police in every city and town.
Purity! It’s a good thing as Martha Stewart might say.
But the purity police doesn’t restrict its activities to politics and politicians.
They’re like the Anti-Sex League in Orwell’s 1984. Orwell wrote fiction. Maybe prophetic fiction, but fiction nonetheless. Today we have a prissy posse in every city and town where anyone ever saw a hooker on the stroll. We cover the covers of marginally erotic magazines on newsstands and in supermarkets so we don’t corrupt the young ‘uns or embarrass the fair damsels.
We have the language Purity Police, those who insist that Latinism is the be all and end all of English and who would rather die before ending a sentence with a preposition.
And all this happens under the guise of “rightness,” “propriety” and Values-Values-Values.
In the change purse of weirdness that the Purity Police dominates, there also are the politically correct. Don’t get it wrong… we’re not advocating racial slurs and such. But there are limits. Or, as a friend put it in an email the other day “people are getting so thin skinned their bodies will fall out.”
What we need today is a civilian complaint review board for the Purity Police.
Shrapnel:
--Two unions are on strike at Verizon. The company has trained ten thousand in-house scabs to do the work of 36 thousand employees. Think of how this will affect you when you need Verizon’s already glacial and inept customer service.
--The website Common Dreams -- reliability unknown -- reports Hillary Clinton collected $225,000 from Verizon. It also says the company contributed plenty more to the Clinton foundation. Bernie Sanders supports the CWA/IBEW strike.
Today’s Quote:
“...” -- no one said anything worth repeating here since Wednesday.
I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®
Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com
© WJR 2016
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