Rules for Radical Conservatives: Beating the Left at Its Own Game to Take Back America - Hardcover

Kahane, David

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0345521862 ISBN 13: 9780345521866

Verlag: BALLANTINE BOOKS, 2010

Inhaltsangabe

A satirical guide by the columnist for National Review Online counsels conservative readers on how to exploit vulnerabilities within the liberal party in order to bolster election victories. 50,000 first printing.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

David Kahane is the “Hollywood screenwriter” pseudonym for a conservative writer who spoofs insufferable liberals regularly in his column for National Review Online, including his Internet sensatio “I Still Hate You, Sarah Palin.” In real life, he is a New York Times bestselling novelist, a screenwriter, and a former journalist and arts critic spoiling to lead the right side over the top.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Chapter 1

The Cold Civil War

Despite all the evidence of the past several decades, you still have not grasped one simple fact: that, just about a century after the last one ended, we engaged in a great civil war, one that will determine the kind of country we and our descendants shall henceforth live in for at least the next hundred years-and, hopefully, a thousand. Since there hasn't been much shooting, so far, some call the struggle we are now involved in the "culture wars," but I have another, better name for it: the Cold Civil War.

In many ways, this new civil war is really an intragenerational struggle, the War of the Baby Boomers. America's largest generation, the famous "pig in the python," has affected everything it's touched, from the schools of the 1950s (not enough of them) through the colleges of the 1960s (changed, changed utterly), through the political movements of the 1970s and 1980s (revolution and counterrevolution), and into the present, where the war is still being waged. For the dirty little secret is that all those fresh- faced kids, crammed together in public school classrooms, have hated each other almost from the moment they first drew breath, and realized that they were to be locked in lifelong, mortal competition with the dozens, hundreds, thousands, millions of other kids their same age. From their first moment of self-consciousness, they were aware that they would have to fight for everything they got: for the love of their parents, for a desk in the classrooms, for a place in the elite colleges, for a job, for a title, for money, for everything.

It was back then, shoulder to shoulder in those crowded, stinky classrooms, benighted places where there was scarcely a grief counselor to be seen, where Attention Deficit Disorder and the whole host of other imaginary diseases we have since inflicted on you had not yet been invented (any kid claiming ADD would have been laughed at and, in Catholic school, probably slapped upside the head by the nuns), and where the idea of filing a lawsuit on just about any pretext would have been considered trashy, that our respective sides developed our deep antipathy for one another. My crew was resentful that we had to share space, not only in the classroom but on the planet, with inexplicably happy alien beings like you, who, at best, ignored us as you got on with your lives in pursuit of the chimerical "American Dream," or worse, treated us with contempt as we whined, moaned, bitched, and complained about the awful unfairness of life and the vast evil all around us and all that jazz. Just because you happened to be the so-called "majority" at the time didn't mean we couldn't start planning ways to take you down, to change things, to effect a fundamental transformation of your society. Which, in case you haven't noticed, is now ours.

You admired strength, resolve, and purposefulness; we were stuck with weakness and indecision. You saw the world as something to be conquered; we saw the world as a hostile force needing to be appeased. You dealt with life head-on, never complaining and never explaining; we ran home and told our mommies. You cheered when macho neanderthals like John Wayne or Steve McQueen kicked some "bad" guy's butt, and swelled with pride at that whole faked "moon landing" charade, while we ogled Jane Fonda as Barbarella atop that antiaircraft gun in Hanoi, and rolled around naked in the mud at Woodstock. Think of us as Cain to your Abel, hating you from practically the moment you were born, hating you for your excellence and your unabashed pursuit thereof while we were the ugly stepchildren. Well, Cinderfella-how do you like us now?

Today, we are cock of the walk, king of the world, all our vices made virtues, and all us sinners, saints. While you were out trying to make your way in the world, earning a living, being responsible, raising a family, paying your taxes, we infiltrated your every institution: the schools, the law, Hollywood, the culture, the government. We learned to train your own weapons upon you and, while you weren't looking, we shot you in the back with them, metaphorically speaking.

And sometimes literally. The Cold Civil War, in its early stages, was marked by repeated clashes between the visionaries among the baby boomer youth (my dad, the sainted "Che" Kahane, was of course one of them) and their parents, between students and the pigs, between the Free Speech Movement of Mario Savio and the other Berkeley protesters, and the university deans and presidents who at first resisted them but quickly and cravenly capitulated to hordes of unwashed goliards and at Cornell in 1969 to an actual armed takeover of the school's Willard Straight Hall on, fittingly, Parents Weekend, by gun-toting black students. Heck, we (and I'm talking Movement here, since I had yet to make my debut and missed out on the whole thing) even got our heads proudly bashed in on the streets of Chicago during the 1968 Democratic convention.

Those were heady early days, marked by the Left's generational blitzkrieg against an unprepared and astonished establishment. To hear my dad tell it, our side couldn't believe how easy it was. I mean, here we were, ready to almost lay down our lives for what we believed in-and what we believed in was basically nothing, disguised as "protest." We were the bastard idiot children of Rousseau as filtered through the nihilists of the nineteenth century (no wonder we all read the Russians in those days, for Dostoyevsky spoke to our suffering souls as did no other nineteenth-century novelist, certainly not the overrated bourgeois Dickens or the impenetrable Thomas Mann), seething with rage against the Burroughs Soft Machine, but otherwise pretty much clueless as to what, exactly, we were protesting-except, of course, the draft; "Hell, no, we won't go," was our ultra-patriotic battle cry. We sure knew what that was about. And yet we rolled through our parents' and grandparents' generation like the panzers through Poland.

In retrospect, it's almost tempting to feel sorry for them. They capitulated so quickly and so completely-especially the academics, who made the French in 1940 look like the heroic Warsaw Ghetto fighters under Anielewicz in 1943. That was the moment when we realized that the universities, far from being instruments of the oppressor, were actually ours for the taking and a natural nesting place for the long term, pretty much in perpetuity. Even after we so clearly provoked Mayor Daley's coppers during the convention, and later during the "Days of Rage"-"direct action" was our euphemism for violence and vandalism-the Walker Report blamed it all on the fuzz and said what happened in the streets was a "police riot." Can you believe that? By May 1970, what had begun on the steps of Sproul Hall at U.C.-Berkeley just six years earlier was essentially over, and we had won.

Alas, as is our wont, we didn't know where or when to stop. One thing you can say about us is that we just can't help ourselves, cannot control our appetites or inclinations in any way; try as we might, animosity, snark, and rage are in us, and they've got to come out. And so it was that the Cold Civil War moved to the trenches with the last battle of the shooting war, which came at Kent State in May 1970.

You remember that: it was in all the papers. Shortly after Nixon (who had replaced Johnson in our eyes as the chief villain) announced the outrageous and illegal Cambodian "incursion," students at the Ohio university protested and demonstrated. There were the usual brave calls to "bring the war back home." On the first day of the troubles, liquor and the late hour predictably ignited into a street riot that was finally quelled by the cops. But tempers and nerves were on edge, and so the National Guard was sent to "maintain order," and the governor called the kids "un-American."...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: BALLANTINE BOOKS
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2010
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0345521862
• ISBN 13: 9780345521866
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 304
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar