Webloggin » Drowning In Generalities

Is anyone keeping track of all these generalities, and while we’re at it, all the unsubstantiated characterizations? Republicans are morons, the Christian Right runs everything, Republicans are drowning in scandal, white men are angry, troops in Iraq are a bunch of dimwits…Cheney is unscrupulous and Bush is a putz.

I remember a generation ago that a “liberal” was someone who was fighting a Good Fight against generalizations. It started out with an intellectual combat waged against half-assed unthinking statements like “black people are lazy” — the liberal would be there to say, hey, there’s lazy & hard-working white people, there’s lazy & hard-working black people, you shouldn’t be stereotyping. The liberal was right. No matter what your personal experience was, somewhere a black guy was working his ass off…somewhere else, a white guy was being lazier than any black guy you’d ever seen. Individuals are individuals, classes are classes, the two are different.

Liberals got so militant about this, that even sensible generalizations based on empirical observations, or cause-and-effect, were off-limits. “Obese people seem to buy food in large quantities,” would have gotten you a censure from our liberals…even as they indignantly noted our egghead scientists might be saying that very thing, and not enough people were paying attention to the egghead scientists. You might say our liberals, outwardly dedicated to everyone being equal, simultaneously crusaded for generalizations to be enjoyed only by our academic elites. Wage-slaves were not to indulge in this. So there’s some irony — your caste determined your license to think in certain ways. Elites could generalize, commoners could not.

Then things got even funnier and more ironic. Telling people what to think, is always easier than telling people how to think, and the liberal movement took the path of least resistance. Liberals made it known were were not allowed to have such thoughts in our heads. They effectively said, we will discipline you if you’re caught thinking Chinese people run laundromats, or Mexicans drive big old cars with messed-up suspension systems, or that women are shrill gold-diggers…and you know what? We don’t give a damn anymore if it’s stereotyping, or an honest observation of an individual. Sure enough, within a decade a man could be divorced, with his ex-wife taking everything all his material possessions because she never had a job in her life and didn’t want one…and he could state, factually, “I just got divorced and my ex-wife took all my material possessions, because she’s never had a job in her life and she doesn’t want one” — and a liberal would be right there, waggling the liberal finger in his face, tut-tutting him into obedient silence.

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