Oh, how I hate to admit this. But the Left -- soul of my soul, heart of my heart -- has become the enemy of everything I value.
How did I misplace the good, old, unassuming Left that worked to get working people into their own modest homes and helped them send their kids to school? Whatever happened to the people who valued the working-class life and the decent, down-to-earth folks who wanted fair wages for a honest day's work? Norma Jean - where did hell did you go?
Now it's all fight climate change and save the caribou and preserve the Boreal and shutter the shit-belching factories and stop those dirty lumberjacks, miners, steelworkers from soiling my pristine wilderness backyard latte patio garden. And fuck off with your hopes for a stone quarry that could employ your sons and daughters at decent wages because it might spoil the view when I sea kayak on your pretty shores in some distant summer. Workers should renounce their carbon-spewing jobs and their animal-killing ways to take up the noble tasks of retail and hospitality -- so they can more perfectly serve the new-veau Left when it arrives for a week of getting in touch with its excellent wild-child self.
That's what the new Left is all about, isn't it? Auto workers are uppity illiterates who deserve to be put in their place. People who shop at Zeller's and Wal-Mart are white trash. Snowmobilers, ice-fishman, bowlers, moose hunters, bingo players, Legionnaires, union members, high-school graduates and community college drudges, people who get up every day to go to work -- all right-wing red-necks. And god, don't get me started on Oshawa and Hamilton and Sudbury. Arm-pit towns full of tedious, uneducated rubes. No nightlife. No creativity. No class.
Way to go, folks. You have achieved a Left that hates the working class. Is it any wonder that working people vote for Stephen Harper and Sarah Palin?
How do we get beyond this? Because get beyond it we must, if we don't want an endless horizon of Stephen Harpers and green-grocer fascists.
We could lose the pretentious superiority. We could stop channelling the late, lamented Jean-Jacques Rousseau. We could start to like real people again. We could stop kowtowing to fever-brained neo-anarchists with delusional agendas. Above all, the Left could to reconnect with its working-class base to become a viable political force again instead of an elitist echo of 18th century nobless oblige.
If the Left can't become the post-Left, and quickly, it will find itself on the wrong side of an emerging class war. Many exquisitely educated heads will roll.
And all that was, will be dust. And all that might be, will be lost.
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