[!@#$%!]

Originally Posted by ilduclo

ya know, it's taken so long for "identity politics" to actually have some legs, that I'd like to see how it can run before sending it to the glue factory. My party is doing a hell of a job including people who've been marginalized for so long that I think it's great. And, anyone who longs for the moral certitude of the Shrub administration, which was more concerned with bare tits on the statues of justice than they were with the use of torture in Guantanamo, well, just fuck them, I'll never find common ground with that shit


http://www.slate.com/articles/news_a...olitics.h tml

i haven't read that article yet, and i second you on your repudiation of good-vs-evil president gog-&-magog, which is part and parcel of neocon ideology-- not necessarily republican, as there are also neocon democrats (e.g. lizard person ex-vp candidate joe lieberman and many others who left the democrats in the 60s)

but about identity politics, let me say--

i'm a "hispanic" mongrel married to a "full-blooded"(whatever that means) "native american" (aka an injun). while the race politics stuff is all around us and about us, we don't see the great benefits of this racialization scheme except that we get to mark a lot of checkboxes in government forms and get typecast into some sort of racist caricatures, apparently for our own good.

i also notice that socially more and more ethnicity is *everywhere*. everywhere i go i'm interrogated about my origins and "nationality"-- don't know if this is a friendly gesture or a fucking gestapo interrogation. feels like gestapo to me and i'm sick of it.

nobody is american anymore. you're "french-irish-german" or "afroitalian" or "mexi-caribbean choctaw" or "polish greek" or something else, but any sense of national unity and common cause and greater community is lost. so everyone fucking bickers about their little ghetto of genetic material. it's a loser's game and there is no benefit to it.

so yeah, i'm sick and tired of identity politics which is bullshit pandering to a hollow cause. i'm all for diversity, yes, but as long as it's diversity within an all-encompassing american (and ultimately human) identity, not as some little pocket of alienation and auto-marginalization.

sure the american idea needs to be broader than the fucking pilgrims and the slave-owning founding fathers, and it needs to include people like muslims who are today's no-irish-need-apply, but it needs to coalesce about something big like, i don't know--the constitution, for fuck's sakes.

me, i see me having more in common with the redneck neighbor who sells me farm supplies than with some megamillionaire "hispanic" cuban from miami; but racial politics tells me that no, the hispanic is "my people" and the rural white is some sort of racial enemy and i must be wary of him. bullshit! bullshit! bullshit!