Middle Class Progressives and the Armor of Imagined Virtue
How a combination of class prejudice, linguistic trickery, and straight up cluelessness have ensured suburban leftists remain blithely untroubled by own staggering hypocrisy
The librarian – a large, bouffanted lady of egg-shaped late middle-age – sat pinned against her swivel chair, eyes bulging in their sockets, the patchwork fabric of her mask indented from a gasp.
Her reaction, it must be said, was more than a little unwarranted.
Being both fully clothed and functionally sober, there seemed no reason why my arrival should’ve been deemed a cause for concern, while set against a hand-painted rainbow flag and multicolored crescent of stick-children, the woman’s revulsion stood in stark contradiction to the library’s professed admissions policy:
“Everyone is welcome here.”
Thinking, as happens sometimes, that my lilting Ulster brogue had been mistaken for something more sinister, I held up my daughter’s birth certificate, smiled my most effacing smile, and repeated, a touch slower this time, my request to use the printer.
“Little bundles of paperwork,” I added, nailing the quip I’d bungled at Staples.
The Librarian was unamused. If anything, ‘scared shitless’ might have been a more accurate descriptor. Her face, or at least as much as her face was visible, remained locked in an expression of undiluted terror, only the startled depression of her mask given way to a frenzied in-and-out. Such was its breathlessness, I was almost about to ask whether she might have some use for a paper bag when, at last loosing her grip on her pearls, the librarian muttered something unintelligible and thrust a quivering finger toward my side of the Perspex.
I considered the lady’s reaction as I made my paperless walk home, December all the colder after my second thwarted print job of the morning. It seemed almost incomprehensible to me how anyone could live in the same peaceful town I do – a town where the mass graves go unfilled and high school football seasons continues in full swing, where the Christmas markets operate without protection of hazmatted stormtroopers – and still remain convinced that the world was in the latter stages of the apocalypse. Seldom had I seen such sobering testimony to the influence of government and corporate propaganda, and yet what struck me most of all, ironic enough to merit a wry chuckle, was the image of the librarian glaring at me from in front of the “Everyone is welcome here” sign, frantically disinfecting anything I might have contaminated.
Of course, liberal hypocrisy is hardly much of a revelation. Having been a resident of the US for over a year now, and a user of the internet for much longer still, I have come to accept that the trait is not merely a temporary affliction but rather, an innate defect in the ideology.
But no matter how grotesquely fascinating it is to watch the Al Gore lecture us on climate change or to listen to Bill Clinton give speeches on the empowerment of women, it would be wrong to call them, in the truest sense of the word, hypocrites. They are and liars, phonies and fraudsters, charlatans, crooks, and bullshit artists, and while the assumed dishonesty of our political class should terrify all of us, what is arguably more troubling, in a kind of Lars von Trier sense, is how the garden variety liberal has allowed this culture of hypocrisy to so completely permeate their movement.
Perhaps the most charitable interpretation is that they simply aren’t capable of seeing it. After all, however little we might agree on the events that culminated in the political maelstrom of 2016, I think we can all acknowledge that in the wake of it, the media has done considerably less than fuck all by way of illumination. Although the issues on the ballot were Trump, Brexit, as well as a whole host of other populist causes, in reality, the elections of that year were referendums not just on the political status quo, but of also on Hollywood, the mainstream media, the banking establishment, and the ever-expanding powers of Big Tech. And those assholes lost. For years, the democratization of technology and the subsequent rise of New Media had chipped away at these traditional power centers until suddenly they found themselves jolted from their complacency by a cold bucket of reality, blinking into wakefulness and the void of complete irrelevancy.
Obviously, there is no need to rehash the ensuing histrionics. We are all familiar with the cynical attempts to gaslight the public, to shame, scare, and berate them back into political orthodoxy. For those who had already severed this digital leash, this ongoing media meltdown was merely the undignified death throes of an order they’d long known to be in decline, while for a great many others, the sheer vulgarity of the temper tantrum offered incontrovertible proof that civilization as we knew it was in a dire need of a good old fashioned boot ‘n rally.
Nevertheless, not everyone had remained so vigilant. The same advances that enabled some enterprising folks to grab a microphone, camera, and go out exposing the corruption of the elites had allowed the more feckless of their generation to stupefy themselves in front of endless on-demand Entertainment™, their regularly scheduled programming only occasionally interrupted to bring them breaking news that Obama was still super cool and totally awesome.
In a sense, you have to feel sorry for these gormless normies. There they were, just browsing Netflix for something to deaden the sensation of thought when, without warning, they were catapulted into a highly politicized world where half their neighbors were Nazis and they other half lay somewhere on the LGBTQAI scale. To these people, it was not necessary to remain logically consistent. They possessed neither political nous nor a grounded philosophy, no knowledge of civics nor even prior interest. Huge swathes of them had been emotionally shredded. A goddamned quarter of them had PTSD. Nearly the same again had no idea who America defeated in the Revolutionary War, let alone who their media gatekeepers like to party with, but now here they were being conscripted as the hysterical foot-soldiers in a battle against the incoming cultural paradigm.
