Gillian, I think you’re the most deeply conflicted person I have actually *ever* met. The problem is that I just can’t understand **why** you’re so conflicted . In my opinion, the big dilemma I have with you, in terms of these asinine political arguments we get into, is that, although you “swear to the heavens” that you don’t take a side, you basically DO take a side. And the side you basically take, 9 times out of 10, is an inherently liberal side.
All of your arguments against your ex, all of your personal life idealism, and even your very interest in knowing me is, by my estimate, all evidence of a strongly liberal mindset. And yet ... you then turn around, randomly, and start swinging for the Republicans, and more specifically, for conservatives. You literally start swinging, pounding my head with punches (so it feels to me) for an **old, white, misogynistic, woman hating male**. Gillian, it just doesn’t make any sense. It doesn’t make any sense at all. How can you hate the misogyny that Rob practiced whilst supporting the very political party that has given that misogyny the room to breathe? How can you hate male dominance and yet support a party, or even sympathize slightly with said party, that supports it? Gillian, there is no “debate” about what the Republicans and the conservatives support. The facts are laid very bare on the table for all to see. They themselves openly admit that they are anti-feminism, in support of an old school traditional misogyny, etc. They support violent punishment. They idealize everything that, in your personal life, you so often hate, and complain over, and brood over. Yet you then turn around and punch me in the face, and get angry, and log off and shut your phone off, when I argue vehemently against them.
Gillian, do you seriously believe I would have ever sympathized with your predicament, or listened to you for even a second, had I been anything but a liberal? Do you seriously believe I Would have understood a single argument you ever made in regards to men and the problems they’ve caused for you, if I had been a Republican conservative? Because the sad truth is that, not only would I have probably ** never listened to your argument **, but I probably wouldn’t have even given you the time of day, had I identified as a conservative. My liberalism is not just some silly abstract thing, is the point I am trying to make. It is undoubtedly an inherent and integral part of my entire being, and my entire aura.
Now would I consider myself the perfect liberal? No, I am actually quite far off the mark in some ways -- and some liberals may even argue that I am not liberal “enough” (since I have always felt I Don’t necessarily “appear” liberal due to my background) ---but that doesn’t take away from the fact that I still definitely identify myself as one. NOt only that, but I also feel it effects everything I feel, do, and certainly everything I write, very strongly. All writers and artists, and then too all people, are driven by politics deep down. Nothing has ever existed without them. No author, no artist, no musician, no parent, can escape being political in some form. The only difference is that most people are simply unable to see precisely where their politics lie. They perhaps choose to pretend they have none, but all people still have them...it’s unavoidable. Your ex’es for instance were essentially conservatives of a new age who did not realize they were conservative, but certianly were. Notice how quickly Robert chose to identify with Trump and the Republicans, once the simple message was understood that Trump was “for old school men who like to grab pussy and keep women in line”. He immediately sided with him oftentimes, in discussions w /me, in total spite of the fact that his own life has been left in tatters by the very politics these conservatives put into practice on the streets.
I have always found your unwillingness to side as a liberal simultaneously disturbing and fascinating all at once. On the one hand, I suppose I can understand not wanting to wear the word ‘DEmocrat” ; but what I can’t understand is that you also, it seems to me, don’t really want to wear the word liberal either. This is really what aggravates me in our conversations. This is what I really can’t understand. But then I often think that maybe one reason you obsessively fight being a “liberal”, is because you feel that liberals act in a way that you perhaps find belligerent. For example, maybe you think that, if you were to identify as a liberal, it would also mean that you would have to immediately accept a lifestyle that seems extreme to you, or perhaps even dangerous. I.e. A “liberal” ought to do drugs, and to party every weekend, to sleep around, to not be polite, to not cook, to be like Nicki Minaj or some absurd thing. I have thought about this for some time really, about why you might, deep down, be frightened of taking on the identity of a “liberal”, and ultimately it it this thing that I think bothers you. Forgive me if I’m incorrect; but maybe as a woman, you feel that becoming a liberal also means you have to become, again, like some Nicki Minaj sort. I, however, beg to disagree, and I want, desperately, to explain why.
FIrst of all, I have tried to explain to you many times that, in our country, especially in terms of our popular artists and cultural scenes, we actually don’t really have a pronounced liberalism like other developed countries do. The truth of the matter, Gillian, is that the United States is literally **the most conservative country** in terms of the entire developed world, and this die hard conservatism that our politicans practice has completely spread, most naturally, also to all of our artistic and cultural happenings. So, the real truth of the matter is that, we have not often been blessed with a vast number of truly liberal artists to look up to, identify with, or take our behavioral cues from.
As I’ve expressed countless times, Robert and your other ex’es fascination with hip hop (and by extension a female rapper like Minaj) is really the perfect example: At first glance, it seems as though the hip hop artists are most definitely symbolic of some type of “wild liberalism”; and yet, when you look twice and deeper, you come to see, very quickly, that they themselves are almost “accidentally conservative”. Do they identify as conservative? No. They basically claim to be “apolitical”. But it doesn’t change the fact that they most definitely are. As I always say, hip hop music is pro gun, pro misogyny, and most definitely anti-woman, as it all currently stands. And hip hop is not alone in carrying this conservative torch, through the halls of our popular culture: Almost all of the American made rock and roll, from the 1970s onward, did the exact same thing. As always, you might find this bizarre and maybe even off topic, but the reverberations of all of this have effected not just our music world, but also our culture on the ground level as well. It has, for example, most definitely effected the men you may or may not be able to meet, and enjoy. Hip hop turned Robert into a bigger misogynist than he ever would have been, had he just listened to English rock and roll, etc,etc....
Now the reason I find this is important to mention, about the music artists, is because I feel that, as a woman, and specifically an American woman, you have been sold an idea of liberalism that, to put it simply, isn’t really the “real deal”. In other words, because we are living our lives in the most conservative “hard ass” country in the developed world, and because we do not really have many actual liberal artists or even TV shows etc., available to us, it is, as you can imagine, kind of hard to actually find “real liberals” to look up to and identify with. It is thus the case that your fear over identifying as a liberal is, in my opinion, a totally imagined fear. Liberalism does not and never has meant a lifetime of drugs and debauchery, or rampant promiscous sex, etc etc. Being liberal does not mean a rejection of, say, studiousness, or patience, or tranquility and solitude. If anything, liberalism is the joyous acceptance of all of those things and more, and here is why: If the United States was more liberal, the plain fact of the matter is that so many of the crazy and very loud, dangerous problems we are currently being forced to live with here....would completely evaporate. The real fact of the matter is that, though conservatives have not necessarily “created” the ‘drug fiend’ or the ‘misogynist’, what they have done is given him endless ground to walk on. They have given him power. They have allowed him to multiply times a thousand. It is not the liberals who have chosen to play the game of taking sides, so much as it has always been the conservatives here, and this fact is very plain to see, once you actually sit down and study the American politics of the last 60 years or so. You’ll begin to see just what I am saying when I Tell you that this is an extremely conservative country in many respects, and liberalism here is, at best, almost a completely underground movement. The facts of what the conservatives have done are very plain to see. America is the only developed countryleft, as I told you, that still thinks its civilized to execute people. This is absolutely preposterous from a 21st century standpoint; but they do it.....
No country, for example, aside from the Phillipines, which is undeveloped, currently wages a more aggressive “War on Drugs”, than the AMericans. No country at all has more people in prison, than the Americans. No one gives out longer sentences than the Americans. No one has more nuclear bombs. No one has more guns on the streets. No one has such dangerous cities. And last but not least, not a single person in the entire developed world, has to worry so much as an American does, when it comes to asking the “state” for help or financial aid, etc. The American federal government gives next to nothing to its people, in comparison to the other governments of the developed world. As I Told you, the people in the Scandinavian countries never have to worry about the necessities of life. Coincidentally, they are some of the most successful people in the world. The Scandinavian people have the biggest welfare state in the developed world, yet they have not become the “lazy moochers” that Republicans swear they should have become. THey have instead become educated, learned, and polished people. 95% of them speak multiple languages. They are far from misogynistic. Women enjoy a liberation there that will not be known in the USA for perhaps another halfa century, if ever. The prisons in Scandinavia are essentially non existent. Oddly enough, they have the lowest crime rates in the developed world. Men do not have to fear going to prison in Scandinavia, for a 1000 year sentence, and getting raped, joining a NAzi outlaw gang, and gettinga swastika tatooed on their forehead, and pumping iron for the next 100 years. This culture simply does not exist there. Does that really sound like something you want to oppose? It doesn’t to me. It certainly doesn’t.
I think the time has come, Gillian, for you to understand that I have never been trying to be “mean” or “rude” to you, when it comes to our political arguments. All I have ever been trying to do is to make you understand, and to see, that you are arguing for a party that not only doesn’t make sense globally, but also for one that seems to stand in direct and absolute contrast to **your own interests** as a woman--particularly as a single mother of two. The truth is that, if you were a 55 year old old white Baptist man from Mississippi, I probably wouldn’t be having this argument with you, because...I probably wouldn’t even bother to be as close of a friend as I am to you. Ths, as I told you, is the exact same thing that I try to stress to my Republican cousins, who make no sense to me: If they were Southerners, I would probably not bother to argue w/ them over politics. But they are not Southerners. They are people living in a comfortably blue state that has, as a direct result of its liberal leaning ways, given them more opportunities than they **ever would have had** had they actually been from the red state South. Alas, I think my cousins tend to have the same idea as I am convinced you do: They are completely persuaded that liberalism means being some wild drug using hippie who smokes crack in the inner-city, and they don’t understand that this exact “wild drug user” is really nothing more than something that Republicans have actualy created themselves, ironically enough. IN other words, the hippie movement was really nothing more than an extremist reaction to an extremist conservative culture. Just like the Civil War, one hundred years before it, was an extreme reaction to an extreme problem. You said yesterday that “liberals shouldn’t force things on people” .. things like changes ,etc. It sounds admirable in theory, sure, but how admirable does it sound once we realize how many things, like slavery, that the conservatives have, once upona time, forced upon someones head? As I said to you, if I was taken as a slave in Georgia, I would be praying around the clock that someone would start a war over it,to come and save me. And the person to do that would, as I said, have to, as a mattre of fact, be a liberal. Don’t forget: the argument that the conservatives of the 1800s used to justify slavery was that it was a “tradition”. This is the same argument they’re now using to keep things like misogyny going...just as we went over this afternoon. Misogyny indeed very much is the new slavery. Absolutely. Just like Donald Trump, Jeff Sessions, Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan, and the others, are very much the new “King George III”, and his tyrannical England. Also, another thing in regards to slavery: The liberals of that time period didn’t necessarily start that war. What they instead did was plead with the South to give up the slaves. They pleaded continously. One day they eventually showed up down there saying “you can’t do this anymore, you simply can’t, these are men, not slaves, not animals.” And of course it was on that day, that the South decided, for her own self, to march on the North, with guns, and cannonballs,a nd bombs So, you see, the South decided to actually throw the bomb. They made it violent.
As I’m sure you know, one of the big talking points the Republicans of our time period consistently use is that they “just wanna leave everyone alone, and keep the government small”. Well, yet again, at first glance, that sounds absolutely fantastic, and certainly as a pirate lover, I love the sound of it. I want to be left alone to sail my galleon. I don’t want to hear from King George. I don’t want to hear from any government. I don’t really want to pay taxes and tribute to the KIng. The Republicans, on the surface level, swear that they offer me all of this and more, and that the DEmocrats just want to take “All my theoretical money”. The Republicans tell me they won’t “steal” my money and give it to the ‘undeserving poor’, to ‘lazy welfare mothers’, etc. All the livelong day do these Republicans go on and on about this, forever stressing their small government and how they swear they will never interfere in your life. They’ll “let you keep ya guns”.....
Here’s the big problem however: It turns out that these men are lying. It turns out, in fact, that the last thing they ever want to do is leave anyone alone here. After all, if they wanted to leave AMerican people alone, then they wouldn’t be literally **the sole reason** that we have this disgustingly enormous prison population, the worlds biggest. If the Republicans wanted to leave people alone, to follow their own beliefs, like they claim, then they wouldn’t have commenced a tyrannical War on Drugs beneath Nixon in ‘71 and Reagan in the early 80‘s. The fact of the matter is that the Republicans only want to leave certain people alone. Rich, white people. Everyone else, they want to have the “freedom” to harass, pursue, imprison, and fuck over. Essentially, the modern Republican idea of freedom goes something like this: They want the freedom to be able to perhaps capture you or I as their slave, and once we are made their slave, they want the freeodm to go on with it, without being harassed. The Republican idea of freedom, we thus see, is in direct opposition to the freedom of everyone else ...i.e. the weak and vulnerable, and the poor. It ain’t real freedom. It is tyrannical. Nearly everything that Americans fear seems to be something that Republicans are directly responsible for: the cities that have turned to ghettos, the Prisons, the Muslims now terrorizing us, the absurdly low min. wage, the near impossibility of regular folks paying for American university, etc. It is all thanks to them. They have made life incredibly uncomfortable for everyone. The liberals...the real liberals (i.e. not the Clintons or even the Democrats, but rather the wing even further left than they) have always just been trying to fiercely oppose all of this. I’m a far left liberal... I only identify as Democrat because that’s the closest left wing party we have here... ( by global standards they actually appear rather conservative however...)
So anyways Gillian dearest, thats what I have to say on it. I was unhappy the way our conversation ended so abruptly tonight...but certainly not surprised. Hopefully my messages won’t still be going green tomorrow, and hopefully I’ll actually have the coraggio to actually send this to you. Thanks....
-- Ciao
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