When people felt shame over having done something shameful. I don’t know when those days left us, but they’re long gone.
Shamefulness has become a source of revenue, not to mention hubris.
Take this jackass radiovangelist that has failed to predict the rapture twice. Now one would think that he would quietly slink off into hiding but no, he’s back with a lame ass explanation that he got the math a little wrong. And does he feel bad that his idiotic devotees gave away all of their possessions and (some) killed their pets? Of course not! Because you see, he never instructed them to do that. Shameful! And an asshole. And you know what? He’s going to continue to get donations.
Then there’s disgraced former Speaker Of The House, Newt Gingrich. This is a guy that has no shortage of shit to be ashamed of. Let’s set aside his personal life for a moment. He was forced to resign the speakership by his own party. What part of “forced to resign from the last position I was elected to”, says , “I should definitely pursue a much higher office”? What kind of sociopathology leads one to make this conclusion?
Now on to his personal life; what kind of asshole has three wives, two of whom started off as mistresses, and still finds the audacity to say shit about family values? Are you fucking kidding me? You would think that he was Ms Manners! He was banging the current wife while the last wife was being treated for cancer. Shameful! And tacky!
And he’s an idiot. We found out last week, that he has a revolving credit line of half a million dollars at Tiffany’s. He’s an idiot because for that kind of money, he’s either having another affair, or he’s spending it on his wife. Hey Newt, you don’t need to buy expensive jewelry to keep a woman that was willing to blow you in the parking lot of the hospital where your wife was receiving chemotherapy treatments! She’s a cheap whore! Cheap whores don’t need Tiffany’s kind of maintenance.
And then there are members of the Bush administration. Those shameful assholes have the audacity to go on television and give their opinions about the assassination of Bin Laden that they failed to accomplish? Unfuckingbelievable! If your opinions had any credibility you would have gotten the job done. Why aren’t these people ashamed? One failed war, one failed occupation, a failed assassination, and no shame? How is that possible? The only person that seems to have a modicum of decency here is George W Bush (yeah, I didn’t see that coming either). At least he’s got the decency to shut the fuck up and hide in shame.
Why is this happening? Because we so want to be right in our ideology, that we’re willing to go the distance to defend it. We’re willing to go far beyond the point that reason and logic should allow us to go. It’s easy to see this in other people, but seems to be virtually impossible to see in ourselves. Sure, the rapture whackadoodles are easy to mock, but if you think about it, they’re just desperately clinging onto something to believe in and they refuse to be deterred.
Republicans are the most effective defenders of their party. How did that turn out for them? Not a single accomplishment they can point to since Nixon opened up trade with China, and the worst president in US history, by every measure of a failed presidency. And yet, some of them are still hoping that the brother of the worst president in history will ride into the race on a white horse to save the day.
And for democrats, it’s easy to see where republicans went wrong. But it’s impossible to see where they’re going wrong. I hear Stephanie Miller and Randi Rhodes defend, and take up the mantle of apologists for Obama every single day. They never talk about the torture of Bradley Manning, or the extension of the patriot act. They don’t lie about it, but they don’t bring it up either. If they don’t inform their listeners, they damage Obama because it’s up to a politicians’ constituents to keep them honest. If those constituents don’t know what’s going on, they can’t do that. And pretty soon, they will find themselves defending shameless people without even realizing what’s happening to them.
Our politicians and celebrities are shameless because we encourage them to be. It’s like our collective self esteem relies on being right at all costs. Well, I say that the cost is getting too expensive. It’s time to step back and adjust our opinions based on the facts at hand. Molding the facts to fit our opinions isn’t working for us. We’re just making shameless people really fucking rich. And we’re encouraging more shamelessness.
