Interesting Thread Developing

Read the post. Read the comments. Pay particular attention to Ric, who wrote:

BRD,

You, and such commenters as fabulinius, leave something out. I gather from your post that you’d rather not go there, and so are trying to finesse it. Finessing doesn’t work if East still has KQ of trumps --

Actually there are two things: bigotry and “locality”, the latter a nice euphemism for egocentric obliviousness. One leads to the other.

George Bush should have grown up—wrong; turned out essentially indistinguishable from John Kerry, a scion of Northeastern wealth, part of what (they see themselves as) the “worthwhile people” of America. Instead he abandoned all that, taking up instead with the redneck cracker “xtianists” they hold in such contempt. Bush is thus what any committed ideologue, especially one who hasn’t considered (and refuses to consider) the position, finds most unsettling: an apostate. This is where we get semanticleo and cynn, and unswerving dedication to absolute support of anyone who opposes Bush on any grounds. Death to the unbeliever! Anything less is “carrying water for the Administration”.

I’ve forgotten the actual terms used, but it’s a well-known phenomenon that people are most conscious and aware of the things they deal with daily, and have only a theoretical appreciation (if that) of anything outside that charmed circle. The vociferous critics of the Iraq war are the ones who’ve never been there, and are almost entirely drawn from the selfsame self-described “elite” mentioned above. Their surroundings are those of wealth and power, and that has always been so. Furthermore, those surroundings are as narrowly insular as quasi-ethnic isolation can make them. The result is not only that “Iraq” is at best an abstraction, that abstraction exists only within the context of their own worldview—it’s “real” only as an issue useful in attempting to wrest power from the despised apostate.
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I am enjoing this thread quite a bit. I might contribute again later this evening if I get the chance.