Things Republicans Have Ruined for Me

1. Guns. Idiot gun fundamentalists make me feel guilty for entertaining the idea that some measure of self-defense weaponry is okay; they use this as their justification for collecting arsenals. You don't need the automatic rifle with the night-vision scope and the fingerprint-proof stock/trigger. And you definitely don't need ten of them. In New York.

2. Country music. I have to equate it with hating anyone who doesn't fit into the country-music-universe. Points to Dolly Parton for rolling this back a bit with her embrace of the transgender movement, and to Willy Nelson for touring with John Kerry.

3. Texas. I want to love Texas. I do. Pop Iris' family is there, and Austin is a really cool place. I've seen some beautiful scenery there. Had some excellent times. All the same, I walk down the street and think "the people around me are proud of George Bush".

4. Family values. I would LOVE to talk all the time about family values and the virtue of the nuclear family. It's just that I'd sound like a douchebag who doesn't believe in gays, working women or loving your children as more than objects.

5. Libertarianism. Republicans have co-opted libertarianism to advance a level of economic deregulation that they don't even WANT. The kind of capitalism espoused by Republican libertarians would degenerate into a mafia economy so quickly they wouldn't even have time to say "copyrights are good" before they'd find themselves only being able to shop at Walmart, and Walmart abusing its pricing power like a drug dealer with the police force in his pocket. Meanwhile, these supposed libertarians seem to be fine with government involvement in people's private lives; prayer in public school is GREAT for these guys, who send their kids to private school anyway. Not a whole lot of sympathy for the poor Jewish or Hindu or atheist kid who has to sit there listening to people invoke the name of their savior, and who can't join the school newspaper without signing a pledge to abstain from homosexuality.

6. Economic/Military realism. I'm okay with blood for oil, if it's another country's blood and we get the oil. There will always be rich and poor in this world. I'm on the rich side. I'd like it to stay that way. I'd feel bad if I'd had a role in being born here, but I didn't. If I'd been born poor, I'd want to be rich just as much, I just wouldn't be able to do as much about it. I'm part of the power structure, and unless someone's figured out a way to eliminate power structures, I'm sticking with the one I'm in. It's worked for me. I'm eager to make the existing structure more fair, but I will not give up my place unless I can see I'm accomplishing something in the process. Communism is no option; it trades one kind of elite for another less transparent and more brutal one.