jthomascronin's blog

Before he passed away, Bob Ross, the frizzy-haired host of the PBS painting show, “The Joy of Painting,” became a somewhat iconic figure for his soothing, sedate voice and repeated references to “happy little trees.” Ross didn’t believe in errors, often stating “we don't make mistakes, we just have happy accidents." Ross would often tell his audience that they could have as many trees as they wished in their world but that he preferred a lot of trees in his.

For my friends and I, Ross was must-see-TV; a curious oddity, a faintly quaint relic from a bygone and more agreeable era. We always imagined Ross as someone that had previously undergone such a traumatic experience that he beat a hasty retreat into happy fun-time tree world and checked out on the rest of us. But we really wanted to believe that it was more of a transcendent choice rather than a reactionary necessity. Either way, it was an oddly appealing, Tao of Bob Ross-world for us to envision.

The modern American conservative movement is dead; punched-out by pugnacious neo-cons intent on imposing their purified conservative strain on all Americans. There’s no recognizable there there remaining in conservatism.

When Senator Barry Goldwater strode to the microphone in San Francisco’s Cow Palace to accept the Republican Party’s nomination for president in 1964, he effectively struck the death knell for the party’s liberal, Northeastern, Rockefeller wing. Although trounced in the general election, Goldwater’s principals of limited government, individual liberty and adherence to the Constitution, advocated in the campaign and his groundbreaking book, “The Conscience of the Conservative,” ultimately became the mainstream political belief.

That’s why it would be terribly disconcerting to Goldwater to see the neo-con usurpation of his principled beliefs. Goldwater argued in his book that the framers knew that “freedom depends on effective restraints against the accumulation of power in a single authority.” Goldwater also intuitively understood that it was natural for individuals possessing some power to grab for more power. Conservatives, Goldwater argued, must endeavor to adhere to the Constitution and its “system of restraints against the natural tendency of government to expand in the direction of absolutism.” He repeatedly fretted over the tendency to concentrate power in a few individuals and advocated that politicians always place constitutionality over political expediency.

In November 2001, motivated by a grab-bag of ideals, I enlisted in the military and took a position as a Counterintelligence Agent. Soon after, I left for basic combat training and later served in Afghanistan, for which I was awarded with two Bronze Star Medals. I’ve been fortunate to garner valuable lessons from my experiences. However, on that first day of basic, with the platoon assembled in a horseshoe configuration inside a sweltering third-floor bay, I had a palpable sense of trepidation. The stereotypically crusty drill sergeant paced the middle of the floor and barked out orders, which he expected us to execute without question. Implied, however, was that he would always put us in a position to successfully execute those orders. That was the bargain that helped maintain order.

In a new television advertisement for General Motors’ H3, two men stand in a grocery store checkout line while the cashier scans the first man’s items. The cashier prominently tilts a large package of tofu for the camera while man one sheepishly turns to man two as if embarrassed by his purchase. Man one then notices man two’s grocery items, which include red meat and charcoal. Humiliated, man one spots an H3 print advertisement, burns rubber out of the parking lot, leases a new Hummer and ends the ad contentedly driving along while the catch-phrase “Restore Your Manhood” is prominently splashed across the screen.

It seems lately that American male masculinity is increasingly defined by impulsiveness and childish one-upsmanship. It’s a masculinity where objective evidence is ignored in favor of instinctive knowledge; where perceived slights are mitigated through retribution; and, where impulsive action trumps reasoned thought. Swagger and absoluteness are revered while contemplation is looked upon as indecisiveness; where something’s appearance is more important than its truth. And it’s a corrosive version of masculinity that filters down and repeatedly portrays intellectualism, patience and reasoned thought in terms of weakness.

Growing up in the South in the 1980s, specifically Florida and Georgia, the cement shoes to fit on any political candidate was liberal. I remember the 1988 Florida Senate race between Republican Connie Mack and Democrat Buddy McKay. Fairly even throughout, Mack’s campaign ran advertisements late in the race that ticked off McKay’s positions on issues and ended with the tag-line, “Hey Buddy, you’re a liberal.” You could almost here the collective gasp of twelve million Floridians.

It was an epithet, a slur, a dark family secret best left unspoken and the immediate end to any candidacy on which it was hung. It was more than a word – it was all the baggage that came with it, especially the notion of “tax and spend,” which denoted a dearth of ideas and imagination, relying instead on tired and worn liberal practices. The playbook was always the same: A liberal wanted to raise your taxes and spend your hard earned money. The liberal’s political solution was always the same no matter what the problem entailed. Almost twenty years later, conservative is the new liberal.