I should note that there is no hate speech on any of this... vast rainbow array of bumper stickers - but the way that it's so easy to assume that is testament to how hijacked American patriotism has become. Over the last couple of years, it's become part of the national vocabulary to call things "true" and "fake" depending on how closely they match a set of imaginary ideals... so many of the arguments I've seen involve someone being called a "fake American" for believing in twenty-first century ideas. If being a "true American" is to become as hateful and as proud of ignorance as these people are... then not being a true American is one of the greatest things I can imagine.
It must be a bit liberating in your case, in that when someone defaults to the usual response of calling your views "un-American," you can just say, "well, yeah."
It... is - but a lot of other Americans I know are quite un-American in this way :) It is as if anything but the way America currently operates is considered heretical and untrustworthy, while so much of the developed world has moved ahead of it. The country is sometimes like some sort of ignored middle child, hungry for praise and interpreting any criticism or attempt to improve as outright hatred.
With the use of the term "un-American", McCarthyism appears to be alive and well despite the fact that it's 50 years later.
Except instead of "He's a Communist!" the preferred smear is "He's a LIBERAL!" (or the preferred indoctrinated spelling of the various conservative bloggers, which is frankly pathetic, of "lieberal".)
That is perhaps the worst part, that someone can unironically take a term that stands for something good, an ideology that's taught me to be nice to people and allows general progress in society, and twist it as if it were an insult. However, the fierce ones on the left don't help either with terms like "repuglican" or "rethuglican", which I'd quite like them to stop 'cause it's stupid.
I guess I'm guilty of stereotyping here, but every time I see a car decked out in that many stickers criticizing anything perceived as "left wing" AND bringing religion into the mix (the God "Bless" America) sticker, I often see connected bigoted catch-phrases on there too... And it is, after all, a Republican cornerstone to oppose equality for same-sex couples. That's why I used the particular sarcastic phrasing I did.
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branchandroot
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Date: 2012-09-01 11:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-09-02 12:13 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-09-02 01:19 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-09-02 02:16 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-09-02 02:23 am (UTC)Except instead of "He's a Communist!" the preferred smear is "He's a LIBERAL!" (or the preferred indoctrinated spelling of the various conservative bloggers, which is frankly pathetic, of "lieberal".)
no subject
Date: 2012-09-02 02:33 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-09-02 02:29 am (UTC)