I occasionally come across quotations that snag my attention like a needle-hook to yarn. I may or may not agree with the writer's perspective, but the quotation represents something that stirs my thinking and, sometimes, imagination. From time to time, I'll share them and their source, but
caveat emptor.
The contempt is not always that explicit, but it's ever present. Increasingly in America all the real divisions seem less like political differences - left/right, progressive/conservative, big government/small government - and more like class indicators: Those Who Matter vs Not Our Kind Of People. Poor Hispanics give Nancy Pelosi a warm fluffy sense of her own virtue and moral superiority (as long as they keep their distance, and we ramp up security next time those Dreamers try to rush the stage), whereas poor whites are just a bunch of yahoos. A touch of #BlackLivesMatter in an awards-show dance routine is edgy and radical (as long as the actual BLM types are on the far horizon torching some other guy's neighborhood), whereas upcountry losers ODing on oxycontin and heroin is hicky and depressing. Transgender bathrooms is a modish boutique issue with an appealing exotic frisson, whereas Christian florists ...whoa, who the hell would trust evangelicals with your centerpiece anyway? What's up with that?..
Amid the condescension, there are contradictions. So a century-old statue of someone dead a hundred and fifty years who does not conform to the identity-group pieties of 2017 must be torn down - whereas an actual flesh-and-blood human being who does not conform to the identity-group pieties of 2017 can stagger around Hollywood and New York and London and Rome treating women like garbage.