Us Bleeding Heart Liberals

I'm going to attempt the nearly impossible. I'm going to try to analyze only the flaws and foibles of my peer group, without any regard to our opposite numbers – that is to say I won't be balancing and justifying by saying “..right, okay, but the Right is even worse.”

First of all, I call myself a bleeding heart liberal for several reasons, one of them, of course, being I wish to seem modest and self-effacing – but also because I do recognize many of the sillier thought processes and motivations of people like myself. We are, admittedly, often all too smug, prejudiced, naive and lazy in our thinking.

For example:

Many of us BHLs believe that, if not a majority, than at least a large minority of rich people acquired their wealth by underhanded methods. They cheated, exploited. “You must be mean and devious in order to make much money in life,” is our assumption.

Sadly we don't seem to realize that few people would be in business long enough to acquire much success if they were deceiving their business associates or treading on their employees to any great degree or for any major length of time. In other words you can't run a business for very long if trust is often broken. We BHLs tend to point to the Ken Lays and Bernie Madoffs of the world, as if they were the norm and the honest businessman was as rare and as charming as Jimmy Stewart running his tiny ah-shucks no-interest lending bank.

And mega-successes like Bill Gates tend to confuse us. On one hand, while Microsoft has often been accused of devious and predatory business practices, Bill seems to have redeemed himself in our eyes by his generosity, much in the way Carnegie and Rockefeller gave back most of what they earned-extracted-filched. Just as St Augustine once famously said, “Dear Lord, make me good.. but not yet..” many of our towering business figures seem to go through the same transition – when they were simple millionaires they hated paying taxes – but now that they are multi-billionaires, like Gates and Buffet, taxes are less than gnats buzzing in the room and they encourage raising them.

Another unfortunate tendency on our part is to casually dismiss the complaints of business people.

We either don't believe or don't care if business people are burdened with government bureaucracy or senseless regulations. We by and large trust the government to enact mainly sensible and beneficial policies, when it comes to others – especially the well off. When the government regulates us we find it oppressive.

Another example of we BHL's faulty thinking is the blind assumption that few if any poor people are lazy, parasitic, self-indulgent, bad parents and/or violent or awful citizens. This insistence on our parts that those living in poverty are somehow noble and pure, untainted by greed or covetousness, is surely a sign of wishful thinking on our parts and nearly to the point of established liberal dogma.

BHLs of 19^th century England and America looked at the poor and shuddered. The BHLs wanted to transform the lives of the poor precisely because the poor were all too often criminal, self-destructive and dangerous. Today we tend to say they are simply misunderstood or the hapless victims of circumstance, and we also tend to forget that predatory behavior may be more common amongst the poor than the well off. To paraphrase a wise Frenchman (yes, they exist) “..a wealthy man has no need to knock over gas stations nor break the law by sleeping under bridges..” - an observation we BHLs soothe ourselves with. And we tend to too quickly disregard the pain and suffering caused by predators from the underclasses.

We BHLs also regard any skin color other than white as a sign of primitive nobility, Blacks and browns to us have soul ..and yellows have mystic wisdom. White people are bland, heartless and soulless.

We BHLs also tend to mock white Christian fundamentalists while excusing black.. but only because we like the joy, exuberance and music of black churches? If you syncopate your superstition it makes it much better, we seem to say.

As for sexual relations, we BHLs also tend to increasingly shun the claustrophobic links of matrimony while wishing them on our gay and lesbian population. Hypocrisy? Not exactly, more the willingness to say, “You have the right to be as miserable as the rest of us who've voluntarily committed ourselves to a protective(?) institution.”

We BHL's also tend to over-look the fact that much gay public behavior is seemingly endless examples of loud, trite, repetitive and garish exhibitionism, originally done as understandable pride and defiance ..but now something akin to the self-aggrandizing boasting of bling-encrusted rappers.

We BHLs have also decried the loss of factory jobs to Asia and Mexico for years despite the fact that we have been in the forefront of mocking and rejecting American products, preferring foreign cars, foreign coffee, clothes, electronics, films etc.

While we BHLs are internationalists and hate hearing the French referred to as being rude and cowardly, the Germans as humorless, the Italians as corrupt.. and so on and so on.. we seem to have no problem condemning all Republicans as stiff and selfish or all Mormons as mad as hatters. (Prejudice, unfortunately, is a part of life, as it saves us time.)

As for America's place among nations we BHLs have never met a war we liked – except for the war against Hitler, as Hollywood could never in its wildest imagination come up with a comic book hero so vile and colorful. Those Darth Vader-like costumes clearly told the world, “We're the bad guys!” Fighting Hitler gained our approval, while the so-called cold war seemed silly to us and a waste of trillions of dollars. “Ike should have sat down with Nikita and finished that vodka bottle until they were singing in harmony together,” would have been our naive hope at the time.

(To be fair to us BHLs we had enough sense to favor fighting the North Koreans in the Korean war but opposed the fighting of the North Vietnamese. Proof of our wisdom can be found in examining Viet Nam today. Although the government is stiff and oppressive about some things, no one is starving and capitalism flourishes. Napalm helped no one 40 years ago.)

BHLs are often wrong or at least wishful thinkers on economic issues – but to no greater degree than conservatives, as has become abundantly apparent.

Finally, as Churchill said of Democracy, “It's the worse system, except for all the others,” when progressive liberalism is wrong its usually wrong for the right reasons. When cold and clinical conservatism is wrong it's usually wrong out of spite. (Okay, I couldn't resist comparisons and I succumbed to the desire to justify.. but didn't I manage to stick it out for a praiseworthy length of time?)