jawfish

Why Republicans Are So Angry
john posted in politics & culture on March 19th, 2006

	Why are Republicans so angry?
Bill O’Reilly	There’s no doubt that they are angry. Stymied at every turn in Congress, snubbed at the White House, locked out of the Washington lobbying circus, they are just not in the power circle.
No sir, things are just not going their way. Hundreds of shows are produced on TV and you never see a Republican. Visit the boardrooms of Sony, Time-Warner, and Fox and there’s not a conservative to be found.	Chuck Grassley

So what’s wrong? It’s those snotty effete Liberals with their books and wine and art.

Dick’s eyebrow

yuppie wine tasting

deKooning

Repubs just hate them because they can’t be them. You see, secretly Republicans want to be hip.

They try and try, but they keep getting twee or Texas diva, or fascist-wildlife. They just can’t hit the right note.

Painter of Lite

hair with singer

wooden eagle

Inside every angry Repub, there lives a timid wannabe hipster, just sprouting a hint of soul patch or dreaming of a navel stud. Sadly, they are so unhip, that Republicans don’t know that Liberals aren’t hip either. They think that just because Liberals are soooo Not Republican, that Liberals must be the hip ones.

Hatch Graham Sessions Harris

So why aren’t they hip? Well let’s face it, to start, most Anglos just aren’t hip. I mean maybe you can find somebody with a goatee and a ‘tude you’d count, or a rocker in a dress made out of bubble-wrap, but basically no. We pink people can buy hip, sell hip, rip-off hip, appreciate hip, but we aren’t hip. Being hip starts with being not-Anglo.

Now these guys are hip.

Mr. Monk or Blue Train

Hip is about being in the moment, but Anglos are people who go around maximizing their revenue, begging for approval, and buying up mud-soaked shacks for redevelopment. Hip people don’t say “beverage” or “merchandise.” Hip people don’t write about hipness as if it were a commodity. Or at all.

Now Anglos can be cool.

Cool was invented by the hip, but has a lower bar. To be cool you can do ironic, or nonchalant, or just plain sang froid. James Bond is cool, but not hip. Of course this Bond is also not Anglo, he’s an unreconstructed Scot.

I’m not sure, but I don’t think you can be hip and be powerful. Politician, leader, tycoon, president are all closed to hipness. Mom and Dad, it goes without saying, can’t be hip. Maybe teacher can be hip. Some Anglo comics might make it to hip.
Lenny

So what can Republicans do to be hip?
What can they do to throw off dowdy petulance and strut their real stuff?

That’s a big non-starter pilgrim. Republicans are made up of two predominant Anglo groups: the dwindling pin-stripe Wall streeters, with their sidekick small-businessmen, and the countrified, evangelical, tetchy Snopes of all incomes who are running the country just now. I used to say that these folks are held together by a terror of Black Sex: steamy, night-living, full of bright colors, big men, and loud women. Their worst nightmare is that Big Johnson ogre that threatens to trample their manhood and violate their womenfolk.

rasta wrestle yo wife?

He gonna get you sucka.

Ok so they are afraid of the dark, but that doesn’t explain why Republicans think they are such victims: why Hollywood, the Culture of Victimization, Liberals, New Yorkers, People With Good Suits, are all out to get ‘em. To listen to self-described Conservatives you’d think they sit in the back of the bus, eat in the kitchen, and shuffle their feets before the massa. After buying all three branches of government, overrunning Wall Street, and consolidating the entertainment industry, just what is it they haven’t got?

What Republicans haven’t got, and can’t get, is hip. Democrats aren’t hip either, but they accept it, and are sort of aw-gee shucks apologetic about it. They figure it’s good enough to be embarrassed at being unhip, and maybe hope for cool. Worse, Democrats even look like wannabe Republicans, these days.

Diane Leahy Biden

What about cool?
Mostly Republicans can’t even fake cool, because they are so busy whining and pounding the table. Hip is way over the horizon, like Shangri-la.

They’ll never be satisfied.
In their hearts, Repubs know they come from Eisenhower and Goldwater and not Lincoln or TR. Nixon, Agnew, Reagan, Bush: just a bunch of laughable palefaces.

No matter how many Lincolns, LLadros, and big hair appointments at Neiman-Marcus they get, no gloss of hipness will appear. They’ll keep on feeding their frustration, buying up jobs, shipping their money overseas, pushing for Big Brother government.

Trying for hip is uncool.
Resenting hip is frumpy.
Decrying hip is self-righteous.
They’re doomed.