Time.com January 5, 2001

Yes, Minorities Can Be Conservatives BY LANCE MORROW

Change is good. Change is necessary. Let us, as Bill Clinton said long ago, make change our friend.

In any case, when change comes, it's a little silly to greet it with indignant disbelief. The poor New York Times hears the axes at work in the cherry orchard of the vanished Clinton '90s. It beholds the new Bush team and begins to keen, sounding as mournful as Ashley Wilkes standing stiffly in the ruins of the old way of life. Oh, sure — three blacks, five women, several Hispanics, an Arab-American, an Asian-American Democrat, and so on. Diversity, if you will. But it's sneaky diversity! Peek under that apparent ethnic variety, and what you see are pod people, aliens disguised in the colors of Benetton! Conservatives!

They were expecting, perhaps, Earth Shoes? Jerry Rubin as secretary of state? Jim Morrison? Let's not go through the debate again about whether George W. Bush will be the legitimate president of the U.S. That seems to be the working assumption. That being so, why is the Times shocked, shocked, to find conservatism going on here? Times columnist Maureen Dowd calls it "the drowning of the Age of Aquarius." Are we supposed to be in mourning for that? Gurus of death and dying list the stages of grief — denial, anger, and so on, passing through to acceptance. The Times is stuck in the denial stage. The news has not penetrated to its editorial offices — the Skull & Bones clubhouse of liberal orthodoxy — that Hispanics, African-Americans, women, and Asian-Americans may sometimes be just as conservative as "white men." The Times cherishes a highly invidious and morally proprietary sense of race and gender, and does not like its women or minorities straying off the reservation. But when that happens, it is not a disorder of nature, or birth defect, or error in the coding. It may actually be the result of moral thought and conscious choice.

But forget politics. Even partisans may accept the premise that change is good, simply for the sake of change. Think of the new administration as part of the cycle of nature. The forest requires periodic fires. Politics and government need seasons. Leaves fall off trees, ground freezes. Eventually, spring comes. Buds and birds return. Washington, D.C., is similarly deciduous. It sheds liberals and conservatives from time to time.

I remember visiting the White House during September of 1992, in the dying days — the twelfth year! — of the old Reagan-Bush regime. I said to myself, the air here is suffocatingly stale. These people have no ideas. They believe they belong in power permanently. They have ceased to think. In a matter of months, the ancien regime was out of office. The new Clinton administration moved in.

Change. Good. Political ecology. The system refreshed itself.

Now, after eight years, change again. Good.

But this is not change at all, Democrats protest. This is a restoration of the geriatric old regime — Poppy's Over The Hill Gang come back to town, reorganized by the dyslectic son, who is a traitor to his generation. Back in the Age of Aquarius (now gone the way of Ophelia) the countercultural young used to say, "Don't Trust Anyone Over Thirty." That stupid dictum got into their software. Even now, when they are themselves in their late forties and early fifties, and Mick Jagger is about 96, the sight of any white man with gray hair (Dick Cheney!) is a flashback to odious Dad of long ago, the punitive, privileged authority principle, the idiot who got us into Vietnam.

That was then. This is January, 2001. Time to move on.

-- Lars (larsguy@yahoo.com), January 08, 2001

Answers

Well said, Lance Morrow

-- Lars (larsguy@yahoo.com), January 08, 2001.

Hoo- RA , Well put now move on.

-- Red Johnson (Red Johnson@member.net), January 08, 2001.

Why don't you explain this to your redneck conservative friends. They seem to think that all minorities are liberal and all liberals are minorities.

-- (everyone.but.you@gets.it), January 08, 2001.

reaping & sowing=======works

-- al-d. (dogs@zianet.com), January 08, 2001.