After a few morbid days sulking in the alarming results of the elections, both nationally and locally, I am feeling a gradual charge of hopeful anger and opposition. It's as if now knowing more clearly the worst news about this country, and the central issues for the majority of the poor saps who have been easily manipulated into a deeply cynical view of "morality" and "leadership", the weight of respect and balance has been cast off out the fucking window. I really believe the stakes are high enough and clear enough now to effectively organize and enact a genuine opposition movement to "evangelical America".

I believe and hope the whole discussion of the "new morality" and Christian values can potentially open the way for the left (such as it is) to define itself in a more appealing, authentic and effective way. The next four years should be a full on attack on the hypocrisy and carnage of these right-wing extremists.

In explanation of the other half of the country voting in favor of this horrifying agenda, I turn to Maurice Mereau-Ponty's discussion of psychological rididity and social perception:

A study was made of 1500 schoolchildren between 11 and 16 years old, and in particular, of 120 of them who were remarkably "rigid". These subjects showed very strong racial and social prejudices -- prejudices which...bear witness to a sort of interior schism between what the subjects admit and recognize in themselves and what they do not admit, do not recognize, and are unwilling to see in themselves. The latter traits are projected on external subjects who play the role of scapegoat; while on the contrary, the subject appears in his own eyes as immune to the defects he finds in external groups.

In sum, the subjects who carry within themselves extremely strong conflicts are precisely those who reject, in their views of external things, the admission that there are particular situations that are ambiguous, full of conflicts, and mixed in value....The more emotionally ambivalent the subject, the less it suits him that there should be any amiguity in things and in his view of things. Emotional ambivalence is what demands the denial of intellectual ambiguity.