Dude, Where's My Country_ - Michael Moore [70]
In this country nearly everyone wants to have the strongest protections necessary to ensure a clean environment. And they take personal responsibility by doing a number of things every single day to cut down on pollution and waste.
This country is so far to the left that 80 percent of its people believe in universal health care and racial diversity on college campuses.
This country I know of is so hippy-dippy-free-love and all that jazz that only a quarter of its people believe that drug users should go straight to jail—perhaps because, as their president has, 41 percent of the citizens have admitted to using illegal drugs themselves! And when it comes to holy matrimony, the number of people who live together and don’t get married is up 72 percent in the past decade, and 43 percent of them have children.
I’m telling you, this country is so commie-pinko-weirdo, its conservative party can never get more than 25 percent of its recurring voters to join it, while the vast majority of its citizens define themselves as either members of the liberal party, or worse—independent or anarchist (the latter just simply refusing ever to vote!).
So, where is this utopia I write about, this land of liberal-lefty, peacenik tree-huggers (and how soon can you and I move there)?
Is it Sweden?
Tibet?
The Moon?
No! You don’t have to go to the moon because . . . you’re already there! This Land O’ Left paradise I speak of is none other than . . . the United States of America!
Surprised? Don’t believe it? Finally convinced my last screw has come loose? I don’t blame you. It’s hard to think of the U.S. of A. as anything but a country that is ruled by a conservative majority, a nation whose moral agenda seems set by the Christian Coalition, a people who appear to be cut from the cloth of their Puritan ancestors. After all, look who’s in charge at the White House! And look at the approval ratings he gets!
But the cold bitter truth—and the best kept political secret of our time—is that Americans are more liberal than ever when it comes to both the lifestyles they lead and the positions they take on the great social and political issues of the day. And you don’t have to take my word for it—it’s all there in the polls, just the facts and nothing but.
Now, say this to any liberal and they won’t just snicker (liberals stopped laughing a long time ago, which is part of the problem), they’ll shake their heads and repeat the mantra they’ve learned from a media with a vested interest in making them believe they’re on the losing side every miserable day of their lives: “America has gone conservative!” Ask any liberal-leaning person to describe this country and you’ll hear a series of invectives about how we live in a nation of pickup trucks and gun racks and flags flying everywhere. They will speak with a tone of defeat about how much worse things are going to get, and resign themselves to four more years of whatever crap we’ve been eating for the last four (or fourteen or forty) years.
The right must rejoice every time they hear this surrender—and then they reinforce it with whatever sledgehammer they can grab. Yes! America supports the war! Yes! America loves its Leader! Yes! All of America was watching The Bachelorette last night! So, if you are not part of All-of-America, then just shut the fuck up and go crawl into that phone booth with the Noam Chomsky fan club, you miserable loser!
The reason the right is so aggressive in trying to squash any and all dissent is because they’re in on the dirty little secret the left doesn’t get: that more Americans agree with the left than the right. The right knows this because they look at the numbers, they read the reports, and they live in the real world that has become increasingly liberal in the last decade or so. And they hate it. So, in the tradition of all propagandists, they lie. They create an opposite truth: AMERICA IS CONSERVATIVE. Then they pound away with that false message so hard and so often that even their political