I was struck in how people from the right to conservative were Peter Pans intellectually. I do not mean for the longing always of "how it was" but deeper. It is if their vital social opinions became stuck in the early teenage years and they never grew out of them.
Like many youths determining their place in the world I well remember having sets of absolute viewpoints on all soughts of things, most of which were pretty fasciod. Everything felt in flux and these rock hard opinions gave me an ability to navigate and orienated myself, but they were incredibly silly, ad hoc and garnered from all over the place.
Years later I found some of the same opinions, held as rock hard as my own were, but in people in their 30s-50s and all right-consrervatives. These navigation points had never been changed and anything, even accidently, contradicting them were met with outbursts of pained defense (widely out proprotion to the transgression itself - suddenly they became petulant teenagers, incoherent and pugnancious to an extreme).
Other aspects also pointed at a perpetual adolescence. They were all rather cosetted in their life experiences (I am talking of the so-called intellectual right here), if they travelled they did so as pure tourists, sticking to familiar hotels, the idea of mixing it with the locals, back packing, or just adventuring about was obsessively avoided. They tended to be unadventureous in work experiences, madly networking careers that are safe from challenging their ideas, and not so oddly, much given to, almost sexual, hero worship complimented by a pathological demonising of everybody they disliked.
All in all, once you get a handle on their 16 year old's world view (which is always idiosyncratic) they are very easy to provoke into lunatic outbursts. Far from being stupid they go to enormous pains to disguise the child-within, adopting cultured and intellectual affections capable of great cunning, but they remain pathetic human beings rather then objects of hate, dangerous perhaps but always pathetically perverse.
My personal conclusion is that we take them far too seriously as intellectuals, the foundations for their theorising is nothing solid, nor even consistent (within itself or across the right-intellectual sphere) beneath it all is just a "lost boy" following their "Peter" into battle against "indians"and "pirates" to preserve their "never-never-land". Perhaps it is JM Barry who gives us the clearest vision of the hidden heart of the intellectual-right, "Peter Pan" is the best insight I have come across that gives shape to their real motivations (what is lovely in the child becomes grotesque in the adult).
--- Message Received --- From: Dennis Perrin <dperrin at comcast.net> To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com Date: Sat, 23 Mar 2002 15:39:39 -0500 Subject: Re: Lenin today
Many years later I was reminded of their venom when I was invited on Laura Ingraham's radio show to plug my sports book. She asked me what I thought of the WNBA. I said that while I recognized it was largely a marketing ploy by the NBA aimed at young women (an untapped pro-sports market), it had evolved into something unique, and one could see the way the game used to be played by men 30-40 years ago -- emphasis on passing and passing lanes, ball control skills, shooting percentage, etc. Ingraham began shouting "LIAR! LIAR!" I thought she was kidding, but she was not. She wanted me to trash "that girls league" and I found something of merit instead. So, she screamed at me.
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Greg Schofield Perth Australia g_schofield at dingoblue.net.au _______________________________________________ _______________________________________________
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