discipline posted:

your time abroad has aged you horribly

His return home, as described in that book, had convinced Joe that American culture "is based on two things: television and petroleum." We live "in an age of corporate dominion just as we once lived in an age of domination by royal families, kings, and warlords." He reserved his greatest ferocity for the liberals who let it all happen, with their

thick-headed denial of what is obvious to every thinking white person: A class conflict is being played out between the Scots-Irish culture and what James Webb rightly called America's "paternalistic Ivy League-centered, media-connected, politically correct power centers." Whether educated liberals believe this or not, it is true. Tens of millions of Scots Irish and thousands of Scots Irish-influenced communities believe it is true and vote as if it is true, and that makes it true.

Joe blamed Tom's transformation in part on liberals, who, in their noble rush to disown the racist southern elements of their party during the civil rights era, pulled away from the region entirely, leaving an information vacuum that Fox News and GOP operatives would later exploit. "There is no good reason," Joe continued,

why for the past thirty years the uncertainty and dissatisfaction of people like Tom... was automatically snubbed as unenlightened by so many on the left. If the left had identified and dealt with this dissatisfaction early on, if they had counteracted the fallacies that Republicans used to explain that dissatisfaction, if they had listened instead of stereotyping blue-coller angst as "Archie Bunkerism"... we might have witnessed something better than the Republican syndicate's lying and looting of the past six years.

Gssh posted:

looks like it's an actor playing a character.

aren't we all