like the proverbial house upon the sand.
I've been most amused at some of the comments from the TV/cable chattering class - about the nature of this election's outcome. "Surprisingly" liberal. "This was a liberal election..." they say, with varying degrees of surprise and wide-eyed incredulity. Seems THEY, TOO, bought and swallowed whole - the outright LIE about this country being "center-right." HELL NO IT ISN'T!!! NO "center-right" country would ever go so decisively FOR marriage equality and even pot legalization in a variety of states scattered across North America, much less give that black guy another four-year lease on the Oval Office. You would NOT have Election Night results like that from a so-called "center-right" country. That's a complete and total LIE. America has NOT been pushed to the "right." We are NOT a country that's growing MORE CONservative. Nobody my voting-age kids know in their age group would have voted against either of those, and everybody they knew voted for President Obama. Our younger generations are MORE liberal,
not less.
That makes me feel a little bit of relief. No - a LOT of relief, to see it played out as I certainly had hoped. And it's now a confirmed fact that there are more of us on the liberal/progressive/open-minded side than there are on the prejudiced/CONservative/narrow-minded side. THAT is the side that's shrinking. They're aging and dying off. OUR side is loaded with the younger generation, especially the Millennials, who see things differently than the CONS and the Pox Noises and the limbaughs and norquists and the like. That simpering whiner michael medved wrote something about how - "NO, friends, the demographics for the future ACTUALLY present GOOD NEWS to republi-CONS!" He "reasons" that it's by virtue of the fact that everyone's aging, so we're gonna keep gaining increasing numbers of old people and old people always vote CONservative, don't they? Well, I have found that the older I get and the more I know and the longer I live, the more LIBERAL I become! Same with the VAST majority of people I know.
That argument always makes me think of the singer-entertainer and Miss America runner-up Anita Bryant, who - back when I was first working (the '70s) was best known as a VIRULENTLY anti-gay activist. Oh GOD she hated gays. She became a national spokeswoman for the anti-gay-rights reactionaries and used her public profile as a celebrity as a platform to spread the "gospel" of prejudice and hatred. This was a woman who routinely went overseas with Bob Hope on many of his Christmas tours for the armed forces, she was a guest star on all the variety shows and the Tonight Show and stuff, and she starred in her own concert tours, which always featured her rousing version of the "Battle Hymn of the Republic" to close the show and bring down the house. She had several "Hit Parade" type hits in the pop and middle-of-the-road radio formats, and she was the national spokeswoman for what was then called "the Florida Sunshine Tree" - Florida orange juice manufacturers.
Her vocal anti-gay activism eventually backfired. It actually helped galvanize the gay rights movement like nobody's business and literally shot it full of rocket fuel - helping it develop into the prominent social force for change that it's become by now. Meanwhile, there were boycotts galore, her career declined, the orange juice folks didn't like the bad publicity and dropped her as their spokeswoman, and her personal life deteriorated into a messy divorce that outraged all her legions of fundamentalist followers (how DARE you! Marriage is FOREVER!!!!!).
And remarkably enough - This SAME Woman eventually was heard to say that she'd come around to the decision that it was better just "to live and let live."

I about dropped my drawers when I heard that!!! That was something I NEVER thought I'd hear coming out of the mouth of somebody like her, ever-EVER. But I guess she'd finally just gotten bumped and banged around hard enough and often enough by life to start seeing things from another point of view than just her own narrow, pinched, shallow, and myopic one.
Kind of an interesting evolving-karma story that played out in pop culture back then. When I was first working, she was a BIG ongoing story, and everyone talked about her on the air a LOT.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anita_Bryant