corrente

Digby's got a great post up which links to this piece in the NYPress on the subject of Spite. Digby's excerpt focuses on the economic angle, so here we will look at Sex as a factor in all this:

This is why they [note: he means "us"--ed.] will forever struggle to understand the one overriding mystery of why so many working- and middle-class white males vote against their own best interests.

I CAN TELL YOU WHY. They do so out of spite. Put your ear to the ground in this country, and you'll hear the toxic spite churning. It's partly the result of commercial propaganda and sexual desperation—a desperation far more common than is admitted. If you didn't know anything about how America's propaganda worked, you'd think that every citizen here experienced four-dimensional multiple orgasms with beautiful, creative, equally satisfied partners, morning, noon and night.

The wretched truth is that America is an erogenous no man's land. Most white males here (at least the straight ones) have either dismal sex lives or no sex lives at all. As bad as this hurts, the pain is compounded every time you expose yourself to the cultural lies that await you at every turn—that is, every waking hour and during deep REM sleep, when the subliminal messages kick in. This wretchedness leads to a desire for vengeance, to externalize the inner famine—it leads directly to the Republican camp.

This explains why the Republican elite—the only true and all-powerful elite in America today—is not considered an "elitist" class in the spleens of the white male have-nots. Elitism as defined today is a synonym for "happy," not "rich" or "powerful." Happiness is the scarcest resource of all, not money...

Kerry won't draw the spite vote, but his creepy face, along with Bush's jock glow, just might neutralize it—out of spite. All the left has to do is not stir up the wrong bile. That means keeping the focus on Bush's corporate-jock clique, and keeping it mean.

This post inspired one of the longest comment threads I've ever seen at Hullabaloo. About a third of it is banter with a troll, but there are some very astute observations as well. Sticking to the sexual angle to all this is the following by ESaund:

Rush Limbaugh's power over people is because he has convinced alot of working class chumps that all their problems are the fault of uppity feminists who don't put out. And these chumps really hate gays and blacks because they get sex any time they want.

So all this sexual repression fits in neatly with the GOP's message - self rightous condemnation of anyone who has sex on a regular basis.

See what I mean? This explanation goes far to tie together the various seemingly incompossible mishmash that makes up the drinkers (although not the pushers) of the Kool-Ade. The fundies, the anti-gay crowd, the basic bigots, the MBF's--even the Swifties, if you go to the original article, although they're not mentioned by name. Haven't they always seemed like a spiteful lot to you?