I had a bout of argumentation over at Respectable Negroes with C. DeVega whose contempt for Conservatives surely has bounds, but I can't see them because the Milky Way obscures the view. I am recalling, since it's been a while since I've gone typo a typo with an online interlocutor that I should use Popper's sort of argumentation via falsifiable statements. It may or may not yield the proper results, but I should remain consistent.
The pursuit of happiness is a great phrase. In my reading, I've been told that it was a substitution for the pursuit of commerce. I am of the sort, lately, that understands the equivalence. It has not always been the case. As England has been derided as a nation of shopkeepers, so too I had contempt for the likes of Korean grocers amid the fiery arguments I possessed in the days of Rodney King. And for a long time I have been quoting Cornel West by saying that he recognized in African America an existential dilemma that precluded their participation in that thing called 'enlightened self interest'. And so despite the monumentally astounding thing that is the infrastructure of the American commerce machine, millions are not willing or able to find happiness of that originally intended sort.
It is from that position of unhappiness that grows a poverty of spirit and charity which characterizes that crowd my political fellows have called 'Hate America First'. I'm inclined to believe not that most people are stupid, but that most people accept stupidity as common ground. So these unhappy people accept that most people are unhappy and then come up with solutions which have the unfortunate consequence (or intent) of dashing happy people into the dirt. For them the world can always be improved and the formula is simple. Take whatever it is them that got got, water it down a bit and distribute amongst those what ain't got.
There are a few things, however, that do not fit that formula. Whiteness, for example. Such things must then inevitably be demonized. After all, if it can't be shared amongst all of humanity it must not be good for mankind. This ineffable kind of specialness must be reckoned with, and in those things come the axioms of HAF values. I don't know why it must be this way. I presume it is so because such unhappy folks find the present so miserable that something must have gone radically wrong in the past - something that determines their unhappiness, something outside of themselves, created by someone that they are not and could never be. It leads me to a very interesting existential question I will ask in the following essay. But for now we know this thing to be Other.
I found this video, and very much like another video I posted here of Lawrence Welk, it shows a picture of happiness. It is a happiness alien to my upbringing, not in substance but in form. And it is a happiness that I think would baffle most of the HAF gang. I myself am happy, and I am convinced that the sort of happiness I am pursuing is defended by the Constitution and held in contempt by its enemies. Tra, la freakin' la!
BTW, DeVega asked a question about black conservative commitment but then either pooped out or punked out before he could process one, my answer. I guess all he could hear was 'tra la la'.
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