Nature_and_Environment.98

<b>Crunchy Cons: How Birkenstocked Burkeans, Gun-Loving Organic Gardeners, Hip Homeschooling Mamas, Right-Wing Nature Lovers...Plan to Save America (or at Least the Republican Party) </b> book review "http://www.powells.com/biblio/1400050642?&PID=25450"

I fully endorse people's rights to be loose cannons, and not follow a "straight party line". However, having read an earlier Utne article by the author of this book on the same topic, I think his view of liberal environmentalists is both patronizing, and lacking in real understanding of environmental issues.

I admit that I don't think the author was that clear on what he would support or oppose politically. I think he was more generally pro- environment, than Bush's lot (which wouldn't be hard). I have seen some other examples. He mentions a wife of a petroleum company executive who homeschools her eight kids. She was once a petroleum company manager but says, "I feel like my kids are getting a real childhood." My mother who taught school for 38 years and now designs and promotes math curricula at the elementary school level, is NOT a big fan of homeschooling. And her objections are NOT about "socialization" so much, because she thinks kids actually get more socialization from church, family, and neighborhood than school. But she feels very strongly that homeschooling often means a very poor education and that problems like dyslexia can too easily go undiagnosed in that environment. She feels that even if the parent is a certified teacher than homeschooling is not a better education. She doesn't recommend it unless it's the only alternative to an extremely long commute, or a "moving around" situation where the child ends up in multiple classrooms a year. As a former kid, I also feel that the public school I went to was better than Catholic school. And I try to make it very clear that my preference WAS about the quality of education, not the religion (I went to cathechism for years afterward willingly.), nor because of nuns with rulers or anything like that (this was Vatican II). Several of the listed "crunchy cons" expressed distrust for the "hysterical environmentalists" but still made comments about not wanting to destroy small town America, or turn all the farms and forests into suburbs. One said that he thought environmentalists were just "conservatives who want to eat fresh vegetables". To me this in a classic example of rejecting a philosophy without truly understanding its positions. Basically I feel like he enjoys some of the things that have been popularized in part by by the ecology movement such as organic vegetables and walkable communities, but really doesn't *get* the larger concerns of environmentalists. Another thing he said that undermined his credibility was that he enjoyed listening to both Garrison Keillor and Rush Limbaugh. A number of conservative commentators, I could have rolled with, but Limbaugh's constant disrespect for logic and costant use of broad ad hominem attacks on "liberals", "environuts" and "feminazis" (most of which are created him by taking the most cherry picked outrageous and out of context examples and twisting in his own signature way), just didn't help his arguement. Especially considering how much he mentioned old fashioned civil discourse as another "crunchy con" core value. Basically the best case that can be made from these crunchy cons, in my view is that common stereotypes of liberals and conservatives don't always hold up. Basically these crunchy cons are political palecons and often religious traditionalists, whose lifestyle choices don't fit the "Walmart shopping, beer guzzling, and NASCAR loving" stereotype.

One notable thing about crunchy cons is that they recognise that the original counterculture of the 1960s was not “liberal” or even “radical” in many ways. Beats Kerouac and Rexroth were Catholics, albeit of a type that frequently acknowledged even mortal sins as a form of grace, following on from Julian of Norwich in “Revelations of Divine Love”. Many hippies were very fascinated by highly traditional forms of Christianity and/or practitioners thereof, primarily because they saw in the Distributists especially a working model of living "back to the land". It is from this root that “cruncy conservatives” seek to build a locally based society based around family-centric work and education. In fact, the communalism of the hippies contrasted with the radical individualism and radical egalitarianism of the punks of the late 1970s in a very firm manner. People like Rod Dreher and his allies at “Front Porch Republic” recognise how the radical break with Western Civilisation was really created not in the Sixties, but in the late seventies and eighties as punk and then rap gradually worked their way into popular consciousness.

Yes. And the devolution of the family was well on its way to becoming the frightful mess it is today.

I would argue that the radical individualism and radical egalitarianism punk thought it was bringing in has been co-opted by a consumeristic society that feeds off of these desires and the egalitarianism is only the fact that this consumerism is equally distributed between all sexes.

.....and the families that are raised today have a new god to worship with their very marketable bodies and minds - materialism.

....On the tibetan wheel of life it's called the world of the hungry ghosts.

Nature_and_Environment.98
Crunchy Cons