SlowpokeBlog

I find Priscilla Owen, one of Bush's whackjob judicial appointees, a fascinating political phenomenon. I mean, this woman unabashedly tortures the law to rule against the little guy over and over. She has overturned "rulings in favor of a child born with birth defects, a worker injured on an oil rig, a nurse fired for blowing the whistle on a drug-dealing co-worker, a family with an interest in an oil field that had been drained by a nearby company, asbestos and breast implant plaintiffs..." (NYT). Yet many ordinary Americans embrace her ideology, which a supporter describes her as having a "frontier mentality" in which you "don't cry about your hardships."

The success of the radical right's marketing of legal powerlessness to ordinary Americans is remarkable. On its face, this "tough shit" ideology really isn't very appealing, which begs the question of why millions cling to it so dearly. There are many good explanations out there, involving the Protestant work ethic, the mythology of American individualism, the meritocracy narrative, and more recently, Lakoff's strict-father/nurturing-parent models. But at the core of their ideology is this: these people don't believe the tough shit rule will ever apply to them.

No, the tough shit rule is for those other people who don't work hard enough, who bring on their troubles themselves, who (in many of their minds) tend to be people of color.

But just wait until these people are on the wrong end of, say, an insurance dispute, where they're up against a giant company with far greater resources than they have. Oh, then they'll want theirs! Then they won't like a Priscilla Owen screwing them into the ground.

I'm reminded of something I saw recently, an e-mail from a co-worker who once wrote a letter to my local paper to complain that a cartoon of mine portrayed conservatives as stupid. (This same person is a devotee of Rush Limbaugh, who speaks so highly of "the liberals.") There's some question over the drinking water quality at work, so it's being tested. This person wrote a note of approval, encouraging the testing. But at the bottom of their e-mail message was a quote from Janice Rodgers Brown, another of Bush's whackjob judicial nominees deeply opposed to civil liberties, Social Security, etc.

Water quality and workplace safety are progressive issues. Without the work of progressives fighting corporate negligence over the years, things would be much, much worse. Right-wing judicial activists Owen and Brown stand diametrically opposed to such efforts. I find it funny how The Brainwashed swallow their sick ideology in the abstract, but when it comes to their own lives, the "tough shit" rule doesn't apply.