Despite being a hypocrite (at times, a raging one) I really despise hypocrisy. Which is kind of hypocritical of me, now that I think about it. One of the most ridiculously hypocritical things I know of is the “why should I have to press 1 for English” meme (typical link). Seriously, it makes my skin crawl. Don’t the people who say this have any sense of the horrible, horrible irony?
Of note, I never ever see this phrase trotted out in left-wing venues, in left-of-center venues, or centrist venues. This seems strictly a right-of-center conservative American complaint. Actually, let’s call a spade a spade: this is more of a whine.
Now, I’m not gonna say liberals ain’t whiny. They are plenty so. But I’m talking about conservative whiners right now. And why is this a hypocritical whine? Because of two little concepts you might have heard of: capitalism and democracy.
Right-of-center ideologies in the U.S. generally support ideas about business and government that are, well, conservative. If the Founding Fathers wanted a constitutional republic, then we should stick with it and stop trying to tweak the system. If our economic system has been capitalist for 200 years, then we should leave it alone and stop trying to regulate the corporations built up by the hard labor of good Americans. But when the ethnic demographics of the country start changing, this becomes problematic for some people.
It’s business’ God-given right to make money in nearly any way they can, so leave them alone, you bloated and inefficient government folks. Unless those corporations start to respond to a shift in American demographics and try to make money by offering service that shifts toward ethnicities that are not mine. We need English-Only rules. They should apply to all businesses, no matter what.
And we’re a constitutional republic, so our leaders have the responsibility to represent their constituencies… oh wait, unless their constituencies are brown and speak a different language. Nevermind. There oughta be a law.
The whole concept is similar to John Stewart’s recent observations that Republicans seem to believe that it’s only wrong to criticize America if Republicans are in charge of it. The principles seem to shift when their consequences hit a little too close to home.
Maybe the problem is a clash between two conservative positions: do we stick with the old rules or with the old outcomes? If the former, then we should let the businesses and government respond to demographic shifts. If the latter, then we should, by all means, protect the status quo.
The problem with that analysis is that the ideology of the conservative worldview seems to support living by a consistent set of rules, whereas statements like “WSIHTP1FE” ignore those rules in favor of an Us-Versus-Them mentality. Maybe there are really good reasons (that I do not understand) for the apparent flip-flopping, but from the outside it just looks like another group of people whose ideology is a disposable mask for more crass, selfish, and unflattering human tendencies. Rules, schmules. Protect the people who sound like us.