Illegal Tender

Friends, we have spent the last several days considering American Conservatism.

We have, of course, long maintained that the terms "Left" and "Right" are more or less useless for describing most of the formations, deformations, affiliations and sillynations in American politics, and it's no secret that healthy, subtle political differences are unusually difficult to discern amongst the demagoguery and stupidity that passes for mainstream political commentary.

You'll find organized Progressives in Texas and radical religious conservatives in Connecticut -- hell, one of them is getting nervous about his Senate seat right about now -- and that raving Maoist Howard Dean was a fiscal hawk who was loved by the National Rifle Association. Remember, the theory that running up large deficits isn't always a bad thing wasn't invented by Bush and Cheney, but by that fascist theocrat John Maynard Keynes. Yes, things may be more complicated than they appear on the nightly news.

It therefore struck us as a characteristically iconoclastic impulse to move away from the commondreams, the counterpunch, the Democracy Now, and the other sources of alt commentary, and to tour places that the average lib-lab schmuck Wouldn't Deign to Tread.

"What if," we said to ourselves, "Our anti-Statist impulses, roughly resonating with a more or less anarchist-libertarian-socialism, cf. mid-1940s Dwight Macdonald, were to find natural allies in the resolutely anti-Iraq-war factions of the American Conservative movement? There must be some on the Radical Right who are against gay marriage not because they hold particularly odious, retrograde, theologically-derived beliefs regarding sexual conduct, but because they're against marriage per se; because they think States have no business ratifying or denying personal relationships of any sort: gay, straight, or otherwise. There are certainly those on the Radical Left who hold such things."

Well, it wasn't the first time that we were mistaken and disappointed, but we don't want to ruin the surprise: we'll be reporting on our findings in coming days.

In the meantime, the image above is something we found plastered all over the neighborhoods we visited. Turns out that the "hurry-up- and-build-the-big-guarded-fence against the criminal Mexicans" fascist-xenophobe movement is sending them to Republican politicians during upcoming campaign fundraising drives.

Captions and / or close-readings to accompany the "Nada Pesos" bill would be most welcome.