Living Like a Liberal

[Geee]

Weekly Standard:

Living Like A Liberal
It’s hard work, politicizing your whole life.

BY MATT LABASH
July 19, 2010

This is a story about living the good life. Or not the good life, exactly, in the Italian, dolce vita understanding of the term. It’s more about living the better life, a comparative way of living. It’s about living better than I was before, living better than I once thought possible, living better, if you’ll forgive my candor, than do you.

Here, I use “you” to loosely mean “conservative” or even “disengaged liberal.” For living better than you is all about honesty. Honesty with you. Honesty with myself. So I’ll just level with the two of us: I used to be a conservative. I mean, I wasn’t some nutcake conservative. I didn’t follow along with Glenn Beck at home, flowcharting the lineage of Lenin to Van Jones on my kids’ Fisher-Price chalkboard. I didn’t attend Rand Paul rallies in a tricorn and a frilly blouse like some kind of colonial crossdresser. I was just a vanilla, middle-of-the-road conservative. As long as I remained undertaxed, overdefended, and unaborted, I was pretty content. Live and let live, I thought. I might have even made a good Libertarian, except I hate science fiction, think Ayn Rand was a crank with an unfortunate haircut, and would fail the house drug test (when my results came back negative).

But my lesser living was a lifetime ago. Actually, just a few weeks ago, but it feels like the distant past. It was before my road to Damascus encounter, before the illuminative flame touched my torch of enlightenment. It was B.J.K.—Before Justin Krebs.


Who is Justin Krebs, you ask? Only my sensei. My guru. The man who made plain that I had politics all wrong. I used to think along the lines of the British writer and publisher Ernest Benn that politics was “the art of looking for trouble, finding it whether it exists or not, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedy.” Thus, I had put my politics in my political box, and my life in my living box. When I should’ve placed all the contents in the same box—a much bigger, biodegradable one. (You can get them at Treecycle.com.)

Krebs showed me that my politics shouldn’t be just my politics, but also my religion, my sun and moon, my inhalation and exhalation. Since politics, particularly liberal politics, bring people so much joy, wouldn’t I be better off politicizing everything—the way I live and work and play? That’s a rhetorical question, by the way. The answer is a resounding “yes,” as evidenced right there in the title of Krebs’s new book: 538 Ways to Live Work and Play Like a Liberal.

The 32-year-old Krebs didn’t just write this book, which comes complete with a 538-item checklist. He’s lived it. He sharpened his liberal-living iron on the mean conservative streets of Highland Park, New Jersey; Cambridge, Massachusetts; and, finally, that repository of red state madness, the island of Manhattan. Girding him for battle were his parents—two good liberals, who sent him to a cooperative preschool, where he called all the other kids’ moms and dads by their first names. Krebs says his parents were his “playmates” as well, though all was not idyllic. There are some intimations of child abuse; they took him to a Walter Mondale rally when he was just 6 years old.

Upon graduating from Harvard, Krebs had his liberal ticket punched repeatedly. He served in the office of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton. He blogs on the progressive blog OpenLeft. He is one of the founding directors of The Tank, “a non-profit arts presenter in the heart of Manhattan.” But his enduring legacy, his gift to all of us really, was hatched over a pitcher of beer.

[righteousmomma]

This is FUNNY!! LOOOOONG but one I will read again.

I especially liked his parenting attempts:

 

"I try to incorporate his commandments into my parenting regimen, and it’s a disaster. I read a series of Krebs-recommended books to my sons Luke, 10, and Dean, 7. At this stage, they’re pretty apolitical. If pressed, they probably consider themselves conservatives, if they even know what that means. But during the 2008 election, they pulled for Barack Obama because they enjoyed the way his name sounded.

 

They weren’t having much of Krebsian storytime, however. First, I let them share stories, as Krebs suggests. Dean plows right in:

 

Once upon a time, there was a princess. She ate a frog. She pooped out green stuff. Her hat fell out the window. The prince caught it. He threw it in the river where the crocodiles were. Since he gave it to the crocodiles, they smelled it, and hunted her down and killed her. The end.

 

I stare at my son with blank bewilderment. The stories we tell are supposed to “cultivate compassion, empathy, and community spirit,” I tell Dean. “What’s the moral of your story, Dean?”

 

He gives a whaddya-want-from-me shrug: “You should never feed a crocodile a princess hat,” he says.

 

Reading time doesn’t go much better. At Krebs’s insistence, I read aloud the 1973 Marlo Thomas classic Free To Be .  .  . You and Me, but the kids are more interested in the companion CD, begging me to put it on, so they can do break-dancing moves, karate kicks, and fake-lasso each other across the living room floor while listening to cloying songs such as “Parents Are People” and “It’s Alright to Cry.” Finally, Luke has enough: “I hate this song, it’s torture. Please turn it off.”

 

Once they finally settle down, I read them a story called “Zachary’s Divorce,” about a kid named Zachary, whose parents have just gotten divorced, and whose mom reassures him that it’s not his fault. “If your mom and I ever get a divorce,” I say, “just know that you two are to blame.”

 

“Really?” asks Luke.

 

“Don’t be so dumb,” admonishes his wised-up brother.

 

But the story prompts the boys to hold a symposium on who they like better/who’d they go with in a divorce, me or my wife. “It’s a tie,” Luke says diplomatically. “But she’s cleaner. I’m sorry for saying that. I just had to spit that out.” Also, Dean adds, “You cuss all the time when you’re mad. Not trying to be mean. It’s just your hobby, I guess.”

 

“Yeah,” adds Luke, “you’re good at your hobby.”

 

I figure we might have better luck playing nonelimination games of inclusion I get from Terry Orlick’s book Cooperative Games and Sports. But something about the Nerf nature of playing games with titles like “Cooperative Musical Hugs” and “Collective Score Blanketball” brings out my sons’ inner hooligan, causing several shoving matches, a mini-fistfight, and declarations that “Victory is mine,” even though we’re all supposed to be winners.

 

At one point, playing “Grasshopper in the Blanket” on our deck, which involves us throwing up Dean’s stuffed monkey, Stevie, and catching him in a blanket, as many times as we can to see if we can achieve a high collective score, Luke finally drops his corner of the blanket as Stevie flies off into the grill. Luke’s worried the neighbors might see us: “Dad, this is gay.”

 

“Don’t say gay in that context,” I reprimand, ever the dutiful progressive father.

 

“It used to mean ‘happy,’ ” protests Luke.

 

“Well it doesn’t anymore,” I say........"

 

---------------and his quote:

As one of my favorite liberals H.L. Mencken said: “Liberals have many tails, and chase them all.”

[Rheo]

I'm on page 10. What a great article.