Button up your shirt, Mr. Gladnick – your inner idiot is showing.

For Rod, it was his inclusion in the Roy Edroso Right-wing blogosphere smackdown that made him feel sufficiently disliked to know he’d hit the big time. In my case, the source of the attack is a bit less prominent, but a hilariously point-missing screed from the keyboard of one P.J. Gladnick, of the Media Research Center’s NewsBusters blog, nevertheless makes me feel like a member of an at-least-somewhat exclusive club. I almost hesitate to link to it, for what lurks on the other side of this click is not for the weak of stomach, but etiquette abides me – so here you go. Follow along, if you will, for a doleful gaze through a window into the unfortunate saga that is the ongoing attempt to enforce the precepts of RightThink:

There has been a trend in recent years for liberals to try to rebrand themselves as conservatives. The purpose is to con people into thinking that they somehow uphold traditional values. One of the more laughable of these rebranding attempts has been put forward by one John Schwenkler, a doctoral candidate in philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. The very title of Schwenkler’s Boston Globe article, “Eat Republican,” along with the subtitle, “How an organic movement born in Berkeley exemplifies conservative values,” sets the tone for the attempted con.

And so it begins. Leaving aside the issue of the Globe’s unfortunate choice of a title, the problems here are manifold. Apparently I, a married and consistently churchgoing father of one who would like nothing more than for the federal government to crawl off into a corner and leave me and the market well enough alone so that I can homeschool my children and eat my sustainably-grown produce in God’s peace, am by virtue of my love for the finer things nothing but a liberal con on a “rebranding” project. (Why any liberal would want to share an appellation with people like this is entirely beyond me.) It is not enough, in other words, to attempt to disprove the claim – not mine, by the way – that “Food Choices Can Make You ‘Conservative’”: rather, it must be carefully shown stated baldly and without any support whatsoever that the opposite is true. Into good food and farmers’ markets? You, my good man, have exposed yourself as a liberal. Liberal, liberal, LIBERAL. Now go back to Berkeley and sip your commie lattes with your commie friends. Liberal.

It is all downhill from there. The several paragraphs that I spend railing against the history of federal meddling in agriculture and nutrition, my specific calls for a populist movement centered on “[n]eighborhood gardens, cooking classes in schools and church basements, and the promotion of local and co-operative markets”, and my insistence that the task of teaching children to garden and to cook ought to be the province of “private and parochial schools, home-schooling parents, and churches and voluntary associations”, are not enough to save me: it is “indoctrination in the schools” that I must be after. Never mind that all education involves “indoctrination” of some sort or other, and that most conservatives have very little problem with using even state-run schools for such purposes when the doctrines in question are of a different sort – my willingness to suggest that it might be worth teaching our children to cook well and eat together as families, or to grow or buy food in ways that respect God’s creation and sustain local communities rather than multinational corporate monoliths, reveals my con for what it is, and brings my “inner liberal” to the surface. Liberal, liberal, LIBERAL. Now go back to Berkeley and eat your commie grass-fed beef with your commie friends. Liberal.

What follows – e.g., the implication that since Jonah Goldberg works for the National Review he is therefore the de facto expert on all matters conservative – is no less cringe-inducing or more worthy of detailed comment than the rest. (“Laughable”, indeed.) And when Mr. Gladnick moves to drive in what is apparently meant to be the final nail by insisting that the contents of my meals show that I am not sufficiently committed to “traditionally American” patterns of consumption, the jig is truly up. That “bean sprouts and yogurt” do not even begin to resemble anything that is included in the meals I listed, and indeed that there is nothing especially untraditional about any of them, is really no matter – according to the rules of the game, I cannot be counted as eating like a conservative (or a Republican, if you really must) unless I throw budgetary concerns to the wind and sustain my family on a diet of fried chicken, sirloin steak smothered in onions, pizza, and barbequed spareribs. One glance at your refrigerator proves that you are a liberal. Liberal, liberal, LIBERAL. Now go back to Berkeley and eat your commie bean sprouts and yogurt with your commie friends. Liberal.

At this point the natural temptation is to throw up one’s hands and run headlong into the nearest hard surface. But at the risk of moving yet deeper into territory where even the angels fear to tread, let me try very briefly to make a more substantial point – or rather, to make it again, in the hopes that I will not be brushed off simply as a “con”. What we eat, and where it comes from, and how we choose to eat it, are things that matter: for we are not merely bodily beings who can feed ourselves like so many horses at a trough, but spiritual ones as well. And so the cultivation of the proper sorts of relationships to our food, to its sources in the earth, and to the people who grow it and sell it and those with whom we eat it, is obviously the sort of project that conservatives ought to go in for. That so many professed conservatives refuse to recognize this possibility, and choose instead to react with this sort of bitterness to what boils down to a call for a return to family values and political and economic decentralism, seems to me to say all that needs to be said about the sorry state of the modern American Right. If P.J. Gladnick gets to define who counts as a closet liberal, then I guess I just might be one after all. I’m happy to report, though, that that isn’t his call to make.

P.S. Gladnick’s failure, in his role as an officially-appointed Liberal Media Watchdog, to mention that the essay in question was originally published in The American CONSERVATIVE, is almost too painfully ridiculous to mention.

(Image via Flickrer glynnish.)

Filed under: conservatism, food, personal