A sanitized society is a dead society.

There’s a great deal of talk about the left/right split in this country. The right hates the left that views it with distain while both hate the centrists who stand for nothing. This “great divide” occupies our punditocracy as they parse and analyze it. Yet, for all the Sturm und Drang, this controversy is merely the roiled waters on an ocean that is calm and sedate in its depths.

This deep is the corporate mindset designed to turn all of society into mindless proles who will be dedicated employees and who will make nary a squeak when they are laid off or fired. Granted, there are liberal corporatists just as there as there are conservative corporatists. The differences between the two are superficial.

The liberals coo, “There, there. It’s good for you,” as they screw you; conservatives bark, “Bend over!”

In many ways liberals can be more oppressive. They are our great sanitizers whose mission is to scrub society clean of all the grime that contributes to the diversity that makes for a community. Nowhere is this more evident than their gentrification of working class neighborhoods where they take an organic community and reduced it to a fragmented and isolated gaggle of expensive condos, pricy boutiques and tony restaurants.

Often their initiatives are taken in the name of “healthy living” as in the antismoking laws they so favor, or their courageous battle against transfats being served in restaurants.

It is the construction of a sanitary bubble in which nothing can live, let alone thrive. It’s all very corporate with the razing of a community and the construction of a climate controlled world lit by shadowless fluorescent lighting in which silence rules and the only sound is the hum of the air conditioning unit.

Corporatism and community simply cannot coexist. In a community its inhabitants see things they’d rather not see, hear things they’d rather not hear and smell things they’d rather not smell. The strength of a community is in the ability of its inhabitants to coexist with their differences.

But, the most dangerous thing about a community, from the corporatist point of view, is that people bond together and talk, and from this talk may arise movements and agitation. So it is better to neutralize this antisocial tendency by gentrifying the place and make it a haven for self-centered yuppies.

The shame of it is that the angry protesters that have been raising hell at town meetings, for all their misinformation, irrational anger and sheer stupidity, should be in the left’s tent. Instead, they belong to a group Julian Delasantellis calls America’s less informed voter (LIV). He goes on to say:

The left wing’s coping strategy to deal with the LIV is to try to bring the light into the darkness, to educate them as to the errors of their ways, but that is proving to be like a hand grenade tied to a boomerangs coming back to explode in their face. The right, seeing this “education” the left is trying to provide the LIVs whispers this message back into their ears: “They think you’re stupid; that’s why they think you need to be educated. They look down on your trailer parks and country music and stock-car racing and unwed teenaged birth and methamphetamine addictions and say you have to change.

The left’s error is that they fail to understand that education is a byproduct of inspiration. Without it, “education” is weak and ineffectual. Besides, many of these people attended substandard schools where they were constantly told they were lazy and didn’t try hard enough to master information that had no relevance to the struggles of their daily lives.

The left’s idea of education to turn the poor and the working poor into middleclass Euromericans who are polite and obedient.

The tragedy is that with just a little creativity and effort, the left could redirect this anger towards the running sore on Liberty’s face, Wall Street. But before they could do that, the left would have to actually like the sons of bitches, and that isn’t about to happen.