Clive Bundy Or: Seriously Though; Motherfuck John Wayne

blog recycling is the new Pepsi :-) 


Even if you consider yourself a property rights absolutist; a pure, real true libertarian capitalist or whatever, it is nowhere written in Smith, Friedman, Hayek etc. that a piece of land belongs to a guy because he says so in an Eastwoody tone of voice. It's clear that Bundy is endowed with an aristocratic, cartoonishly self-superior image of himself.
I'd agree with more measured observers that it's wrong to dismiss right-wing beliefs, even patently absurd ones, as simply a product of stupidity. People as smart as you or I can easily have such beliefs; so long as they endow believers with some sense of personal grandeur or existential security that they value more than reason.
But the rise of this Bundy fanclub does, I think, betray a sort of thoughtless reflexivity. I think it betrays that much of the Right's unyielding demand for absolute capitalism isn't based so much on how Hayek compares to Marx or Keynes or what have you; but rather a superstition that a 'truly free market' would return us to the natural order of things; one where strong, individual Manly man take what they see as fit without challenge and the 'mongrelized' rabble that can't live without them is grateful for it.
Bundy is a White man in a cowboy hat, after all, what more evidence that he must be such a Superman do you need? And further more it's his word against the federal government; (the Feds! you understand) and all good people know that our modern, urban, cosmo/egalitarian society is an unnatural thing that could have only been wrought by an evil Big Government/Bilderberg/N.W.O etc. conspiracy. Given these truths it is a waste of time to concern ourselves with facts.

And as for Bundy's recent self-outing as a big fat racist?  Well of course it was coming.  The man had already revealed himself as a Tory traitor in the course of this dispute; a man who either doesn't believe that there's any such thing as society; or at least as seeing himself above society and us Untermenschen that live in it.   A man who 'loves America' only in as much as he sees America as an extension of himself and as existing in order to aggrandize himself.  Now it isn't strictly necessary for a white man to take such a royal view of himself because he's a white man, but that certainly is the only place that Occam's razor cuts to.