"Buddhist prayer beads are wonderfully spiritual, but a rosary is a symbol of fascist misogynist oppression"

How I Realized I’m A Conservative

By Dana R. Casey

Although I grew up in a union household and surrounded by progressive peers, I kept noticing liberal policies sound good but actually reinforce poor choices. It dawned on me: I’m a conservative.


In the late 1970s, I went to an experimental high school. Most of the students were some form of nature-loving hippie. Not the raw, shocking, and rude kind of the true hippie era, more of the granola-eating, yogurt-making, calico-and-work-boot-wearing kind, but still dabbling in some risky sex and drugs.

These hippies were mostly the children of wealthy progressive parents who had purchased immense Roland Park mansions with their trust funds and who raised their children by the most progressive paradigms. Most of the rest were rock-n-roll drug addicts. A few of us, children of working-class parents attending the school on scholarship, were a little closer to normal. I came from an educated working-class family, and am daughter of a public-school teacher.

I remember some of the students sitting around one afternoon talking about the beauty of Native Americans and their respect for nature, recounting that, when the natives killed an animal, they first prayed to thank gods, ancestors, or perhaps the animal itself. My schoolmates talked about how the natives honored the animal they had killed by using every part, wasting none: the meat for food, the skin for clothes, the bones for tools and jewelry, the sinew for bindings and cords, and the hooves for rattles and bells. I could feel the awe this inspired in my fellow classmates. They felt enlightened, that a truth was revealed.

My First Encounter with Liberal Hypocrisy

The next morning, I brought a scrapple sandwich to school for breakfast. A friend, who was indeed wearing a calico skirt with long johns and work boots (although no deodorant) leaned over to me and asked, “What ’cha eating?”

“Scrapple,” I replied.

“Eww! That’s disgusting! Do you know what they put in that stuff?” Thus the Scrapple Theory was born to me at the tender age of 16.

For those of you who are not familiar with scrapple, it is corn meal, ground pork, and spices baked in a loaf pan, cooled, sliced, and fried in butter. It is often eaten with catsup, a nice sweet contrast to the peppery spiciness. It is a true American specialty of the Pennsylvania Dutch. It was originally made from “scraps” of pork (i.e., scrapple) left over from butchering that could not be sold or used elsewhere, in order to avoid waste!

Perhaps you can see where I am heading. According to my schoolmates, Native Americans who “honor” an animal by using all of its parts are noble human beings in touch with nature. However, a good German peasant (from whom the Pennsylvania Dutch originated) who makes use of the entire animal is abhorrent and disgusting. This scrapple sandwich epiphany was one of my first observations of ubiquitous liberal progressive hypocrisy.

I began to see that if an act, religion, or tradition comes out of Western European and American culture, it is something to ridicule, to looked down upon as backward or oppressive. If it comes from other world cultures like China, India, Africa, or even pre-Columbian America, it is admirable and deep, something to imitate. Buddhist prayer beads are wonderfully spiritual, but a rosary is a symbol of fascist misogynist oppression. It is a xenophilic rather than xenophobic intolerance, a hatred of your own culture. This has become such a part of the cultural norm that it has evolved into the white self-hatred becoming so pervasive today.

Not long after the scrapple theory was born, I got a ride from yet another trust-fund hippie in his mother’s hand-me-down Volvo station wagon to a concert at Goucher College. He told me that life would be so cool if we could have anarchy in the country. Then people could do whatever they wanted. The effing “pigs” and “the effing man” would have no control. Already knowing the real consequences of anarchy, I said, “Don’t you realize that you would be one of the first people slaughtered, that the people who were no longer controlled by ‘the pigs’ would steal your stuff?” He looked dumbfounded, and knew that I was no longer as cool as he had thought.

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