Conservatives and Meg

‘Family Guy’ has lowered the bar for crude, offensive, lowbrow humor to depths not even the Glomar Challenger could reach. And even though the show most often embraces the broadest of leftist cliches, there are moments when the show is almost as subversively conservative as South Park. When an entire episode focused on Rush Limbaugh in a fairly positive way, for example. Or when Brian — the show’s atheist liberal Mary Sue (who also happens to be a pompous, pretentious, free-loading, racist, amoral, alcoholic sexual predator) — gets called out epically for his phoniness.

The character of Meg is constantly the subject of abuse by other characters, even though she seems to be the least dysfunctional person in the family. In the episode “Seahorse Seashell Party,” she finally confronts her family about the abuse they constantly heap on her.

My point is that with all the irresponsible, reckless, idiotic behavior in your past, that somehow, heh, somehow you have the nerve, the arrogance to consistently and ruthlessly point out my shortcomings.

Ultimately, everyone concludes that the reason they hate and abuse Meg is that by abusing her, they avoid confronting their own dysfunction and are able to live in denial of how truly screwed up each of them is.

I wonder if the reason leftists are so fanatically hateful toward conservatives comes from the same place. Conservatives, by and large, are responsible people who make responsible decisions most of the time and strive for drama-free lives. The left, on the other hand, celebrates dysfunction. But of course, dysfunction has consequences, and routinely making bad choices will for most people result in a miserable life.

Rather than confront one’s own dysfunction and take responsibility for one’s actions, how much easier it must be to heap scorn and hatred on other people? If your own life is a dumpster fire, how gratifying it must be to call an otherwise together person a “racist” or “homophobe” or whatever this week’s perjorative is. (“White nationalist.”) And even if your individual life isn’t, you probably know people who are dysfunctional, and they probably blame others for their condition, and you do too because it’s easier to go along with your friend then to tell them that the choices they’ve made are suboptimal.