"Timor Mortis conturbat me"
--"The fear of death confounds me" This dread of the inevitability of our own singular personal terminations combined with the (fortunately-mostly-fantasized) willingness to inflict death upon innumerable strangers is a grotesque enough hallmark of conservativism as it has existed for as long as I've been alive in this country, and based on my readings of writings from both elsewhere in the Anglosphere and before my time: the warmongering chicken-hawk, tough-on-[some]-crimes, "are there no workhouses? better they should die &c" Podsnaps of the world shivering in fear of "the rabble" they require to batten on is not a modern invention, nor an invention at all, alas.
It becomes even more grotesque when this fear-hate of the Imagined Others Under The Bed/At The Gates Coming To Get Us combined with the contemptuous metaphorical stepping-over of the bodies of the Undeserving Poor lying sick and hungry at their gates gets also combined with a sticky sentimentality falsely called "Being Pro-life" - again, something which I've seen up close and personal in the movement since aught-seventy-something - that doesn't require anything but melodramatic words, the generation of bathos and voting Republican year in, year out. (Picketing, leafleting, and violence are all optional.)
It certainly doesn't require any actual sacrifices to help protect "the sanctity of life" (which only matters off the battlefield, and enemy civilians aren't really civilians at all in Modern Warfare(TM) as I have often been told by other conservatives over the decades) and as soon as anyone suggests that even the possibility of some sort of mild fiscal sacrifice being required of them to help save the lives of non-hypothetical people who are non-hypothetically dying of preventable ailments every day they go absolutely ballistic and the dudgeon reaches the welkin. Which makes it seem as though the whole "sanctity of life" rhetoric is pretty empty, to outside observers, for some strange reason.
Anyway, I think there are a couple of things operating here, on different but intersecting levels, the way that the winds and the clouds move over and angularly to each other, sometimes tangling, and I promised to try to tie it all together with sundry common Usonian delusions and social dynamics, so here you go: from the outside looking in at my inside-looking-out recollections, this is how I can best explain the whole "Soylent Granny Panic" phenomenon.
- It is born of fear - the Old Guard of the Movement hate FDR in no small part not simply for his class treason, mild though it was, but for his public disdain of fear-motivated motivation (however unserious a rejection this really was, George Takei can attest among others) because they operate on a "Be afraid, be VERY afraid!" system - and yet there are certain fears that are respectable and certain fears that ain't, and so they have to be careful as they shout "Boogety Boogety Booooooogety!" at the populace, too.
- It is not considered, even now, post-Reagan, to be overt about saying "I'm afraid that people I find icky may get the same benefits I currently enjoy." Thus the careful framing of things like "welfare queens" and how gay rights will hurt The Children(TM) because even old Reaganites were savvy enough to realize that they couldn't just say "Black people should stay poor and wretched, because" and have that be a reason like it was on the playground back when, nor "Queers make me uncomfortable in ways I can't articulate so I wish I wish they'd go away" - Pat Buchanan being the example that proves the rule, since his speech in 1992 was what put so many "moderates" off, I am told.
- It is even less acceptable to say "I got mine, screw everybody else." As I have said before, even the most greedy and self-interest defending of Conservatives inevitably feel the need to explain just how and why their self-interest is really in my self-interest, too, by some sort of mystical process: the Common Good is really what they're defending, not their right to hunker down over the biggest slice of the pie and growl at all comes like Aesop's infamous dog. (Eventually even most Objectivists will slip and start trying to justify selfishness with appeals to altruism, which is even funnier.)
- Being afraid of death is a) perfectly sane and normal for sentients possessed of a modicum of foresight, b) not allowable in the [Brittle] Masculine Paradigm of Conservative Americana. Thus we get the wonderful cognitive dissonance of people claiming to be BRAVEBRAVEBRAVEBRAVEHEART300WOLVERINESRAMBO brave as evidenced by the way they brandish their guns and live in remote areas where they aren't likely to be threatened by anybody - or think that they might be threatened by anybody, at least, even if they're no less nor more at risk of real menace than I am in my down-at-heel tenement town. I can't even begin to sort out (well, more than I have tried over the years, not briefly at least) the craziness of the whole conservative not-allowed-to-be-afraid-of-cars though cars are the most damn dangerous things around and driving the most dangerous activity you can risk your lives in, but okay to be terrified of ZOMG! brown people! people who aren't Christians! GLBT people! "Oops they're not they're coming through the floors!" --
- Anyways, the whole "ZOMG! they're gonna kill Grandma!" is the acceptable way of combining both the rational-but-embarrassing fears of death - abstract and concrete - that most humans have, and the rational-but-unsavory fears of having to share with the Have-nots, into one bogus-altruistic package that can be treated as a single rhetorical unit, one slickly-packaged enthymeme that they trust we will be too flustered by to get out the crowbars and pry apart--
Part of the reason why this is so messy (apart from the usual non-linear thinking of yours truly) is that it isn't a nice clear meme but a morass of them and many of them contradictory. However, Slacktivist has written a fair amount on the craven, craving to avoid the reality of mortality in Left Behind and the Christianity it embodies: "The Denial of Death, "Concorde calling", "A Fool's Hope", "The Undead", for a selection. (Thanks to the folks at Right Behind for putting together the handy Index of Posts.)
I promised to explain how so much of it relates to suburban boredom, too, as well as suburban angsts - again, this may not be universal, because from my direct experiences I can only describe it in the US and UK, and from my first-hand readings only in other Anglophone nations, as it takes me quite literally hours to read French and Italian newspapers with the aid of dictionaries & online translation services, and radio and BBC reports are of course mediated. But I strongly suspect from such reportage and other writings, and having listened to multilingual continental Conservatives' talk as well, that it is not entirely unlike our own.
In the world of the bored American house-husband - not usually SAH, usually a clockpuncher who comes home to the picket-fence ideal though the higher up in the world you go the more likely to be a writer or pundit who does work from home - there is this dual tension that tears their souls apart: on the one hand, they have the very normal human social animal urges for shelter, for comfort both physical and psychological, and thus for safety; on the other hand, they have the normative-if-not-strictly-normal human social urges for Adventure and Excitement and A Sense of Purpose and Being Heroes On A Grand Scale - none of which are a) likely to be fulfilled for most of us, b) because they're not really attainable for most of us, c) and we wouldn't like it if they were because they require constant States of Crisis, d) which are incompatible with the whole comfortable-and-safe place to live bit that any species needs to thrive.
Then factor in the tenuousness of the comfort-and-safety thing being dependent on an economy out of our control for 90+% of us, even the bourgeoisie, and the fact that we haven't been allowed to say where the blame is due for this for most of recent history (or distant, for that matter, just ask Rev. J. Ball about that) and even before you have the PTB deliberately engaging in legerdemain and deflection and scapegoating you have exactly the sort of fertile ground for Know-Nothingism and all the rest of it going backwards and forwards from the 1300s to the 21st century - there's a reason it mostly uses the exact same memes and tropes, and it isn't all that the propagandists are historically literate. The Persistence of Memes is one of my longtime fascinations, and part of this whole problem. "Poison in the wells" becomes "fluoride in the water plants" becomes "soy makes you gay" etc etc.
So there's an aspect in which the whole "UR NAZIS UR GONNA KILL GRAMMAW" pandemonium is just a kind of street theatre, the sort of psychodrama/melodrama that people who live with control freaks and/or hypochondriacs get used to, in which everything that goes wrong is part of a Plot to Kill Them or Hurt Them, where every little thing must be a Crisis and if there isn't one handy why, they'll just manufacture one because they don't know what to do with themselves if there isn't constant Drama. (The corollary of this is that we who survive such environments become severely allergic to any Drama and conflict in any situation, which may have something to do with the difficulty in mounting a response to all this.)
And there's this ready-made subculture that feeds it, has shaped it and supports it, unlike the preschooler who decides to claim that their sibling is an alien and carry on as though little Sally really were a space invader in disguise because it gets attention and allows them to vent real resentments of the baby in a superficially-allowable way, so long as everyone simultaneously pretends to believe that Baby Sally is a BEM and knows that she is nothing of the kind and they're not going to call in the guys in the white suits to take her away like on ET, no matter how they play along with our hypothetical preschooler's little psychodrama.
Some of that is what is going on. But as we all know, there can come a point where, to use an old phrase, someone works themselves into A State; when you convince yourself that the invisible monsters under the bed are real so that you can't sleep, you can't even climb into bed normally but have to take a running leap from five feet away to be sure of clearing any claws, and the nightmares are very real.
If adults have helped bring this state about by working on the child's fears for their own vicious amusement, this is a Bad Thing.
But when it's adults playing both sides, the fearmongers and the fearing, to both sides, in order to play at heroes in their own heads - and the Macho part of it, the whole fantasy of being the Great White Heroes defending the Helpless Wimmen and Children and Old Folks from the Native Savages/the Technological Terror, is a distinctly masculine ethos that we females can only participate in as Vor auxiliaries, aware of our subordinate status and accepting the Damsel role even if we consider ourselves magically Exempt as Pioneer Women - it's hard to mitigate the culpability.
It's a perfect storm of memes both targeted and organic, building on centuries of self-justifying I-got-mine-screw-u-ism from all across Europe long before they were ported to the Americas, and imo only by understanding the substructure and hidden roots of these meme-clusters can we begin to, ahem, root them out of contemporary societies.
* I'm not sure I fully got through everything I was trying to put together, here, so there may be a part 4 after I finish dealing with the painkiller and respiratory problem situations here. It's not really about REAL senior citizens, though, any more than being "prolife" is about saving any actual babies; it's about Symbols and conveniently-mute figures to play fantasy savior to regardless of actual outcome.