It’s my own fault, really.

I had a hellish day at work. I worked through lunch, and by about 4:00 in the afternoon my brain had just had enough of working overtime, and I found myself dabbling around on my computer at work. This is when I do things that I will eventually regret.

My sin, if we can call it that today, was that I surfed over to a Web site that I shouldn’t have. No, not one of those Web sites (get your mind out of the gutter). I won’t do this particular Web site the privilege of naming it outright, partly because I don’t want anyone who works there to discover the reference on my site and start monitoring what I say here. The people that keep this particular Web site up do that sort of thing.

Let’s just say that it was a neo-conservative Web site that was up and running long before having a neo-com Website was cool among people that think neo-con Websites are cool. It likes to criticize people who work in my field who don’t espouse their particular brand of neo-conservative ideas about what the United States should be doing in the rest of the world. If you’re crafty and have figured out what field I work in, you could probably find it in a few quick strokes over on Google.

Anyway, I read a few articles on this Web site and it had the usual effect on my blood pressure, which made me grateful for once that I’m not the one in my house who has the high blood pressure problem (yet). Because a lot of the columns on this Web site read like the angry rants that they actually are, and they make frequent use of one word in particular.

The word that I am referring to in the title of this post is traitor. It gets thrown around a lot, and as much as I as a liberal would love to sit on my left facing love seat and claim that it’s a word that only neo conservatives use, it’s not. (This is why liberals always lose arguments and debates: we’re willing to admit our own faults, and we’re willing to admit when the other side has a valid point.)

Everyone is a traitor these days. You can’t watch C-SPAN these days without watching the Democrats call the Republicans traitors, and the Republicans call the Democrats traitors, and sometimes the President comes out and uses words that his speech writers have looked up in Microsoft Thesaurus™ that aren’t ‘traitor’ but mean the same thing.

When I was in South Padre over the weekend, staying at the Bates Motel, I caught a glimpse of Fox News – which loves to use the word – in which some conservative pin-up female anchor was going on at length about how Noam Chomsky’s book was at the number one position on Amazon.com because it had been cited by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez in a speech at the U.N. denouncing the United States.

She was practically in a state of advanced sexual gratification over the number of things she could label as traitorous actions: Chavez, as we all know, is a traitor (never mind that he’s not from the U.S. – he’s still a traitor); the U.N. is a traitor because it doesn’t do whatever the U.S. wants whenever the U.S. wants it done; Chavez actually denounced the U.S. at the U.N., which I think is the Fox News equivalent of calling someone a whore and then actually catching them exchanging sex for money; and we all know that just about everyone hates Noam Chomsky.

The conservatives hate him because he’s liberal. The liberals hate him because he’s a linguist who writes about political science. And college students hate him because his writing is so unbelievably turgid that it requires copious amounts of attention just to get through the dedication passage of any of his books. I’ve never read Chomsky, I’ve just heard the horror stories from students in the Linguistics department.

Anyway, our friend over on Fox News was going on at length about this ‘undeniable proof that left-leaning Americans are rushing out to buy Chomsky’s book in order to support Hugo Chavez.’ Wha-huh? How does that follow? (OK, we’re talking about something that was said on Fox News, but still … ) Why couldn’t it be some of the right-leaning Americans who want to see what the fuss is about? Or burn the book? And who the hell cares what’s on Hugo Chavez’s night stand anyway? (For the record, we don’t have to guess what’s on Mahmoud Ahmedinejad’s night stand: he probably says so in his blog, but I can’t read Persian so I don’t know for sure.)

But the bigger issue here is this: at what point did it become acceptable for us as Americans to start labeling each other based on our own perceptions of what constitutes patriotic behavior? For a country that was supposedly founded on the free exchange of ideas, we have become remarkably intolerant – and I’m talking about both liberals and conservatives here – of people who espouse viewpoints different than our own. I admit it – I do it too. I’ve always been a trend-follower, rather than a trend-setter, but I have also been the kind of person who will call out stuff that I think is phenomenally fucked up. And this, boyses and girlses, is phenomenally fucked up.

What I’m saying here is part of what I deleted from the 9/11 retrospective post that never happened. For me, the legacy of 9/11 is that it marked a turning point: suddenly people didn’t feel the need to be tactful or diplomatic anymore.

Maybe it wasn’t a direct result of 9/11 – maybe it had been going on for a while – but it was after 9/11 that I actually noticed it because I was on the receiving end of quite a bit of it. Think Muslims are evil? Say it out loud! Want to go bitch slap those liberal lefties who want the U.S. out of Iraq? Put it on your bumper! Want the U.S. out of Iraq now? Stand on the Congress Avenue bridge during evening rush hour and make your voice heard! Afraid that multi-cultural education might be secretly recruiting our children for the hordes of Islamics (that’s pronounced “eye-slam-ics”) who are waiting in the shadows to turn this country into the United States of Mecca? Testify before the Texas State Board of Education and make sure that a Bible course gets approved for the high school curriculum. Want to make sure that people like that don’t get taken seriously? Start a blog! Why the hell not?

Have we forgotten how to be nice to each other? Have we forgotten how to be diplomatic? Have we forgotten what the American dream was supposed to be about? Have I had too much to drink tonight and am I writing myself into a corner? Probably.

I don’t have answers to any of this. I wish I could follow the example of Dean over at Aman Yala and command a piano to fall on their heads, but I’m not sure there’s enough pianos to go around – nor am I sure that one wouldn’t be coming for me … Besides, I’ve always been the sort of person who’s better at posing questions than finding answers.

See … just like I said, I’m willing to admit my own flaws. This is why I can’t win arguments. Not even the rhetorical ones I have with myself…