To Label or Not to Label?

As I was listening to the radio last night, the Lionel Show on KQKE to be precise, I was irked by something the host, Lionel, was saying to a caller. He was insistent that he hated being labeled and was giving the caller all kinds of grief for calling himself a “Progressive”. The caller argued back that Lionel himself has referred to himself as a “Progressive” - correctly or not I do not know - and Lionel denied this, claiming that he believed that when describing one’s beliefs, one should lay them out and avoid any kind of labeling - or rather any kind of ’subset’ labeling. In other words, Lionel believes it is okay to say you are a Democrat, but not a Progressive Democrat. Beyond that first level of identification, he would prefer everyone spell out their beliefs one-by-one rather than adding another layer of categorization.

I take issue with this. When you have a party such as the Democratic Party that is a self-described “big tent” party with your Blue Dog Democrats and New Democrats, it is a pretty fucking important and powerful thing to be able to identify with an alternative to these right-wing factions of the so-called “big tent” party. I don’t know of any official congressional coalition of “progressive” Democrats.

In fact, there is NO official representation of the Liberal cause in this country except for the marginalized Green Party. The Democratic Party is centrist at times left-of-center at times but mostly right-of-center. The Republican Party is just left-of-Nazi. I think that it is absurd to have a population of citizenry in a so-called ‘democracy’ with largely liberal social values yet not have a viable political party that represents those values.

That is one of the sickest, saddest, most dysfunctional things about this country of ours. But let’s not get going down that road…

So when you have a talk-show host that jumps all over a caller for calling himself a “Progressive Democrat” in this kind of stifling, right-wing-dominant political environment, I have to take issue with that. To Lionel, I say shut your fucking piehole, asshole!! I am a Progressive and proud of it. What’s that you say? You don’t know what that means? Here is some help for you, you helium-voiced little runt:

What is a Progressive?

http://www.ppionline.org/

http://pandagon.net/2006/01/25/what-is-a-progressive/

http://www.americanprogress.org/aboutus

So now you know what it means when someone refers to themselves as a “Progressive” - right, Lionel? Jerkoff.

- Tekstone