conservatives and counterculture

after a lengthy pause from a great book, The Rebel Sell: why the culture can't be jammed, i've picked it up again for my long subway ride to and from my clinical placement.
just as i'm reading about the difference between dissent and deviance and what's acceptable in public by society's standards, a girl gets on the streetcar, headphones on, singing at the top of her lungs.
which was fine, except she's singing rap lyrics...which would also be fine, except instead of a rhythmic flow she's singing only the ends of sentences that are emphasized.
and emphasized by serious profanity.
it was a funny situation because aside from myself and another adult, there was nobody else on the car. but how funny would it have been if there were children? would she have stopped singing? or did she even notice she was only rapping the emphasized disses and cusses?

so back to this book...
there's this regular at the bar where i work, whom i do like, even though he's admittedly (and proudly) a conservative. he's a very intelligent guy, very sweet too, but we don't have much in common--which inevitably leads to some heated debates which are always abruptly ended.
i think he's given up trying to change my young mind about the evils of the left, and instead our conversations are now only about karate...which is fun, but getting tiresome.
it seems he's simply refused to try and get through to me. which is unfortunate, because i always enjoyed our arguments.
the other night he nonchalantly mentioned how much he likes george w. and everything he stands for.
and in my tiredness, all i could muster was "what?! warmonger." not very intelligent convo, i know. but sometimes i forget just how conservative he really is, and i am rendered speechless.
what i really wanted to say was something along the lines of this:

"...to this day, Republicans in the United States go to almost comical lengths to denounce the enemies of America as "evil." In their minds, they are striking a rhetorical blow against the counterculture, which they believe denies the reality of evil. (As usual, American politics is dominated by the compulsion to refight the battles of the '60s.) What conservatives fail to observe is that this rhetoric directly feeds the countercultural idea that they are so desperate to oppose. "We need to get tough," the conservatives claim. "We need to use force, because our enemies are evil." What they tacitly admit, thereby, is that if their enemies weren't evil, then there would be no need for the use of force. This sets things up for the argument that the enemies in question are not actually evil, they're just misunderstood. And so there is no need for coercion! Thus the conservative backlash feeds the countercultural ideas whose conclusions it tries so hard to oppose." ~ Heath & Potter, 2004, p. 74

time to rest.
my brain is chock full of g-tube feedings, colostomy bags and catheters.

In reality: this is just awesome because i now know all about what this guy discovered.