The bad apple tree
Well, now that our weekly terror incident is behind us, we can start worrying about the next one, because fascist nutcases randomly slaughtering the enemy du jour is clearly the new normal. Ah, those “quaint” days of yore, when the Bush DHS’s report daintily hinted, based on past experience and the ever-present “chatter,” that we ought to expect a spate of violence from those Americans who have been taught to hate many groups of people and think they should be killed, and from FOX on down, all the MSM were happy to play the story as a scary government crackdown on its political enemies. Janet Napolitano was practically setting up concentration camps. Too bad that last fear campaign worked so well. Feeling more than usually beleaguered and a fresh urgency for action, the crazies who swallow such crap are spraying the bullets, as predicted by the DHS, and lo and behold, the victims are the predicted targets; the perpetrators hail from the eliminationist right, and everyone’s singing Condi’s greatest hit, “No One Could Have Predicted.”
Indeed. While Glenn Beck, Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, and Michael Savage scream for the blood of liberals, abortionists, “elites,” gays, etc. each day, certain members of these groups keep coincidentally turning up dead, as the DHS predicted, and no one seems to be able to add two and two, even when every perpetrator parrots different versions of these luminaries’ words to justify their actions, and are avowed fans of their ideology. For certain groups of people, being murdered by hateful losers who watch FOX is leaping forward as a cause of death, while Bill and Glenn brag about their ratings. Who advertises on such programs? Gun stores? Bail bondsmen? Criminal lawyers? Oh, and the Depends account as a fallback.
The conspiracies, growing like kudzu in the right-wing media, have joined with our Republican-created economic collapse to create a perfect parafascist moment: fear and uncertainty incessantly blamed on a host of Others, the only answer for which is the other’s speedy elimination. Doesn’t matter which other, really… Focus groups can tell you whether gays, guns, God, immigrants or whatever will scare and mobilize the most people in a given market, and loads of corporate money will take the rubes’ eye off the ball while the cash drawer is dumped. It’s a great system, like the financial one they invented to go with it; the problem is that they both work really well until they don’t, and when they don’t, it’s too late to keep the shit from hitting the fan.
Like it is now. FOX, being a business organization as well as a propaganda outlet, has known for some time that it had lost the great majority of the possible market with its hectoring jingoism, parroted GOP hogwash, and abysmal journalistic standards, but hell, it’s only cable. You can be #1 in that pond with an aging quarter or so of the viewing public, particularly if you make that group proud of the prejudices, hatred, and phobias that had always rightly embarrassed them before. Nixon showed us that there is a core of authoritarian and bigoted, insecure Americans who are utterly impervious to facts, and indeed grow in loyalty when the rest of the world recoils in horror.
Way back in 1968, Nixon only dared to send Spiro out to say anything close to what FOX says every day, but he was actually trying to get reelected; a contest that includes input from the non-crazy, too. Roger Ailes, the creepy Svengali who sold us the “New” Nixon, understands the difference, all these years later. And as then, doesn’t give a damn about what happens when he “succeeds.”
Racism, xenophobia, and a desire to eliminate the “enemy within” are nothing new, and although they can no longer elect a President, they can still “make a difference,” as the recent (and ongoing) unpleasantness is showing us.
Wow. Ain’t that the truth. This type of pandemic worries me a great deal more than swine flu. Attention to hand washing practices, an NR 95 mask, and “elbow bumps” in place of handshakes isn’t going to cut it here. And, despite the rosy picture the MSM/Cable/Bloomberg Boys and Girls might paint, our economic picture is not healthy. The fact that were descending more slowly does not mean we have reversed course. We’ve a world class petrie dish in the making for this kind of germ.
It worries me, too. Bush worst failures; the lost wars and depression, seem to play to the advantage of his ideology, particularly on the fringes. Mistake or success? You decide.
Well, here’s the thing. James Coleman said it eons ago [paraphrasing], The whole train can move ahead, but the engine will remain in front, and the caboose will still be in back. Of course Coleman was referring to inequities in educational attainment, but he could have easily been referring to economic attainment since the two are so tightly linked.
With this kind of economic upheaval, opportunities will be created, and folks will be able to take advantage of those opportunities. But, it’s the people who are more strongly positioned, who will be best able to capitalize on them. And, surely, given the way Bush initiated this so-called economic recovery – he did it in a way as to insure the engine would remain in front and the caboose in the back. Bush (or, his proxies) must have had some doubts that the “well off” retained sufficient skill to stay well off, even though they began with the advantage.
So, I’d say, success.
side note. perhaps WT will wander by and offer a synopsis of how affluent families remain affluent. sociology ain’t really my thing. i think it’s also true that them that earn it and establish the dynasty, have different social class signifiers than them who follow. the followers, never understanding how it got made in the first place, only seem equipped to spend it.
You’re clearly right in your assessment. Despite the fables, what the right has clearly accomplished all these years is the upward transfer of wealth and power. Death and destruction is just a distracting sideshow. Bread and circuses, minus the bread.
They can lose elections, wars, and whole industries…. But they never lose real money.
Or legitimacy on the TV.
They know their place, and they love to remind us of ours.
Real money. I have to think about that a bit. Money, among other things, ought to be a store of value. But, the way our current crop of financiers made money was by fueling an unreasonably inflating bubble. And, they threw money at that bubble until it exploded. So, yes, money was made, but – literally – out of thin air. Because, when the bubble popped, there was no value underpinning that money. So, it could be argued, that while they lost money, there wasn’t much real about the money they lost. That’s why they need our money to rescue them. Some argue housing values fell. I’d argue that housing values were never that high to begin with. What got exchanged as a purchase/sales price had become detached from the value of the object which was being exchanged. The whole premise for the transaction was a fantasy.
Exactly. My brother used to work for Citi, and they honestly believed their “brand’ would make up for a crappier loan deal. That worked out, as we’ve seen.
It’s a mystery to me; I’m from another class altogether. Do you remember the line from Harlan County, U.S.A.? It went like this: They kin shoot me, but they cain’t shoot the union outa me. This from a woman who carried a .45 in her waistband, and manned the UMW picket lines/roadblocks so that her husband couldn’t be identified by the company goons.
Thanks to the liberals of the great state of California who made it possible for me to get a world-class education, I have some insight into the lives of the affluent, but I don’t have a helluva lot of time or sympathy for them, and I’ll never, ever forget where I came from.
Yes, WT…. I’d like to find irony in my righty dad who attained unlikely affluence and position from a “liberal” education, and now is a pot-bellied, octogenarian Sean Hannity. The more hideous the wonders are, the less likely they will cease.
Well, seems WT has some small craft warnings he’s trying to navigate. But, he did leave a link to this which isn’t so far out that it’s beyond the channel marker.
Hag, I “tweeted” about this story by Amy Goodman… that Dr. Tiller did not have to die, if only existing laws had been enforced.
How scary is that? Whose side is Law Enforcement on? Apparently, not ours.
Ah, Karen, you make me like this tweet thingy. Of course law enforcement favors nots on the right… They have so many advocates.
In my final Air Force job in Chicago, I spent more time than I wanted around the very wealthy with people like the Pritzker family, Hyatt Hotels. I found the obscenely rich came in two versions, complete assholes or pretty nice people. Usually the latter, were of the older generation where they respected their companies and employees. For example, the founder of Helene Curtis, which by the way was named after a secretary, was very right wing and a lover of Nixon. Despite our extreme difference in view points, we got along very well. His son though was the most complete asshole I ever ran across and although he has tried to seek political office, even hard core Repugs couldn’t stand him.
It’s very true that the second generation who only learned to spend the money, usually have some lousy character qualities. An exception in the Pritzker family was a son who was in the Air National Guard. Of course, he was considered the Black Sheep even though the family was supposedly a strong supporter of the military. Maybe the fact he didn’t love money, made him a black Sheep more than his military service.
When you attend lavish social functions, the phoniness is so ripe that the smell is overpowering. It is unbelievable how many charity functions they have to attend. I would get pretty jaded if I had to go to that many. The bottom line of my experience among the rich, was to be very glad that I came from a humble culture that was honest and loved life and that after I retired, I would never have to be around them again.
Ah, I had similar experiences with board members when I worked for the ballet. Some, not all, were the shallowest, silliest, least pleasant characters I’d ever met. Are the rich different? No, about the same as the rest of us, many much worse.
Sara Robinson at David Neiwert’s blog, after the Dr. Tiller murder:
http://dneiwert.blogspot.com/2009/05/jesuss-jihadis.html
She’s more optimistic than I am. It’s hard for me to see how any liberties are being won, or soon will be.
What happened after the Oklahoma City bombing? In 1996, in order to make sure there’d be no delay in executing Tim McVeigh, the Gingrich Republicans, and most of the Democrats, and Bill Clinton, enacted the AEDPA (Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act), which gutted Habeas Corpus not only for those few sentenced to death but also for all other convicts. A few people spoke up, but who’s going to vote AGAINST “antiterrorism”?
One of the cases for which Sotomayor is now being unjustly criticized (or, worse, unjustly praised) for lack of empathy is a case in which the judges’ hands were tied by the AEDPA.
And it’s hard to see when and how, at some point in the future, the murder of Dr. Tiller will be seen as a sign that we’re winning liberties.
What next? More surveillance cameras, more metal detectors, more vacuum cleaners sucking up blog comments and emails and trying to gauge the paranoia level.
I wonder how high mine ranks.
“Liberty” can be defined in so many ways. To the right, it means the “liberty” to silence opponents and bend them to their will. Now they want to buy Dr. Tiller’s clinic… a Wichita branch of the “Creation” museum? A gun shop? Who knows?
There is something so deeply unseemly about their wanting to buy that clinic that I wanted to be sick this morning listening to that weasel on the radio.
One wonders what they want to do, besides more grave-dancing. I say let them spend their money….. anything else they spent it on would be worse.
PS…. Sysprog, I’m currently reading Neiwert’s book, “The Eliminationists,” as you might have guessed from my tone. Book Saloon coming….
I shouldn’t be so down.
Not EVERY liberty is being rolled back.
There’s always one liberty that shall not be infringed, no matter how contrary the exercise of that liberty becomes to the security of a free State, and no matter how far away it is from a well regulated Militia.
What’s so bad isn’t that we’ll never have gun control.
But that, in lieu of gun control, we’ll have other — worse — forms of control.
Yeah, I went to that hippie enclave, Powell’s Books today, so I wore my Kevlar, but made sure not to jaywalk. You can get tased for less.
No, you shouldn’t. What we need to fix what’s broken, we already have. It’s a matter of implementation, and for that, you have to take it as a given that most of what we call politics these days takes place in an asylum which has abandoned the distinction between caretaker and inmate.
If you can’t win the argument, in other words, change the subject. If you don’t like the reality served up by Harry Reid or Nancy Pelosi, let alone the vast assortment of loonies to the right of them, from Orin Hatch to Rick Santelli to Generalissimo Petraeus, make your own.
All wars begin as wars of meaning, and end when you find that you’re the one being quoted. The rest, as important as it sometimes is to our own individual destinies, is really just a collection of props.