Wednesday, November 25, 2009

Indian "Tea-Baggers"


(From Arthur, November 21st)


This all may sound far crazier than anything that could happen in the United States, but we would be fools to assume that "it could not happen here". It could. A call to mob action is something that extremists have always used in the early stages of their political insurrections. The claims of Congressional candidate Doug Hoffman in upstate New York that the special election there was hijacked by ACORN, with the complicity of the local Republican Party(!) is an example of political actions that have no basis in fact, but that are no more than trumped-up charges of evil-doing intended to motivate gullible and extreme right-wing elements in that Congressional District (though you can donate, too!) in an attempt to build passion, a paranoid story-line and gather donations.

To say that such actions are entirely cynical is too obvious to be a breaking news item. It is often easier to see such patterns in other countries, rather than our own. One can see similar actions, but taken to extremes or done more obviously. The Indian political parties in this story operate in the State that Mumbai (formerly Bombay) is the capital of. Actions taken recently by a splinter political party there included the beating of immigrants from other parts of India, which the leader of that political party participated in. I think it is unlikely that we will ever see Lou Dobbs or Tom Tancredo punching out Mexican day-laborers, but that would be a comparable phenomena. While that is a far-fetched idea, the fetid (i.e. "rotten smelling") ravings of the various Fox News pundits is the rhetorical equivalent of such actions. We would be fools to imagine that extreme words can be uttered without in some cases sparking actions and producing terrible consequences.

At one and the same time I am proud of our country, and as fearful for its soul and its future as I have been in many years. It seems to me that there are clear calls for extremists to take violent actions and undertake an insurrection of either spirit or action, purportedly in "defense" of all that is holy and noble about our nation. Such actions, to call on the weakest elments of society, to alarm the disaffected and frightened, has parallels in Germany during the Weimar Republic that we would ignore at our peril. I do not intend to suggest that our current challenges, as a country, as a society and an economy are remotely as dire as that of Germany in the 1920s and early 1930s. To the contrary we are a nation with powerful advantages, resources and potential, that other nations can but envy. But we are going to be going through "a bad patch" over the next year or two which will test our character as a people and as a society. Many are suffering and suffering greatly now, as our go-go economy of the early twenty-first century falls apart and must be reconstructed, brick by brick. Those of us who can grind through it, relatively unscathed, are the lucky ones, but there are millions in our country who will not be so lucky. There will be terrible stories of poverty and loss that play themselves out all around us, often largely unseen. Certainly we will not hear about it on Fox News, while they are otherwise occupied trying to turn our county into a massive sandbox in which corporate giants can play with lavish toys without any form of parental oversight. The utter childishness of what is being broadcast is stunning. The base appeals to fear and ethnocentrism appear to be an attempt to roll back the clock to a simpler and darker period of our history, where those who have can gather much more, while those who don't have can either lump it, or go someplace else.

Arthur

Sunday, November 1, 2009

Weekend Update - November 1st



  • Someone shot at Lou Dobbs and missed? After CNN host Lou Dobbs stated this past Monday on his radio show that “my wife has now been and I have been shot at,” right-wing pundits and nativist groups are rallying to his cause. But statements by New Jersey state police are putting Dobbs' claim that he and his wife had been shot at into question.

  • The battle for upstate New York confirms just how swiftly the right has devolved into a wacky, paranoid cult that is as eager to eat its own as it is to destroy Obama. The movement’s undisputed leaders, Palin and Beck, neither of whom has what Palin once called the “actual responsibilities” of public office, would gladly see the Republican Party die on the cross of right-wing ideological purity. Over the short term, at least, their wish could come true. Frank Rich in the NYT.

  • Sean Hannity and Michele Bachmann recently did their best to disprove the theory that FOX news is an arm of the Republican Party. And failed laughably.

  • Former Death Star VP Darth Cheney has been involved in interviews with the FBI concerning the Plame leak. And guess what, he just can't remember anything. Here's a non-comprehensive list of 22 things Dick Cheney claimed he couldn't recall about the Plame case, in the order they appear in the FBI's notes. From Mother Jones.

  • It's true. My guess is that many clumsily educated Americans have been fully expecting some sort of wacky Hollywood-style apocalypse scenario as a result of all those dire prognostications, and are now feeling a little ripped off. "Where is my wrathful hurricane?" they demand in response to all the dire-but-boring scientific info about, say, melting ice caps and severe weather conditions in places most of them don't actually live. "Where are the screaming frogs? Where is the tidal wave crashing over the Himalayas with John Cusack yelling in panic? I still have to wear a jacket in December! Global warming, my meat-loving American ass!" Mark Morford in Part 2 of "10 Amazing Truths You Already Suspected."