It is almost becoming a ritual in our house these days. At the end of a long day at work, the wife and I turn on MSNBC and watch, stunned, as Keith Olbermann, Rachel Maddow and Jon Stewart put on the parade of angry right wing lunatics. We sit, mouths agape, as we see manufactured rage at town halls over something tangential to health care, we see Glenn Beck weeping over something called "oligarhy" and a whole circus of birthers, deathers, truthers, tenthers, and every other sort of "-er" you can think of (except "thinkers"). Obama is a Nazi, or a communist, or the antichrist, or the Hamburgler, or whatever.
My wife can't stand it anymore, and is more inclined to change the channel to the new show about hoarders on A&E. But I always like to watch my friends in the liberal media take down the hypocrites, the liars, the ignorant. Besides, at first they all seemed harmless, a silly distraction, the easily-provoked getting riled up by an otherwise impotent minority party. But the more I consider what I've been hearing, the more I sense a more fundamental problem with an aspect of American culture, something dark.
To give you an idea, take a look at this foreboding interview with Frank Schaeffer, a former founding father of the Religious Right and now impassioned critic of wingnut zealotry.
Schaeffer calls the angry fanatics "beyond crazy," a "fifth column of insanity," particularly in their enmity toward Obama (the original subject of the interview), but I think that lets them off the hook. He notes that this pseudo-fundamentalist subculture is conditioned to "reject facts," and I think that gets closer to the point. The rage and racism (more on that word in a bit) here is the result of a willful ignorance on the part of millions who know exactly what they're doing. They're not insane, they are opting out of reality.
Schaeffer also notes that the Republican Party, languishing in the political minority, is "enthralled to this subculture," and this is evident in the unwillingness of the more reasonable members of the party to take a stand against the hate and stupidity, as well as in the more knuckle-dragging members who dive head first into the filth, hoping to ride a mosh pit of bigotry and fear into a fixed position of consolidated power.
Which leads me, as one might guess, to Rush Limbaugh. I don't care to simply quote mine Limbaugh to prove some kind of point about what a blowhard he is--this is like explaining that fire is hot. Instead, I want to use a recent diatribe of his as an example of exactly the kind of thing Schaeffer is talking about.
If you read any liberal-leaning blog, you already know about Limbaugh's stupid tantrum about the white student who was beat up on a school bus by black students, in which Limbaugh belched, "We need segregated buses."
This is revolting and offensive enough on its own, but a full reading of the transcript shows that this isn't really what Limbaugh was getting at per se--don't worry, I'm not defending him, because it's really worse than you think. Limbaugh said:
It’s Obama’s America, is it not? Obama’s America, white kids getting beat up on school buses now. You put your kids on a school bus, you expect safety but in Obama’s America the white kids now get beat up with the black kids cheering, “Yay, right on, right on, right on, right on,” and, of course, everybody says the white kid deserved it, he was born a racist, he’s white. Newsweek magazine told us this. We know that white students are destroying civility on buses, white students destroying civility in classrooms all over America, white congressmen destroying civility in the House of Representatives. We can redistribute students while we redistribute their parents' wealth. We can redistribute everything, just return the white students to their rightful place, on their own bus with bars on the windows and armed guards--they're racists, they get what they deserve! . . .
. . . I wonder if Obama's going to come to the defense of the assailants like he did his friend Skip Gates up there at Harvard.
It's that term "Obama's America" that kept haunting me as I heard this. That Rush Limbaugh and those like him harbor racist feelings and resentments is not news. But what is striking about this serving of rhetorical vomit is how it attempts to make white racism against blacks acceptable again, but uses a perversion of the phraseology of identity politics and manufactured umbrage. The important message of Limbaugh's monologue is not "let's bring back segregated buses," it's really, "You see? Black people have always been the problem!" He feels the racists have had their point proved: In Obama's America, white kids get beat up and white men get blamed for everything, while their wealth is stolen by blacks (and gays). Another way he might have put it: "We let the blacks have a shot at being in charge, and now your kids aren't safe from black people."
When Obama was elected, there was a lot of fuzzy talk about the beginning of the end of racism. But Limbaugh, Beck, and their ilk (and I specifically mean anyone in the Republican Party who will not totally renounce them), in what they are telling their stupid followers, are showing us the opposite--they're trying to make the case that it's okay to be racist again, because Obama is a Nazi/communist/black nationalist/foreigner/racist/Muslim/antichrist. You were right all along, these inexcusably abhorrent men tell their anti-intellectual swarms, so it's okay to take this president down.
Frank Schaeffer said something else that is spot on, that we can't "reorganize village life to suit the village idiot." But we do have to wake the village up, assemble a legitimate town meeting, and make sure everyone knows that the village idiot has formed a posse, and it's headed this way.
Related posts:
- Southern Christian Leadership Conference: Some people are more equal than others
- The Apparently Weak Faith of the Unfaithful Republicans
- Atheists and abortion rights: How to form a rational policy?
Comments
Sadly, the losers of the 2008 election seem to prefer to cynically manipulate credulous people instead of adding their energy and ideas to solve problems or even offer an intellectually credible counterpoint to Obama and the Democrats. Sadder still, all it takes is a few dozen people doing crazy stuff to become a media phenomenon. The bigger story that doesn't get reported is how thin the anti-Obama revolution really is. Just like Cindy Sheehan's protests in Crawford during the Bush administration, if the cameras would just do us the favor of doing a wide pan from left to right, we would see that the narrow focus on the most intense activity is misleading.
If your news source is msnbc then you are the ignoramus. PS. You are as racist as the next guy.
Henry - I wonder if chalking it up to a tiny minority who can't get over this or that makes too little of it. They actual numbers of sincere believers in this line of thinking may be small-ish, but they're certainly not that small, they certainly have veto power in one of our two political parties, the which is too spineless to disavow the racism, ignorance, and hate. I think it's worse, and I think the Cindy Sheehan comparison doesn't quite work -- Sheehan, whatever you think of her position or tactics, at least was trying to save other mothers from losing their children to an unjust war. The right wing racists are looking to excuse violence and rage for their own xenophobic purposes.
So I agree with you mostly, but I think it's more serious even.
Steve -
I'd love to know why you think I'm the one being racist. I invite you to back that up.
Thanks for the article Paul. Even if the content gave me a headache and my wife an ulcer, we are better off for being informed. We are members of most of the organizations you list in your web resource menu. We are curious to learn why the American Atheists organization, which we also support, was not listed. An oversight perhaps?
I know someone who actually attended the 9/12 protest. Do you have accurate attendance figures? I am sure the numbers she mentioned to me are exaggerated, so I will not repeat them here.
John
The attendance number for that 9/11 hate rally was approx 60,000-75,000 maximum.
The Police dept, Fire dept and parks dept all said about the same thing, the only idiots that said otherwise were Beck & Malkin.
Media Matters shows how the 2 Million lie got started and then spread like wild fire over the extreme reich wing blogosphere.
://mediamatters.org/columns/200909140039
Just put http in front of it.
I found what is without any question the best reference photo of how many people attended this rally, taken by the nut bag "Freedom Works" themselves at the peak of the crowd. This shows at an absolute maximum probably 75,000 people.
The crowd gets no where up close to the capital bldg steps.
If you look at this aerial view (Go to Mapquest and put in Washington DC and find the capital bldg) of the Washington Mall you can see exactly where this crowd starts and stops, It starts just to the right of 1st st. just to the right of that big tree but BEFORE that small road towards the capital bldg then it goes just up to 3rd st but not past it except for a few stragglers up by the tents.
That is actually a very small area and certainly not even remotely close to anything over 100,000 even being extremely generous and using a vivid imagination.
Case closed
Put http in front of this link
://iowntheworld.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/capitol-view-lo-res.jpg
At least you can turn it off when you get tired of the fundies. Try being the only Democrat in an office of Texans!
John:
No particular reason for the omission. I will admit to some discomfort with some of AA's tactics (as I have also some reservations about FfRF's, so there's no good excuse), so I will admit maybe less of a feeling of urgency to get it listed. But you're right, it probably ought to be.
When I hear "I am scared because MSNBC says __________" I give it the same attention I give "I am scared because Glen Beck says ________"
Come out of your cave man.
I find it odd your drag out all these nuts and not a single elected Republican to make your point as well.
Paul Fidalgo,
It always amuses me how small thinkers play right into Limbaugh's hands. He would have really liked your submission. I'll bet the vein in your forehead was reeely poppin' during this piece (your sentence structure betrays you).
Oh, and the way you put quotations around "your" version of what Limbaugh "really meant" was a nice touch too. That nasty habit is the kiss of death in "real journalism" and it will permanently keep you at your current pay grade.
J Christopher King
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