The best comment yet about O’Reilly, Hannity and Coulter fomenting murder

June 11, 7:16 PMDC Ethical Issues ExaminerLaura Harrison McBride

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Wing nuts and friends (Wiki Commons)

This afternoon, I read the best, most graphic and succinct statement about the results of the hateful ways of the likes of Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter and Michael Savage. Michael Rowe, award-winning journalist and author of several highly regarded books, wrote on Huffington Post:

“As a group, they are the pop culture equivalent of necrotic carrion beetles, crawling with insectile determination from one infected open wound in the American psyche to another. The wounds include fear of race, fear of foreigners, fear of sexuality, fear of difference, hysterical religious fundamentalism, violent nationalism, and paranoia. They lay their eggs in the infected abrasion, then scuttle away. When the eggs hatch, disgorging rage and discontent, they start counting money.”

My beloved step-daughter counts herself a Republican and a conservative, something I?a product of the “flower power” years, cannot understand. I can clearly see what the above-mentioned unholy terrors are made of. How can that sweet young college student, the apple of my husband’s eye (and, truth to tell, of mine) be fooled by that?

Or is she? Maybe she is a classic Republican of the old school, like my grandfather. A person for whom ethics and solidity mean something. Maybe she, like John McCain, would be horrified by the hateful spewings of so many who, these days, claim to be Republicans. Rowe tells the story of a cranky old woman asking McCain, before the election, whether Barack Obama was an Arab. An uncomfortable McCain, hating the question, said that Obama wasn’t and Arab, that he was a decent family man, thereby damning all Arabs with that faint praise of Mr. Obama. However, Rowe gives McCain the benefit of the doubt in this instance. While McCain did knee-jerk his own inner concept of Arabs into daylight, still, he had been shocked at the old woman’s hatefulness in uttering it. McCain’s shocked look and stumbling reply, writes Rowe: “had to do with an old-school Republican accidentally moving the rock, and coming face to face with what actually lived beneath it.”

I’m thinking my step-daughter is like that. If she thinks badly of anyone or any race, she would never state it, never hurt anyone, and would attempt always to improver her own inner thoughts. I know this: I know her fairly well. She is as egalitarian as can be in America today. While her father and I were dating, she asked her father--now my husband--if I had any friends of other races. He was able to truthfully say, “Yes, several of several races and cultures,” and she was very happy with that. I think she would have thought me an unfit companion for her father if I did harbor any animus toward other races.

Still, we all--ALL--have some tinges of some sort of hypocrisy, some sort of discrimination buried someplace in our psyches.. All of us. Black, white, Asian, Latina…Uighur…all of us. One of my best African-American friends and I discuss it quite often. It is part of the human condition not to totally understand nor totally accept those different from ourselves. However, those of us who did not recently crawl out from under a rock realize that we are both the recipients and donors of unkind racial, religious or cultural thoughts from time to time, and we train ourselves not to speak them or act upon them, knowing they do still lurk deep in most psyches but are part of that reptilian brain that we must, spiritually, transcend in order to be good and do good on this plane, in preparation for the next…whatever we think that is…if nothing else.

The things that crawl out from under the rocks apparently do not understand that they are both donors and recipients--if only mentally--of hateful thoughts from time to time. Ignorant of their own participation in the human condition, they think there is some justification for their animus toward those who, in any significant way (and often in small ways) are different from them. Sometimes, of course, it is only greed that drives them, and fear of losing what they have to someone else. Perhaps the cranky old woman thought Mr. Obama would impose Islamic law and she’d have to buy clothes to cover herself and dummy up, as the women in Arab nations so often must. Of course, in the old lady’s case, the “dummy up” part might have been a good thing. It would certainly be a good thing where Ann Coulter is concerned. And the male Coulters as well, to be perfectly non-discriminatory about it.

Coulter believes Jews are just unfinished Christians. I won’t even comment on what’s wrong with that statement. But what, one might well ask, does she think Arabs are? For all I know, she thinks they are unfinished Jews. After all, there is some similarity--dietary demands and so on--just as there are similarities between Jews and Christians--belief in the same God, the ten commandments, etc.

In her appalling ignorance, Coulter is responsible for spewing forth germs of hatred, she and her cohort. And those germs have, to use an Internet term, “gone viral.” Today, the World Health Organization declared Swine Flu a pandemic. Is there no way we can get someone, somewhere--perhaps a newly formed World Mental/Spiritual Health Organization (WMHO)?--to declare the depraved rantings of the right-wing dung beetles a pandemic? Or at least, an outbreak of verbal diarrhea that is deadly not to those who suffer it in their speech organs such as O’Reilly and Coulter et al, but to those whose ears are treated to the contagious droplets?

And could we not then convince the WMHO to isolate those infective humans, like Typhoid Mary at the turn of the century, so that the populace at large could be protected from their deadly disease as New Yorkers were then protected from typhoid? Perhaps if we could but isolate the hate-germ laden Typhoid Marys of the airwaves and cyberspace, those with no mental immunity to the infectious ravings of depraved, hostile and visible hate-mongers would be spared their secondary infection. If they were not infected by the likes of O’Reilly, Hannity, Coulter and Savage, and brave people like the slain Holocaust Museum guard--the brave and laudable Stephen Tyrone Johns--would still be alive and well.