posted by Armadillo Joe
Following up on Broadway Carl's post about the violence in Washington D.C. today, I want to highlight a quote from digby's rundown of the same situation:
Naturally, the same things would happen with the right-wings in other countries as well -- and they do so frequently in poorer countries, though such collections of thugs are called "armies" and are usually commanded by dictators who are propped up by some American intelligence service or other -- but we have a peculiar confluence of factors here in these fifty states that afflicts us with considerably more right-wing violence than any other civilized nation on earth. Those causes include, but are not limited to, first and foremost: guns, guns, guns, guns, guns, guns, guns, guns, guns, guns, guns, guns, guns, guns, guns, guns, guns, guns, guns, guns.
We also have a political culture which elevates the outward expression of supposedly simple and "homespun" values to the level of litmus test, which usually amounts in practice to elaborate kabuki ruses intended to get the votes of the racist yahoos and toothless goobers in the hinterlands, which in truth means validating their racist, jingoistic, nativist, xenophobic, bigoted impulses and soothing their deepest, most rancid and repulsively sociopathic urges.
All of which remains necessary even in the dawning of the 21st Century because of the Electoral College.
Thus, myriad apparatchiks, on behalf of the wealthy Ruling Elites who sign their paychecks, can mutter their paraphrased reiterations and reinterpretations and reinventions of the age-old "will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest" laments, all from the safety of their radio microphones and newspaper columns and wingnut-welfare magazines and TV "news" desks and then can pretend to be completely and totally surprised when someone goes ahead and, well, does it because no one could have predicted that calling for the (violent, if necessary) elimination of whole groups and classes of people might encourage some people to actually start killing with whatever is at hand.
Which in These'n Here Yew-Nawted Staytes means a fucking G-U-N.
And then the media whores get to pretend to be shocked! shocked! that someone out there in the world could be so callous and mean and could come up with such an idea all by themselves with no external input. They will all express their deep sadness at this completely isolated and totally unconnected to any external causes or larger narratives "event" at the hands of some lone nut, some completely random act by a disconnected freak who mysteriously lept, fully formed, into existence as a roiling cauldron of hate and violent retribution with no discernible precursors or legitimizing forces in the culture at large. Oooh look! Shiny blonde teenage girl gone missing!
And we'll all move on. Because the smiling news models on the Tee-Vee machine told us to do so. They told us that this particular form of very real, very personal violence has no predicates and thus is totally random and you may as well worry about meteors or lightning strikes because they all come from the same vast and unpredictable fog. 'Tis a pity we can't figure out where this stuff is coming from, now go buy a bigger television set.
But the seed of fear has been planted. One more thing to ensure a meek and pliant electorate of consumers whose survival instinct has been triggered so that they'll close up, turn inward and disengage from the public sphere out of worry and uncertainty and instead do as they are fucking told or else a uniformed cop will Taser'em like a 72 year-old grandma well before the evil, brown-skinned terr'st killers can come and murder all the little (white) children in their beds.
Because selling shit to the shitheads of the GOP has never, ever really been about getting votes. No sir. The Ruling Elites have never really been on-board with this whole "democracy" thing, anyway. Sure, they need votes to seize control of the machinery of governance (Rove's infamous "50%+1" strategy), but they really couldn't give two shits about any one person's actual vote, much less a whole group collected into a "party" like the Dems or the Rethugs.
No, selling shit to the shitheads isn't even about about opposing nigras and uppity wimmin-folk and spics and faggots and dirty fucking hippies, per se. It's about seeming to for long enough to attract the necessary fellow-travelers and mold them into a mongrel horde of poo-flinging monkeys frightful enough to dissuade do-gooders and mushy idealists from ever trying to CHANGE anything ever.
Because CHANGE costs them money.
Anyone who values things like progress and civic engagement and The Arts and beauty and the greater health of the public sphere just hasn't had a big-enough hole gnawed in their soul by Teh Fear to be a compliant consumer of hole-filling goodies like iPods and shoddily R&D'd pharmaceuticals and probably thinks that CHANGE is a good thing and might vote that way and, in fact, largely did in the last election. And CHANGE always means costing the plutocrats of the Ruling Elite more money.
And that means time to release the hounds, the flying monkeys, the goon squads, the un-recompensed adopters of the Faith of the Old Order who will bring down violence on the heads of all of Those Others.
On those people.
More violence is coming, folks, because these freaks are just the comets to circle 'round within sight of our unaided media eye. An entire Oort Cloud of Dirty Fucking Hippie haters stands ready and waiting and well-financed by an unholy alliance of industrial interests and Old Money pining for the days of monarchy to hurl as many of these dirty snowballs our way as necessary to get us to back the fuck off and shut the fuck up and do as we are fucking told.
They did it once before in recent memory, in the 1960's, and even though they started it, even though while the cameras rolled they beat the shit out of peaceful idealists who just wanted a better world (and brutally murdered them when those cameras were off), even though they gunned down our leaders like ducks in a shooting gallery throughout the decade, our collective memory is now that the "Turbulent 60's" were the fault of all those Dirty Fucking Hippies acting up and being disrespectful and shit. Then we got Nixon and then Reaganism and then Clintonian "third-way" capitulation and then President Cheney.
Scott Roeder and James Von Brunn are warning shots.
Following up on Broadway Carl's post about the violence in Washington D.C. today, I want to highlight a quote from digby's rundown of the same situation:
It's pretty clear that the right wing has lost whatever restraint it had and that the ongoing paroxysms of violent, extreme rhetoric are having their effect. The crocodile tears of the anti-abortion forces after the Tiller assassination notwithstanding, it's also pretty clear that they know this violence is effective. If you want to paralyze a society and force people to capitulate out of fear of random violence, nothing beats terrorism.This situation is nothing new in American history. Whenever the right loses political power, they start shooting people. Something ugly and thuggish and authoritarian in the wingnut mindset drives them to it every single time. They are stupid enough and mean enough to be as predictable as a trained seal.
And once the right gets everybody looking over their shoulders, they'll misdirect the citizenry and run to the rescue with calls for "law and order." (Recall that the violence of the 60s didn't originate with the left --- it originated with racist cops unleashing hell on non-violent protesters.)
Naturally, the same things would happen with the right-wings in other countries as well -- and they do so frequently in poorer countries, though such collections of thugs are called "armies" and are usually commanded by dictators who are propped up by some American intelligence service or other -- but we have a peculiar confluence of factors here in these fifty states that afflicts us with considerably more right-wing violence than any other civilized nation on earth. Those causes include, but are not limited to, first and foremost: guns, guns, guns, guns, guns, guns, guns, guns, guns, guns, guns, guns, guns, guns, guns, guns, guns, guns, guns, guns.
We also have a political culture which elevates the outward expression of supposedly simple and "homespun" values to the level of litmus test, which usually amounts in practice to elaborate kabuki ruses intended to get the votes of the racist yahoos and toothless goobers in the hinterlands, which in truth means validating their racist, jingoistic, nativist, xenophobic, bigoted impulses and soothing their deepest, most rancid and repulsively sociopathic urges.
All of which remains necessary even in the dawning of the 21st Century because of the Electoral College.
Thus, myriad apparatchiks, on behalf of the wealthy Ruling Elites who sign their paychecks, can mutter their paraphrased reiterations and reinterpretations and reinventions of the age-old "will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest" laments, all from the safety of their radio microphones and newspaper columns and wingnut-welfare magazines and TV "news" desks and then can pretend to be completely and totally surprised when someone goes ahead and, well, does it because no one could have predicted that calling for the (violent, if necessary) elimination of whole groups and classes of people might encourage some people to actually start killing with whatever is at hand.
Which in These'n Here Yew-Nawted Staytes means a fucking G-U-N.
And then the media whores get to pretend to be shocked! shocked! that someone out there in the world could be so callous and mean and could come up with such an idea all by themselves with no external input. They will all express their deep sadness at this completely isolated and totally unconnected to any external causes or larger narratives "event" at the hands of some lone nut, some completely random act by a disconnected freak who mysteriously lept, fully formed, into existence as a roiling cauldron of hate and violent retribution with no discernible precursors or legitimizing forces in the culture at large. Oooh look! Shiny blonde teenage girl gone missing!
And we'll all move on. Because the smiling news models on the Tee-Vee machine told us to do so. They told us that this particular form of very real, very personal violence has no predicates and thus is totally random and you may as well worry about meteors or lightning strikes because they all come from the same vast and unpredictable fog. 'Tis a pity we can't figure out where this stuff is coming from, now go buy a bigger television set.
But the seed of fear has been planted. One more thing to ensure a meek and pliant electorate of consumers whose survival instinct has been triggered so that they'll close up, turn inward and disengage from the public sphere out of worry and uncertainty and instead do as they are fucking told or else a uniformed cop will Taser'em like a 72 year-old grandma well before the evil, brown-skinned terr'st killers can come and murder all the little (white) children in their beds.
Because selling shit to the shitheads of the GOP has never, ever really been about getting votes. No sir. The Ruling Elites have never really been on-board with this whole "democracy" thing, anyway. Sure, they need votes to seize control of the machinery of governance (Rove's infamous "50%+1" strategy), but they really couldn't give two shits about any one person's actual vote, much less a whole group collected into a "party" like the Dems or the Rethugs.
No, selling shit to the shitheads isn't even about about opposing nigras and uppity wimmin-folk and spics and faggots and dirty fucking hippies, per se. It's about seeming to for long enough to attract the necessary fellow-travelers and mold them into a mongrel horde of poo-flinging monkeys frightful enough to dissuade do-gooders and mushy idealists from ever trying to CHANGE anything ever.
Because CHANGE costs them money.
Anyone who values things like progress and civic engagement and The Arts and beauty and the greater health of the public sphere just hasn't had a big-enough hole gnawed in their soul by Teh Fear to be a compliant consumer of hole-filling goodies like iPods and shoddily R&D'd pharmaceuticals and probably thinks that CHANGE is a good thing and might vote that way and, in fact, largely did in the last election. And CHANGE always means costing the plutocrats of the Ruling Elite more money.
And that means time to release the hounds, the flying monkeys, the goon squads, the un-recompensed adopters of the Faith of the Old Order who will bring down violence on the heads of all of Those Others.
On those people.
More violence is coming, folks, because these freaks are just the comets to circle 'round within sight of our unaided media eye. An entire Oort Cloud of Dirty Fucking Hippie haters stands ready and waiting and well-financed by an unholy alliance of industrial interests and Old Money pining for the days of monarchy to hurl as many of these dirty snowballs our way as necessary to get us to back the fuck off and shut the fuck up and do as we are fucking told.
They did it once before in recent memory, in the 1960's, and even though they started it, even though while the cameras rolled they beat the shit out of peaceful idealists who just wanted a better world (and brutally murdered them when those cameras were off), even though they gunned down our leaders like ducks in a shooting gallery throughout the decade, our collective memory is now that the "Turbulent 60's" were the fault of all those Dirty Fucking Hippies acting up and being disrespectful and shit. Then we got Nixon and then Reaganism and then Clintonian "third-way" capitulation and then President Cheney.
Scott Roeder and James Von Brunn are warning shots.
Editor's note (6/11 09 9:40am): I wanted to add this video I saw this morning on Bob Cesca's blog.
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2 comments:
"No, selling shit to the shitheads isn't even about about opposing nigras and uppity wimmin-folk and spics and faggots and dirty fucking hippies, per se. It's about seeming to for long enough to attract the necessary fellow-travelers and mold them into a mongrel horde of poo-flinging monkeys frightful enough to dissuade do-gooders and mushy idealists from ever trying to CHANGE anything ever.
Because CHANGE costs them money."
Yeah, that pretty much sums it up. But I'm wondering whether it has to be the same way today. In the '60s, activists didn't have the Internet. Look at what Obama's election machine was able to achieve through online organizing. Hopefully now, with the tools at our disposal, we can be much more effective at fighting back against the "Dirty Fucking Hippie-Haters."
Couldn't put it any more eloquently Armadillo!After the assassinations of the 2 Kennedys and ML king,there was Kent State and Jackson State where government troops killed student activists.Then we find out Hoovers FBI were illegaly wire tapping and destroying anybody Hoover perceived was "un american".We have the same thing going on now it's called FISA and the patriot act.They are designed to control and intimidate the population.
But I'm afraid that there will also be an assassination in the near future.I've seen this movie before.
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