Patterns

posted by Armadillo Joe

Following up on my post from Wednesday about the neo-Nazi violence at the Holocaust Museum (Selling Shit to the Shitheads) and dove-tailing nicely with my current reading material (Rick Pearlstein's "Before The Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus"), I read today over at Yglesias' place about the so-called "China Lobby" that held sway in D.C. throughout the 1950's and into the 1960's and their adulation of General Chiang Kai-Shek (Yglesias quotes Robert Farley here):

the influence of the Lobby in the executive branch and in Congress helped prevent a Sino-American dialogue over Vietnam, the final status of Korea, the role of the PRC at the UN, and the potential for collaboration with the Soviet Union. When any President hinted at acknowledging the PRC, the Lobby could arm Congressional opponents with money and righteous rhetoric about the dangers of appeasing Beijing. Nixon was able to break the cycle, in part because the most vocal China advocates came from within his own party

That situation sounds to me like how our Middle East policy has been conducted for the last 30 years (since the Iranian Revolution of 1979), with deep-pocketed lobbyists and myriad influence-peddlers from foreign governments twisting our national dialogue, whether the issue be Iran, Iraq, Israel, Saudi Arabia, et al.. The difference between then and now, it seems to me, is that the ultimate triumph of a certain group of people in gradually taking over the levers of power in this country who were considered to be fringe-group fruit-loops in the 1950's -- a march to power that ran from Nixon's crime syndicate posing as a legitimate presidential administration from 1968 to '74 through Saint Ronnie's glorious 1980's through the tragedy the Cheney regime ending on January 20th of this year -- meant that during the run-up to the Iraq War, no grown-ups were left in the room to talk down the ruling clique of perpetual adolescents who have spent their lives being protected from the consequences of being wrong about everything all the time and who wanted to blow some shit up and torture some brown-skinned people real good to finally, in mid- to late-life, establish their macho bona fides, making up for not joining others of their generation who had those bona fides forced upon them in the jungles of South East Asia.

Once again, I was reminded that it is all of a piece, from the racist Dixieland sheriffs of the Civil Rights-era Deep South to the Glorious Reign of our Saint Ronnie of the Ray-Gun to our current military-industrial complex's deep and frightful warping of our nation's spending and foreign-policy priorities. Mark Twain once said that history doesn't exactly repeat itself, but it does rhyme and the deeper I get into Pearlstein's book, the more I realize just how much today's neo-cons are just a pathetic copy of a copy of a 100th Xerox'd copy of their political and intellectual ancestors in the 1950's, who themselves proved wholly and completely wrong about every single political and historical development since World War 2, but at least had gravitas and panache while being cowards and liars (looking at you, William F. Buckley).

The problem we encounter now is that so much of what has come to be defined as "conservative" over the last four or five decades subsumes a wide range of opinions, from monied business interests and wealthy cultural elites who resent the expulsion of monarchy from the realm of legitimate authority, southern race-warriors still bitter about losing the Civil War, a jingoistic military class who consider their political proclivities indistinguishable from the nation's security interests and a random assortment of slack-jawed, Bible-thumping hillbillies and other nattering, theocratic busy-bodies resentful of the tolerance expected in polite, civil society when living in a pluralistic, multi-ethnic country. Granted, many or even most of these groups overlap to some degree, but the outliers on the far edges of each group make for an uneasy alliance between them and, as I've said before, the only thing that truly unites all of them is a hatred for the Dirty Fucking Hippie.

Hatred is not a governing philosophy, which is why conservatives can't govern. They only know how to oppose and destroy things, which is why the porcine, drug-addled sex-tourist who leads their party will never step out from behind the microphone to actually take a run at public office. Inciting the screeching, poo-flinging monkeys of the Reich-wing to riot (and feigning surprise when they do) is a much more fun pastime for an opportunistic blow-hard with a black hole for a soul than the delicate job of compromise and problem-solving required by the idealism of a life in government service.

James von Brunn is a natural product of that putrid, seething cesspool and he won't be the last one to find his voice now that the poo-flingers have finally, for the first time since the 1970's (and probably not even then), been mostly driven from national office.

Douche Quote of the Day

Talk about your right wing lunacy!

Gawker:

Andrew Breitbart: [Holocaust Museum shooter] James von Brunn was a "multiculturalist just like the black studies and the lesbian studies majors on college campuses."

Breitbart is angry that anyone would call a neo-Nazi a "right-wing extremist."

Here's a sample:

"It's such a fucking slander on people like me. This guy's political philosophy is more akin to the drivel that you hear on a college campuses that delineates us by group and not by individuality....
It's deeply offensive that you would use this for political gain."

What a fucking jokester this douchebag is. But please go to Gawker and listen to the whole seething, angry voicemail. How dare someone call Von Brunn a right wing extremist! Apparently it's an insult to real right wing extremisits like Breitbart.

Selling Shit To The Shitheads

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:

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.

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.)

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.

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.