Response To The Wingnuts
Salon.com had an article this morning on the NY Times best seller list that puts the far right-wing into a broader perspective.http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2009/09/12/rightwing_bestsellers/?source=newsletterIt begins:
“For the past nine months, ever since a certain somebody seized the White House, conservative pundits have dominated the ranks of nonfiction. There have been plenty of golden oldies, such as Bill O’Reilly (“A Bold Fresh Piece of Humanity”), Ann Coulter (“Guilty”), Bernard Goldberg (“A Slobbering Love Affair”) and Joe Scarborough (“The Last Best Hope”). But it’s the relative newcomers — Glenn Beck, Mark Levin, Dick Morris and Michelle Malkin — who’ve put a stranglehold on the top 10.
It would be easy enough, and rather predictable, to lament this state of affairs and to find in it evidence of an anemic literary culture, a dangerously aggrieved minority, or at the very least the diabolical efficacy of bulk sales.
But such liberal cant totally misses the point. Having spent the past two weeks in what I might call a spiritual communion with these authors, I can assure you that these texts are not the psychotic, fact-challenged rants of the mad, but carefully crafted metafictions in which the mundane terrors of cultural dislocation are recast as riveting epics of paranoia.
As such, they fit into a long literary tradition, one that extends from the rhapsodic delusions of “Don Quixote” to the airborne toxic events of Don DeLillo, from the surreal prophecy of Revelations to the post-apocalyptic visions of Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road.” Though written in different eras and wildly divergent styles, these works are all about the incursion of sinister forces on an unsuspecting populace.
Which brings us back to Beck and Co. Rather than accepting the standard narrative — that a disillusioned electorate rejected eight years of conservative mismanagement in favor of a pragmatic (and frankly wonky) Democrat with an inspirational pedigree — they have created a vivid “counternarrative” in which the events of November 2008 represent a coup d’état. Actually, Malkin regards the arrangement as an oligarchy, while Levin goes all in with nascent totalitarianism. Either way, you get the point. The point is danger, urgency, what we in the fiction biz call “stakes.'” It goes on.
I might be out in left field (so to speak) but reading this article, I was imagining how similar the paranoia on the far right is to the paranoia on the far left. Hmmm. Newt Gingrich’s goal was to foment the “cultural equivalent of civil war” (as stated by Robert Reich in On Reason.
I am wondering if what we have in Obama is another Czar Nicholas II…(who introduced the original glastnost and freed the serfs and we know what happened to both Nicholas and President Lincoln.)
In those days in Russia gradual reform was seen by the revolutionaries on the left as leaving people satisfied with the status quo…wanting society to coil like an overtightened spring so that when it popped, it would break. The Bolsheviks got what they wished for after they assassinated Nicholas II and the rest is history.
In the 1960’s, 100 years after Nicholas II, the revolutionaries in the U.S. thought they had their chance but failed. Now we have revolution coming from the right that is spawning violence that makes the the radical leftist Weathermen look like babes. I am reminded what the Russian anarchist Bakunin said about revolutionary change…that revolutionary change must not come from authoritarian methods but libertarian ones.
It feels like now in the U.S. the liberals are caught in no man’s land and change is being co-opted by the far right, most often by voice and pen but increasingly by violence precipitated by a feeling of cultural displacement by a liberal black president and could result in a disastrous 2012 election. Alaska has had a separatist movement going for years which Palin and her husband has been implicated in supporting. Palin anyone?
But don’t make the mistake of thinking this is something only recent. It has been fomenting since the Continental Congress and the Civil War which we are essentially still fighting. Rep Joe Wilson from South Carolina who called Obama a liar (he was wrong) during his speech to Congress is a secessionist and one of only seven Republicans to go against their own party and vote to keep the Dixie Rebel flag flying over the South Carolina capitol. So much for reconstruction.
A farmer, my own father who I loved dearly, used to read really scary far right wing literature to the eternal embarrassment of my mother who wouldn’t let him read the stuff in the house so he had to sit outside. As a small girl I would ride with him in his pick-up truck as he made the rounds…whispering in low tones with his farmer friends who were all members of a national far right-wing farmer group that I can’t remember the name of. I used to hear him say that if the “govment” ever came to his house he would shoot the hell out of them. And then I worked for state government for 10 years.
No one talks about the Ku Klux Klan anymore, but their off-shoots like the White Aryan supremacist survivalists and their militias have been digging shelters and stockpiling arms for years. Kirk Lyons attended Pete Peters’ 1992 gathering at Estes Park, Colorado that is widely credited with giving birth to the militia movement. At the session, he led discussions on how to establish common-law courts throughout the country.
Rep Joe Wilson is director of a North Carolina legal organization called the CAUSE Foundation, (whose initials ostensibly stand for Canada, Australia, United States and Europe — everywhere that white people are established) describes itself as a defender of unpopular causes and the powerless: “I will always support the rights of radicals,’’ Lyons has said. “The more radical they are, the more they need to be supported for their rights. If you take away their rights, we’re all losers.’’ So then we have a yokel who shows up at a Health Reform town hall presided over by Obama with a side-arm in full view strapped to his leg. And the gun lobby buying off the Congress left and right. Who the hell needs an MK47 to hunt?
Actually, Lyons himself is a white separatist who sneers at the current American system. “Democracy in America is a farce and a failure, ’’he once wrote.” It has led us to the brink of a police state.’’ Words that could easily have come from the radical left.
One of these, Tom Metzger, precipitated a hate crime in 1988 when a 28 year old Ethiopian student and father, Mulugheta Serew, who went to the US to attend college, was killed with a baseball bat in Portland, Oregon by three racist skinheads who were members of a group known as East Side White Pride and White Aryan Resistance (WAR). Seraw’s father and son, represented at no cost by the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League, successfully filed a civil lawsuit against the killers and Tom Metzger, head of WAR, and his son John, holding them liable for the murder for a total of $12.5 million. Meanwhile Metzger said the skinheads did a “civic duty” by killing Seraw. More in “In God’s Country: The Patriot Movement and the Pacific Northwest” Then we have the bombing in Oklahoma, murder of abortion doctors, the stand-off by the Freemen in Montana etc.etc.
On the other hand, Glenn Greenwald,, in Salon.com on the same day as the NY Times booklist article was written, maintains that trying to destroy the presidency of the opposite party is not unprecedented.
“To see that, just look at what that movement’s leading figures said and did during the Clinton years. In 1994, Jesse Helms, then-Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, claimed that “just about every military man” believes Clinton is unqualified to be Commander-in-Chief and then warned/threatened him not to venture onto military bases in the South: “Mr. Clinton better watch out if he comes down here. He better have a bodyguard.” The Wall St. Journal called for a Special Prosecutor to investigate the possible “murder” of Vince Foster. Clinton was relentlessly accused by leading right-wing voices of being a murderer, a serial rapist, and a drug trafficker. Tens of millions of dollars and barrels of media ink were expended investigating “Whitewater,” a “scandal” which, to this day, virtually nobody can even define. When Clinton tried to kill Osama bin Laden, they accused him of “wagging the dog” — trying to distract the country from the truly important matters at hand (his sex scandal). And, of course, the GOP ultimately impeached him over that sex scandal — in the process issuing a lengthy legal brief with footnotes detailing his sex acts (cigars and sex talk), publicly speculating about (and demanding examinations of) the unique “distinguishing” spots on his penis, and using leading right-wing organs to disseminate innuendo that he had an abandoned, out-of-wedlock child. More intense and constant attacks on a President’s “legitimacy” are difficult to imagine.
This is why I have very mixed feelings about the protests of conservatives such as David Frum or Andrew Sullivan that the conservative movement has been supposedly “hijacked” by extremists and crazies. On the one hand, this is true. But when was it different? Rush Limbaugh didn’t just magically appear in the last twelve months. He — along with people like James Dobson, Pat Robertson, Bill Kristol and Jesse Helms — have been leaders of that party for decades. Republicans spent the 1990s wallowing in Ken Starr’s sex report, “Angry White Male” militias, black U.N. helicopters, Vince Foster’s murder, Clinton’s Mena drug runway, Monica’s semen-stained dress, Hillary’s lesbianism, “wag the dog” theories, and all sorts of efforts to personally humiliate Clinton and destroy the legitimacy of his presidency using the most paranoid, reality-detached, and scurrilous attacks. And the crazed conspiracy-mongers in that movement became even more prominent during the Bush years. Frum himself — now parading around as the Serious Adult conservative — wrote, along with uber-extremist Richard Perle, one of the most deranged and reality-detached books of the last two decades, and before that, celebrated George W. Bush, his former boss, as “The Right Man.'”
But those folks (with the exception of Pat Robertson (who I believe got the ball rolling with the populist Christian fundamentalist sector) were inside-the-beltway hacks. How many people read their books? I argue now that the difference is that the radio and TV pundits are reaching far more people (Rush with 7 million listeners) who are personally affected by the economic downturn, are and have been feeling culturally displaced and have a real stake in the outcome of a threatening Black presidency. (Who really cared about Clinton’s sperm on that blue dress.) We really should be ignoring them which I think is the point Greenwald is trying to make. But I blame the mainstream media for hopping on the ratings train and giving air time and even more influence to these people who are essentially media personalities on an ego and money trip.
What upsets me, is that these far right “pundits” are using hate speech that, wittingly or unwittingly, foments hatred and violence. No different than yelling “fire” in a crowded theater. They should be held responsible for the violence that I believe they have precipitated already. Some have salient ideas that without the inflammatory name-calling (Obama is a Hitler and a communist) could result in rational discourse. But we have radio and TV ratings to tend to. We have to entertain and cater to a basically uninformed and civically illiterate populace.
So the revolutionaries and anarchists don’t have to do anything but sit back and watch society coil like an overtightened spring so that when it pops, it will break.
Heaven forbid we should have a cool rational wonky president trying to reform a system with his hands tied behind his back by lobbyists, corporations and financial institutions with their billions. And to make it worse the Supreme Court is about to rule that a corporation is an individual. They are about to grant corporations the right to spend unlimited amounts of money to attack political candidates right up until an election, which would destroy the very fabric of our voting structure…such as it is.
I have no doubt whatsoever that Obama expected this kind of opposition. We are a very resilient society and ultimately I have to trust that we will find our way through this.
But Obama is becoming Blacker by the day. I just hope he makes it to the end of his term. The alternative gives me shivers.
Tags: , anarchists, far right extremists, hate speech, mlitias, Obama, supremacists, USA, wingnuts
Zoe
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