In the words of Jack Nicholsen’s proto-teabagger Colonel Jessep in the film “A Few Good Men”:
You want the truth? You can’t handle the truth!
Yup.
Booman recently wrote a piece called Teabagging Ugliness in which he rightfully bemoaned the racism of many Tea Party members.
But then he added:
I’d like to meet the people who called him [John Lewis] a ‘nigger’ today.
To which I responded:
For God’s sake, Booman!
Do you not go out of the house?
Do you not spend hours on the tube? On the jitternet?
“Meet” them? They’re fucking everywhere!!!
And I then went on to elaborate on that point.
A poster named eclecticbrotha commented on my reply:
No. They ARE NOT everywhere.
What the corporate media has done is amplify their antics to give the false impression that they’re a large, vocal presence in America but its the same lunatic fringe that has always existed on the margins of political discourse in this country. The only reason they get airtime now is because the media enjoys clinging to the idea that America will not accept a black man as president, even though 57% of the electorate already put one in the White House. We are witnessing a strange bipolar message being presented through our media airwaves: showing nearly all white hordes at rallies hysterically and irrationally claiming Obama is the “illegitimate president and seeing a lily-white GOP vigorously opposing everything he tries to accomplish, all while the media declares his election has led America into the so-called “post-racial” era.
Apparently, to the corporate media, “post-racial” means pretending obvious racist antics really aren’t.
And that was just about enough leftiness shmoonery for me.
Read on for my comments upon the truth of this matter if you can handle the heat.
Or stick your head back into your ass shell if that’s what will make you more comfortable.
It really doesn’t matter much what you do.
Outnumbered and outgunned, we are all in the position of Walter Moseley’s great Socrates Fortlow character.
All we can do is to continue to try to act honorably in a dishonorable world.
And tell the truth.
Here is today’s version.
Can you handle it?
I hope so.
Eclectibrotha writes:
No. They ARE NOT everywhere.
What? You don’t leave the house either? Or do you live in some kind of “exclusive neighborhood”…a term that fits both gated communities and down-and-dirty ghettos of all kinds. (Middle class right through totally fucked up for any number of reasons, the most common being racially-enforced poverty.)
I dunno where you live or how you live, but friend, you simply do not get out enough.
I live in da Bronx, at the northern end of the NYC megalopolis, and I travel throughout the country, living mostly at the near-bottom end of the travel scale by choice. I can get away with it and it saves me money, so I do it. (I can easily pass for white working class. In fact, although I am an artist…a musician…I am “white working class”. I’m white and I pretty much live from month to month which is the very definition of “working class” as far as I am concerned.) Motel 6s, Dunkin’ Donuts, cars + buses if at all possible. (Rail is generally too fucking expensive here and airplanes? I am outraged at both their prices and their treatment of human beings.)
I can travel 10 to 15 minutes in any direction (by any mode of transportation from walking to automobile) from my mixed-race, working class Bronx neighborhood and be right in the middle of Tea Party Central.
Hell…all I have to do is drop into one of the many remaining Irish bars…almost all cop bars and fireman bars now…along Broadway from about 180 St. right on up into Yonkers to be surrounded by Tea Party sympathizers. Most of them armed and allowed by law to use those arms.
Or walk into any police station or firehouse.
Or hang out with any construction crew.
Or walk into almost any diner/truck stop.
Just for fucking starters!
In a 100 mile radius, there are innumerable all-white neighborhoods.
Italian neighborhoods.
Irish neighborhoods.
Polish neighborhoods.
Catholic neighborhoods.
Literally millions of people live in those neighborhoods, and the most active among them are Tea Partiers either by action or by sympathy and vote.
William Butler Yeats pinned it in his prophecy poem “The Second Coming”.
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Yup.
Like that.
And throughout the rest of white America?
In the Maine woods?
In Appalachia?
The Great Plains
The rural South?
The white Southwest?
The West and Northwest?
In working class suburbs and rural communities across the entire breadth of this country?
Please.
Bet on it.
The rock-bottom 30+% who polled in favor of George W. Butch at the lowest ebb of his popularity?
Them.
U.S. population?
According to the official version, about 300 million.
By my own estimate…knowing that there are a whole lot of people living here (legally or otherwise) who so despise and/or fear this government for any number of reasons that they would no more fill out a census form than they would tell the whole truth on their tax returns…I make it closer to 350 million.
Maybe even 400 million.
But…let’s take the government’s word for it. (Always a risky thing to do, on ample evidence. But hey, let’s live dangerously.)
One third of 300 million is…Tah DAH!!! ONE HUNDRED MILLION. Most likely many of these people are part of the nearly 100 million Americans (in 1993) who owned…or had easy access…to guns. (There are more, now, not less. Bet on that as well.)
In a December 1993 Gallup survey, 49% of U.S. households reported owning a gun, and 31% of adults reported personally owning one. [58] These figures indicate that there are about 47.6 million households with a gun, with perhaps 93 million, or 49% of the adult U.S. population living in households with guns, and about 59.1 million adults personally owning a gun.”
Hmmmmm…
That is a lot of armed motherfuckers, and in my own widespread travels through this society…top to bottom, left to right, black brown and beige alike…with the exception of dedicated criminals and such, most of the people who own these guns are white working class.
As are most of the Tea Party folks.
Hmmmmmmmm…
You also write:
What the corporate media has done is amplify their antics to give the false impression that they’re a large, vocal presence in America but its the same lunatic fringe that has always existed on the margins of political discourse in this country.
Wake the fuck up.
The media has not “amplified” this presence.
In fact, the opposite is true.
It has largely hidden the truth of the matter, which is why you are living in some kind of dream world/media-created Cloud Cuckoo Land.
The same “lunatic fringe that has always existed on the margins of political discourse in this country!!!???”
Lord save the leftiness shmoons!!!
Yes.
They are indeed “lunatics” in that word’s original sense. Under the influence of the moon. Under the influence of that which is cold and lifeless. Without warmth. Evil, in short.
But they are not a “fringe” group.
They have dominated the policies of this country from day one, and those policies have been racist policies. Proof? Sure? Witness the almost total genocide of the Native Americans, the enslavement of the Africans, the largely racially-enforced formation of an Untouchable-like class of African and Latin Americans that followed the so-called “freeing of the slaves” (I mean…somebody’s got to do the shit work, right?), and the wars of the last 75 years (overt and covert), almost all fought against people of color.
Man…or woman…your head is so far up your ass about this that you are reading your own entrails as fact.
Fact?
I got yer “fact” right here.
The joint is broken, and the only reason that it has not yet failed completely is that the U.S. is the biggest consumer of goods on earth and the rest of the world needs us to continue to consume their product.
End of story.
Can we rebound from this?
Hmmmmm….
I give it about 1 to 10 against, myself.
Until we totally renounce our Original Sin…which was and remains racism…then no. We will not rebound because the expense of maintaining a vast underclass has become more expensive than the value of the service that said underclass renders to the state.
Instead we will continue our broken and totally ineffective, corporate-owned system of government and media-controlled social management and the rest of the world will continue to try to prop us up until the whole house of cards collapses.
House of cards?
Yup. And we are not alone. China and Russia are both socio-economic houses of cards today. Driven by a mad rush to acquire individual wealth, they will fail in spectacular fashion because they have moved into that state at the accelerated speed of current times instead of inching into it as did the U.S. They are rioting in Russia as we speak…only because their ill-balanced system has had a downturn and people fear the coming collapse back into “normalcy”…and China will be next. You can fool some of the people all of the time or all of the people some of the time, but roughly one and one half billion Chinese (That’s a lot of people, folks. Yup.) are going to get mighty antsy eventually and no control system ever invented will be able to hold them back if things get rough there.
What can we do?
Nothing, I fear.
We cannot elect an honest government because the real control of who is elected is in the hands of the corporate-owned media, and the corporations that own it care only for their own quarterly bottom line.
All we can do is to continue to try to speak the truth.
And what you said?
No. [Tea Party types] ARE NOT everywhere.
What the corporate media has done is amplify their antics to give the false impression that they’re a large, vocal presence in America but its the same lunatic fringe that has always existed on the margins of political discourse in this country.
It just ain’t true, oh glorious eclecticbrotha.
Not even a little bit.
Sorry.
Station WTFU signing off.
Gotta go earn my pittance.
Wake the fuck up.
Later…
AG
Fuggedaboudit.
This is a bitter brew, best drunk unsweetened with either honey or the aspartame of false hopes about the weakness of the teabagging right. They are numerous, armed, dangerous and people just like them run the armed forces of The United States Of North America.
Just for starters
Bet on it.
How about some recs instead?
Thank you and goodnight.
AG
P.S. Ain’t spring a bitch sometimes?
It can hang you up.
The most.
Yup.
Hey AG, I agree for the most part with your rant. Howsoever, I would like to take a moment to cool things down a bit. Sincere emotion is always good for initiating action and motivation, but it often lacks the most needed ingredient and that is solid objective analysis. Racism is the BIRTH DEFECT of the United States of America. Over three hundred and twenty four years ago, over one and three quarters of a century before the American Constitution was written and certified, slavery and its erstwhile sibling racism stepped on these shores. In the course of these three plus centuries, racism has become incorporated into law, custom, commerce, and the social warp and woof of the soul of America.
Racism has undergone so many transmogrifications over these three centuries that it has become the bedrock cornerstone of the belief systems of many white Americans. Like Hollywood zombies they will fiercely fight to preserve its sanctuary without any real conscious awareness of the depth of control it exercises over their being.
The removal of the birth defect of racism from this nation will require more than the millions and millions of pages already written about it as a social phenomena. Removal will take more than an African American elected President of the United States. From this perspective, I agree with you AG that the population infected with the pernicious destructive disease of racialism is well over 80% of the white population. You will note that I have not wasted time discussing black racists who hate white people. The reason why I bypassed reference to this group is (a) they comprise a minority in the black community, (b) black people do not operate the levers of power that control this nation.
The surgical removal of racism from this nation, unfortunately in this instance MUST BE DONE BY THE PATIENT. This is why W.E. DuBois called “the color line” the “white man’s problem”. Many white folks who start out with good intentions of finding a solution to the “race” problem actually windup becoming proponents of the very racialistic behaviors that they originally sought to oppose.
The world has moved into the 21st century, and the icons of the past century are being shed at every turn. Likewise America can no longer keep lugging in racialism as the subliminal motivation for all of the priority decisions that it makes in this new world. In order for America to maintain its position as a world power in this new century, it must get about the business of REALLY SHEDDING its pernicious perpetual American racism. On that day, America free of its cursed birth defect of racism can surely become a “shining city upon a hill” in this new world.
The surgical removal of racism from this nation must be done by the patient, eh?
And just how do you propose to convince that patient to do so when it does not even understand the extent and danger of the sickness? When the operation will be both painful and dangerous?
Fat chance.
Still too well fed, still too well hypnomediaized.
You write:
Well, at this very moment we have a solid objectivist…one might even use the word “stolid” if he were not so gifted in the use of language…in the White House today. Without emotional thrust, he is failing left and right to get anything much done. Maybe what we really need is someone who will stand up and say “OK, motherfuckers. Bring it on!”
For real.
I have been writing since 2000 that he first pol of national stature who stands up and calls a spade a spade…the first one who says that this whole system is broken and that he (or she) is going to start kicking asses, taking names and prosecuting those who are criminally responsible for the situation…starting at the top, not at the bottom…will be swept into power on a scale that has never before been seen in this country.
But NOOOOOOooooo….
Too much pitty-pattying on.
Still.
Is Obama that pol?
He’d better hurry…his time is running out.
Quickly.
If not him? Who?
I dunno.
Do you?
AG
Fort Hood, Texas. Rather, it may exist in individuals scattered here and there, but area after area I saw every race, mixing as peers with rank being more important than skin or gender. White guys scurrying (without remorse or resentment) to take care of the black Colonel, who nodded sagely at the woman in the room because ~she~ was the General.
Cliques forming that weren’t based on apparent signs of wealth or race, including civilians who weren’t obscuring their wealth under their uniform because they weren’t active duty.
The body language still has notes of alert/adrenaline, it is a military compound, but the absence of racial self-selection in groups was something almost subtle to notice, at first, and then it was hard to not notice how these people had given up noticing race before noticing rank.
How about at higher command levels?
Betcha…
AG
the old white guys are dying out. Lots of mix in the Colonels these days, they’ll be the next Generals.
It all depends upon another “natural process.”
The political process.
I am sorry…the military is not independent of politics, anymore than politics is truly independent of the military.
Another term or two or three of “progressives?” Yeah, I can see that.
Obama gets his ass kicked in 2012? A real regressive in control?
Once again?
As they have been in control for all but three terms since JFK was assassinated? (Two and a half terms, really…Carter’s one and done, Clinton’s one and honey-trapped)
All progress halted.
Once again.
Everywhere.
Business as usual.
Everywhere.
Bet on it.
AG
Petraeus/Mullen letting dissent against Israel out of the bag?
They don’t much like Jews either? (That is only half a joke, folks.)
Now I am no supporter of what Israel has done in the Middle East. In fact I seriously believe that the very best thing that could happen to both the people of Israel and the United States would be for the US to offer safe haven to any and all Israelis who want to get the hell out of the trap into which they were put by the US and Great Britain after W.W.II. Call it Treblinka South, the largest Jewish concentration camp/ghetto ever conceived. I have gone so far (only slightly tongue in cheek) as to suggest that the US give the Israelis West Virginia or some other underdeveloped state here. If they could turn desert Israel into a garden of sorts, imagine what they could do in a temperate climate!!! (Yeah. I know it’s not going to happen.)
But the generals are merely doing their job.
Which is to continue their job.
Good work is hard to come by these days, and if the US military were a large office in a huge corporation it would be in serious danger of being totally restructured.
Remember…it hasn’t won a war in over 60 years.
The Israeli burr that was placed under the Middle Eastern saddle for the sole purpose of maintaining Western hegemony over oil reserves has become increasingly counterproductive due to two conditions.
1-It has united almost the entire Muslim world in an active (and quite effective, at least in an economic sense) state of enmity to the US and its allies. This is not a good thing for soldiers right now. See my “Hasn’t won a war in over 60 years” statement for more on that subject. Ain’t gonna in the near future, either. Check out the situation in Afghanistan and Pakistan if you have any doubts about that idea.
And perhaps more importantly in the long view:
2-Oil is so over. Within 20 years water will be the new oil, and worldwide energy production techniques will be diversified beyond out wildest imaginations.
If water becomes the next product over which wars will be fought and the Middle East has not enough water for its own needs/is running out of oil…why (in a Machiavellian view) would the west continue to support Israel?
The love of the Jewish people?
Please.
C’mon!!!
Not.
You asked.
The generals are just doing their job.
Remember…”Inglourious Basterds” wasn’t just a movie title.
Bet on it.
Later…
AG
Now I do not have much use for John Avlon. He is transparently a spokesman for what I like to call “the left wing of the right wing”…the so-called liberal wing of the the PermaGov…and sounds suspiciously like an intel asset about 90% of the time. (He is a “senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute” just for starters. Look up the Manhattan Institute for all you need to smell on that account. Co-founded by William Casey? Please.)
But he just provided us with a set of numbers that are most interesting.
Long story short, a new poll from the lovely folks at Harris (To be taken with a potentially heart-stopping dose of salts, of course.) states the following:
Now let us throw out the first number…”socialism” not being a necessarily negative idea for many of us…and average out the 4 remaining numbers.
Hmmmm….
Somewhere in the neighborhood of 45 million so-called adult Americans share in an overall “teabagger” view of Barack Obama.
Do you know the total population of the 30 largest cities in America?
Less than 35 million.
HMMMMMmmmmmmm!!!
66 million think that he is a Muslim?
50 Million think that he is not a US citizen?
40 million compare him to Adolf Hitler?
30 million think that he is the fucking Antichrist!!!???
Our lovely edumacational system is doing a fine job, ain’t it???!!!
So…line up the population of the 300 largest US cities on one side, line up the 45 million (averaged-out) who are totally batshit right wing crazy on the other and add in the proportion of those two groups who are well armed and ready to kill some non-God-fearin’ motherfuckers for Christ, and what do you have?
Booman, eclecticbrotha and the rest of the leftiness shmoon in big, big trouble is what you have.
Hmmmmmm….
Let us pray.
Later…
AG
Whoever controls the water will control the world.
Oil is past tense.
And public water utilities around the U.S. have been and are being “privatized” for the past 30 years — part of that “the private sector is sooo much better than government at running things.”
Whoever controls the water will control the world.
Oil is past tense.
Oiled?
AG
It is used to oil the machinations of aggressors.
The supply is dwindling, making it more valuable beyond some countries means
Oil is past, or beyond tense.
The remaining oil will be used by the strongest to gain control of water, a much more valuable control commodity.
my take on this is not too different, as I put in my diary today. (A Half-baked Alaska Sermon)
I think we should all be ready for some out of control behavior and violence. That is how Tea baggers will react when they think they are cornered like rats.
I agree with your rant that these racist mofos have always been here. That’s the point. People don’t like to believe that this type of racism exists but it does. It’s part of America. I’ve seen these teabagging clowns since I was a kid here in Cleveland. They are happy to have the attention.