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