Yeah, I noticed that a lot of us have gone crazy, too.
As with other forms of dementia, the signs weren’t obvious at first. After the 2008 election, when former House majority leader Tom DeLay suggested that instead of a formal inauguration, Barack Obama should “have a nice little chicken dinner, and we’ll save the $125 million,” black folks didn’t miss the implication. References to chicken, particularly of the fried variety, have long served as a kind of code when white folks referred to black people and their gustatory preferences—and weren’t many of us already accustomed to older white politicians making such gaffes? But who among us sensed that it was a harbinger that an entire nation was plunging into madness?
Mainly, people are just unusually unhappy. But whatever the causes may be, we haven’t seen this kind of crazy in my lifetime. I don’t think we’ve seen it in centuries.
Are things ever going to be normal again? Are we ever going to be able to have a semi-honest political debate again? Or, is this it? We’ve lost our shit, and there is no going back.
unfortunately for many people, scratch the reasonable surface and you’ll find an unreasonable core underneath.
It’s just that some are better at hiding it than others–but twist them the right way and you’ll see them squeal the hate.
Crazy is the new normal.
Let Unca Karl explain. And while re-reading it, remember…it ain’t just Republicans he’s talking about.
“The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” … “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality–judiciously, as you will–we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.””
“the signs weren’t obvious at first”
100% pure, unadulterated bullshit. The “signs” were clear from back in the Clinton campaign, where birtherism first started.
White folks simply CHOSE to ignore the “signs”, making shit up about being “oversensitive” and “reverse-racism”. And now the record is being white-washed as “signs weren’t obvious”.
Yah – “mistakes were made”. Liars.
Ah, but this is honest. At least it’s honest to the extent that extremists/racists now readily show their true colors.
Will we ever again have a meaningful debate? Not any time soon.
Or, is this it? We’ve lost our shit, and there is no going back.
Is Drudgico, Faux Noise, CNN, 3/4 of MSNBC, most local TV news and most major daily newspapers going to disappear down the black hole and not come back? If not, then no.
First of all, welcome to the world I’ve lived in for the past thirty years; that is, since Jesse Helms went from being a backbench Senate joke to a driver of the GOP agenda. I guess some of you thought your part of the universe was immune to the crazy, didn’t you Minnesota.
Second, the fever is highest just before it breaks. That might not be medically correct but it is an apt metaphor. The only question is whether it will break in November or kill the patient. You might now understand why a lot of red-state Democrats are working so hard, even independent progressives in red states know the stakes.
Sanity will return. This is the radical right-wing’s last ditch stand. The rational arguments of the Reagan administration have proved a disaster in practice. But a generation of folks who came of age politically worshiping Reagan is still in denial. That is why they are throwing everything into it. We will win. Then right-wing crazies return to the woodwork for a generation. More dog whistles and secret tracts, and in this technological age more emails. But no open candidates. But they will still be there waiting for their chance again for their subculture to loom large.
I have seen this kind of crazy. It was called the “South during the Civil Rights movement” and it got murderously nasty. Maybe we can halt the craziness before they start exercising their “second amendment rights”. Part of it depends on how many people show up on Saturday in DC. And on how many can spare GOTV activities and show up at the Stewart-Colbert sanity-fear event.
This is a new normal only if we capitulate, if we decide that progressive is about an end state instead of about a movement. Sanity will return to political debate when the right’s advertising/marketing shock doctrine media blitz no longer pays off. And that means that we have to educate people that that sort of PTSD-generating tactic can be opposed just by being conscious of how it works and not hold the lofty opinion that you cannot be manipulated by it.
It will be laid to rest for a while when peace and prosperity — remember those? — return to the US.
There’s no going back anyway. We can’t relive the New Deal or the Fair Deal or the New Frontier or the Great Society periods of history. And there are some reasons that we might not want to. But we can, er, buck up just like Democrats and socialists and labor and the whole wild and wooly left did in those periods.
That made this fellow Southerner smile.
It’s also highest just before your brain fries…
Well, if it doesn’t kill us, it’ll make us stronger.
Is anyone going to DC Saturday? I think I may go. My son too. We need to show the right we are fed up with them. Maybe the Dems will catch some momentum too. A big Repug win and all is lost for a long time.
Believe me, I’m frustrated too. This will show the power of the left. Be there or be square. 🙂
Look away, Boo. Admit no despair.
Thank-you, Alice, that Springsteen piece is soooooooo apropos. Let’s all keep on eyes on the prize.
I think Election 08 brought a lot of submerged American peculiarity to a head. The 2 most obvious threads:
— the ongoing racial anxiety about a loss of power and impunity by “traditional” Americans — ie European-descended “conservatives”. Obama gave long-time neofascist propagandists the handle they needed to focus that anxiety on a black guy, an upstart intellectual with a funny name. “Libertarianism” has always really been about the freedom of the ruling class and the majority to lord it over the “other”. Obama’s win provided a sense of acute crisis, hence the much-vaunted “energized base”. The response was to venerate everything Obama threatened: white power, anti-intellectualism, belief over reason, “authority”, and the government that interfered with those “traditions”.
— the near-millennial expectations that the Obama victory induced in his most enthusiastic supporters, and the inevitable letdown that followed. Change was supposed to be more sweeping, more obvious than this, so anything less starts to look like “business as usual”. I think some of us drifted into the old American obsession with utopian change. Obama provided the handle for that, too.
Those are just 2 facets of a wild mix of American oddness that’s been festering beneath the surface from the beginning. Are things ever going to be normal again? That’s kind of a non sequitur. Things never were normal around here. We’ve muddled through despite our craziness so far. What’s different now is that we really have to make some deep changes or we won’t survive the new resource, environmental, and economic world realities. The best case is that all the present lunacy is the ugly face before the transition to real and necessary change. If not, we are indeed done. Either way, no, there is no going back.