George Packer’s article in The New Yorker about the increasing isolation of the South is interesting, but I wonder why I never see anyone mention how the GOP is just a constant annoying source of unnecessary stress for everyone. I mean it is completely unceasing. In Obama’s term it has been unrelenting obstruction, hallucinatory insults, and manufactured crises. But it was even worse under George W. Bush, where it was color-coded terror alerts and duct tape and WMD’s and terror terror terror and OMG GAYS and the War on Christmas and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. I’m only scratching the surface here, but the right/south/GOP never ever lets the left get a moment’s rest. We are never allowed to get to a point where we can say, ‘Okay, that’s settled, now we can relax for a few weeks.’ The newest proposal is to have a fight over the debt ceiling every two months. I mean, what the fuck. Seriously?
I woke up when they impeached Bill Clinton. And I don’t think I’ve felt a moment’s peace since then. Not one single goddamn day has gone by since 1998 when the right wasn’t doing or saying something that I found stressful.
I may be an extreme case…a political junkie who is addicted to my own pain. But, it’s getting to everyone. It has to.
For the love of God, please, give us some rest already.
Well because, ya’ know, “both sides do it”. I’m afraid that we will never be rid of that false equivalency. Seems to be baked into the cake.
The funny thing is that the Right not only stresses the left out continually, but they stress their own base out, too, by constantly telling them that we’re out to get them when we are not.
The right has to stress out and stoke fear in their base.
Without fear, they might actually think a little bit about what they believe and why.
That always leads to less Republicans.
Exactly right – almost.
Republicans operate by promoting fear & hatred. THey use constant turmoil to push for a ruling caste of very wealthy families.
If you want to read a book about a true Republican Nirvana, there’s a book our named “The Hunger Games”. 1% own everything, everybody else works to keep from starving.
I have a fair number of people in my family who I would consider “far right”. And what you say is correct. It seems that they are always in a state of tremendous, self induced stress about almost anything that goes on. They soak up Fox News and far right websites, e-mail their Tea Party brethren every crazy conspiracy theory and recirculate every anti-Obama or anti-Democrat nugget that pops up. In their minds we are always teetering at the precipice of tyranny. They seem to have absolutely zero capacity for filtering bullshit. I just don’t know how a lot of them are able to function as working adults in our society.
It sounds to me, though, like their dream of the perfect world is on the horizon. Go read that Citadel Patriot Agreement. It is the definition of crazy.
I think you hit on something important here. As much anxiety as Tea Party types give those of us on the left, it is they who truly seem trapped in a hell of mental pain. Imagine how awful it must feel to truly believe the government is a malevolent, Nazi-like force attempting to steal your guns and liberty. Or that the primary goal of the left is to prop up a murder-machine that has destroyed 400 million unborn children in the worst holocaust of all time. Or whatever else they think.
Not that those people’s pain excuses their insanity, stupidity, or the agony they put the country through. And I’m not a proficient enough Buddhist to forgive them for it. But I do feel a small amount of compassion for them sometimes.
Here is a personal story I have that highlights this sad state of mind inside that horrific, delusional bubble.
My nephew, who is 18, had recently been toying with the idea of joining the National Guard. His grandpa (my father) is truly anguishing over what he thinks is the very real possibility that some day very soon, because of the direction that this current administration is taking the country, his grandson will be called into service by this government to round up, suppress, and to even kill, his fellow citizens and neighbors.
I can tell you that he is not kidding about this. My father is an intelligent man. He is not stupid and he is not insane. He really, really believes this stuff. And he is getting more than a healthy dose of validation from a whole hell of a lot of people in his circle.
Yes, that is what the right wing is about. Their media is in a constant frenzy of panic, and their base not only eats it up, they won’t tune in unless there is that constant frenzy of panic.
I think this is the most important difference between the so-called moderate Republicans (not politicians but the regular people) and the core. Not racism – even the moderates generally have a good dose of that. Not religion – a lot of the nuttiest wingnuts don’t give a crap about religion except to the degree they have to pretend to for their peers.
No, I think it is the fundamental need for constant paranoia – of some OTHER who is doing and/or planning something horrible against US good people. Put wingnuts in an isolated community with no news from the outside and no threats whatsoever and they’ll burn people as witches.
The wingnut propoganda leaders – from Goebbels to Sununu to Falwell to Ralph Reed to Rove to Dobson – they intrinsically get this about their followers. It’s not just that constantly stirring the base up helps the rich leaders achieve their ends – it’s that the base is desperate for stirring up and if the leaders try to calm them down the base will find someone else who’ll tell them the “truth”.
The problem now is that in these days of intense media and entertainment distractions the wingnuts need an even more intense threat than ever before in order to drown out all the competing noise. And worse, there is a dearth of real threats. 23 years after the Berlin Wall fell, 20 years after the USSR ended, 11 years after 9/11, 9 years after the shoe-bomber, and in this post-leaded-air era of plummetting crime rates, the threat level is as low as it’s been in memory.
Well, with two exceptions. One is the proliferation of over-armed wingnuts, and the other is the inevitable ending of life as we know it due to climate change within the expected lifetimes of people being born today. But of course the wingnut blob is inextricably intertwined with the gun and carbon industries, so those threats can’t be used.
So they have to invent stuff like Obama’s secret plots.
There can’t be a good ending to this trend.
I saw it first hand when relocating from Tucson, Arizona — where I had lived for many years. I had a mechanic who was really skilled and reasonably priced. He seemed honest too, though he had told me he had added $20 to a client’s bill once or twice, when they pissed him off, and donated it to his church. But I don’t think he stole for himself and his Robbinhood efforts for his church were small sums. We would talk politics sometimes but it was hard because our views were so far apart. But we talked about all kinds of things, enjoyed each other’s company, and were almost friends. (I say almost because he wanted to keep a little professional distance so he wouldn’t feel bad about charging me his going rate, which was damn inexpensive compared to others in town. I understood because I didn’t want to not pay him. I had witnessed his strong loyalty to those he considered full friends, such as, for instance, the ex of a woman I dated for a time.) He had many really good qualities and I respected him (though I would say I mostly had compassion for him around what I saw as twisted political views).
At one point, he seemed to actually be coming around in his politics. I spoke often of how Republicans try to drive wedges between different groups of struggling folks in order to advance the true agenda of the wealthy and powerful. He would think about this sometimes. But he was so angry at Latinos, who he saw as liars, thieves and takers, that he mostly blew off what I said. On one occasion, though, right after bin Laden was killed, he called me and said, “You know, I think people have been lying to me. I think Obama really is a good man.” I had been saying I considered Obama a good person and a truly great president. When he said that, I really thought he had come around. Unfortunately, the next time I saw him, it was as if none of those words had been said.
He was my mechanic for about 16 years so, when I was leaving Tucson, I took him and his wife out to dinner as a way of saying thanks. After that, I was to see him one last time before driving away. He was supposed to work on my car. He was doing the work, and he began talking politics. At first, it was alright but he kept getting angrier and angrier. I realized that, in the past, he had controlled himself because he didn’t want to lose a customer. He worked only on Volvos so his customers were mostly liberal — an irony I pointed out to him on many occasions.
After a while, he was yelling at me. I said, “We may not see each other again. Let’s not let our last interaction be dominated by our political differences.” He said, “That would be fine except that it’s people like you who are ruining this country for my boys.” He then slammed down the hood of my car and told me to get out.
He had done almost all of the work but had forgotten to change the oil. I said, “What about the oil change?” He threw a filter at me and said, “Take it to Jiffy Lube.” This was totally absurd because he often told me of how incompetent “those Jiffy Lube monkeys” were. I was totally confused. I said, “Alright, well how much do I owe you?” He said, “Nothing, it’s my going away gift.” I said, “Roy, you did a lot of work; I want to pay you.” It must have been $350 to $500, parts and labor. His response was, “I don’t care what you want.” I said, if I thought you really meant it about the going-away gift, I’d be fine with it. He said, “I don’t care what you think.”
It felt really bad to leave things this way. I said, “Take good care of yourself.” I heard him mutter, under his breath and in spite of himself, “You too.” It was weird. He was really angry and almost torn apart because I don’t think he wanted our friendship (or whatever you might call it) to end that way either. But he was so angry he couldn’t help himself.
Had a couple of those experiences myself. Strangely, I found out later that I had been simply the wrong person at the wrong time and my old friend was simply venting because someone in his family had been accepted into college but he didn’t have the funds to help out. Don’t take his anger on face value, he could have really been torn up by something entirely different than you.
He may have also been coming to terms with not hating his customer the liberal and seeing value in your friendship which then didn’t tabulate with the hatred for Liberals in general that he was supposed to feel.
or he could have been sad he was leaving. People are demented.
demented is not the right word. sad about his friend leaving, couldn’t express it
I mean that people act in inexplicable ways when they are upset.
It’s like, “you’re breaking up with me and moving out of state? Well, then, fuck you and your Volvo, you tree-hugger.”
Some people act that way.
Right, because that’s the only way they can deal with it.
Yes, I think this is a real possibility. My wife thought that might be it when I told her what had happened. It’s impossible to know. The guy didn’t deal with feelings well and I think it would be fair to call him “demented.” Heck, I don’t think even he would disagree with that. He had one hell of a hard childhood, with biker parents. In a way, he was close with his dad — but then his dad died when he was 12.
His parents were atheists and somewhere along the way, I’m thinking as a young teen, he was introduced to fundamentalist Christianity. I’m guessing it offered the structure he was lacking. At the same time, it was really hard for him to think of his dad rotting in hell. We talked about religion from time to time. He knew I was Jewish. I never mentioned that I was on a Sufi path because Sufism is the mystical branch of Islam and I knew that would freak him out. In reality, though, mysticism is mysticism — whether Jewish, Christian, Islamic or anything else. He liked my views on religion, and would ask for my take on various Christian doctrines.
The guy was very intelligent. If you met him out in the world, you wouldn’t know it because he didn’t get the kind of breaks that would have allowed him to make good use of it. He went into the Air Force as a teen and was no doubt a brilliant plane mechanic. When he got out, he became a brilliant car mechanic. I loved watching him diagnose problems. It was like watching a painter paint or a chef cook. But he could have been so much more. He was sometimes insecure around being “just a mechanic.” I’m an attorney but I treated him as my equal because, in truth, he was. There but for the grace of God . . .
I think your story and your analysis would merit a diary in its own right. In my all too brief times in the US many years ago I was often stuck by the extreme personal kindness of many I came in contact with and yet the extreme violence of their political views.
Some of it has to do, I think, with the extreme militarization of US society. Some with what Durkheim called anomie – the normlessness of a changing society – and many others have called alienation.
It reminds me most of apartheid South Africa, where a white ruling class lived in dread of others taking over – only to discover that, in many ways, they were better off in a more democratic and pluralist society – except that they could never admit it.
Many books have been written on the phenomenon, and yet I’m not sure I have ever read a full explanation.
Yes, and I think this comes back to Tarheel Dem’s comments further up the thread. I’m as Yankee as they get, born and raised in Brooklyn, NY, but I’ve lived in two places in the south — Piedmont North Carolina and East Texas — and I never met nicer and friendlier people. I just don’t talk politics with them. (And there are liberals here, just not too many.) People here in TX know that my family and I frequently visit NY, and whenever we are leaving the typical comment is, “I wish I could go with you”. The culture of the south is much more complex than people in the north tend to give them credit for. Imagine, for example, how impoverished this country would be without the food, folklore, music and literature of the south.
As someone whose family has a deep southern heritage, I found this articleby Lynn Parramore very interesting.
Thanks for this. It’s a very important message, and beautifully written.
Of course, there is also this:
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/2013/01/rage_bait.php?ref=fpblg
yes. exactly.
Is he afraid of Agenda 21? Literal conversation with mom on Saturday:
Me: “Good thing we have secular laws.”
Mom: “We won’t for long…”
Me: “What are you talking about?”
Mom: “Have you heard of Agenda 21?!?!”
Then she went on and on about how we’re going to be rounded up into camps in order to combat sprawl.
OTOH I have found myself in the situation of reassuring some (not relatives, I think relatives are a special case) Just pointing out that, for example, we have no indication that that is the direction Obama is going can be very reassuring. And it’s true of course. And it can be reassuring to point the truth in that fog of lies and anxiety.
No both sides don’t do it – they are not an equal problem. The blockage has come mainly from the South and GOP.
Should a let ’em succeed.
I mean secede.
I was trying to assess your snark.
Yep, I pretty well screwed the pooch on that one.
Politics is in your blood, you’d miss them if they weren’t there!
Richard Nixon’s last press conference – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Any way, just think of what it’s like for the left in countries where you risk your life if you oppose the Government. Where politics is literally a matter of life and death. Every day. You’ve won a few battles. Had a few set backs. But are slowly winning the war.
The Democratic party at leadership level is mostly populated by corporatists. It would be even worse if you were having to fight your own side. The whole point of Republican obstructionism is to try to wear down people like you. YOU annoy THEM just by being there, by being what you are: In their eyes a godless collaborator with the enemy. The fact that you are male, white and middle class only makes it worse.
Just think what a pain in the A you are to them. And enjoy.
Nuke the site from orbit.
Stupid and Crazy have been with us forever, like arthritis and parasitic diseases. They used to hide out in their quaint little burrows scattered about the landmass. Then they found gods called Koch and Trump and Adelson and Greenberg and myriads more who peed money into their mouthparts to enable them to evolve into Shitters of Propaganda, all the time, every time.
You will never find peace until Americans awake from their StupidCrazy dreamtime and rise up to destroy the new gods once and for all. But that would require being awake enough to quit pretending that capitalism American style is incompatible with democracy.
Not one single goddamn day has gone by since
19981980 when the right wasn’t doing or saying something that I found stressful.1980 for me.
The rest of the country likes to keep the irrascible, violent, racist, decadent South as a foil to hide its own racism and viciousness and decadence. The Southernization of the US during the 1970s was framed as a nostalgia movement longing for simpler times after the 1960s. And it undid the revolution in the South that Jimmy Carter wanted to nail down though his Presidency. A restoration of respect for stepping away from racism, a restoration of honesty after the cynicism of Nixon.
Folks outside the South love to focus on the loudmouths. Love to ignore the fact that a lot of the increase in Southern craziness is from some of the very areas into which large numbers of non-Southerners have migrated.
So far the rest of the country has had two historical periods to get it right. Reconstruction ran afoul of Northern capitalists wanting to keep an internal colony instead of facing competition and Northern voters worried about the blacks in the North seeking equal rights. The Civil Rights movement finally ran afoul of the Cicero residents not wanting housing desegregation and the Louise Day Hickses not wanting school desegregation and the Archie Bunkerization of the US labor movement.
The right never stops, but neither does the equivalence of the South with that which is bad and reactionary in the South.
If the nitwits who have hogged the political stage in the South ever get busted and sanity returns again, I hope that this time those outside the South don’t collaborate in a reversal. The dysfunctional South has depended for some time on the co-dependency of the rest of the country.
There are a lot of people here who are counting on it.
One explanation of “evil”…of that which pulls back and away from human progress or survival and evolution (synonyms, really) on any level, from amoebae to galaxies and beyond in both directions…is as follows:
It is that force which keeps the story in progress. Without it the entire universe would instantly collapse into its own constantly continuing death and rebirth, forever and ever.
Do I believe this?
Makes sense to me.
On this level…
‘A course…take this’n with a grain of salt.
It’ll taste better, ‘n’anyway…as above, so below. In that grain of salt lies the universe in microcosm.
Bet on it.
Later…
AG
P.S. Bet on it?
Who’s yer bookie?
UH oh!!!
My lack of peace began shortly after November 1994 when Gingrich became Speaker of the House and we had to endure “The Contract with America” nonsense and threats of government shutdown. Of course the impeachment of Clinton just added to the stress. However, I can see BobX’s point that l980 was a turning point, but I wasn’t paying as much attention and the Democrats in Congress buffered this conservative movement. I lived in the deep South from 1997-2001 (university town), but wouldn’t consider it now. I live in a “blue” county in a “blue” state and I’m staying put. Too old for all this nonsense and aggravation. The counties surrounding me are red, though. Now I know why people live on islands.
Progressives are self-selecting themselves into smaller and smaller islands and then wondering why they can’t affect national policy.
You are right about that, but how do we get people to see that when it comes to economics they have more in common, than not? Cash’s “Mind of the South” comes to my mind when I think about these issues. Now we have a whole industry (right-wing media & politicians) that promotes these differences. Also, there are places in the South that continue to feed “Southern pride.” Then there is the West where a libertarian attitude is promoted. In the Midwest and mid-Atlantic, we have a fairly strong urban vs. rural mentality. Lots of competing forces at play that result in division and less economic equality. I venture out to the mainland sometimes, but it’s a tough sell out there. I guess it always has been.
Dick Armey’s admission that Freedom Works paid Limbaugh and Beck EACH $1 million to shill for them should have been promoted much more than it has been.
As far as the Right mouthpieces are concerned there is just too much money in it to tell the truth. And so they will continue to train and maintain people who think it’s smart to aggitate and obstruct.
Norquist is at again bitching about how much Obama spends- but by damn he’d have another war in a blink of an eye if he could. They’ll never be happy even if they had it all.
“Now the trumpet summons us again–not as a call to bear arms, though arms we need; not as a call to battle, though embattled we are–but a call to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle, year in and year out, “rejoicing in hope, patient in tribulation”–a struggle against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease, and war itself.”
JFK Inaugural, 1961
Its going to be a Long fucking March.
It’s a good reminder that the “long twilight struggle” did not end with the fall of the Soviet Union. It just entered a new phase that will perhaps be even more difficult than the Cold War. I’ve long thought that the fall of Communism as a perceived threat started a slow-motion disaster in the West because a lot of progressive reform in the 20th century was grudgingly permitted by the powers that be as the lesser of two evils.
I suppose my awakening came with the election of George W. Bush, and the subsequent Iraq war. My sense of shock deepened when they nominated Palin to run as Vice President. And it’s deepened again since they’ve been willing to threaten to crater the global economy if their demands are not met. Can one even call this a “conservative” party anymore? I was never a Republican, but I didn’t use to think of them as a frightening destructive force.
The owners of the Teapots are Koch bros, and the like; whose level of wealth means they can land on their feet despite a cratering of the global economy. They stand to lose more from a better-paid, more educated work force and environmental and finance regulation.
The National Socialist Party never gave the Weimar Republic a rest, either. Our militarist nationalist authoritarian party simply hasn’t found its Hitler yet—but they will. Especially with a damage-the-national-economy political strategy.
Radical nationalist reactionaries are never satisfied until they have complete control over the body politic. Irrational emotion and frothing hysteria is essential to their existence. Their leaders and financiers are well aware of that.