Bring Me Another Mint Julep

It would be a full time job to chronicle the slow slide into madness of the political Right in America and I’m too lazy to invest the time and effort to get the facts straight, but I know what I think I know and it’s pretty clear to me that approximately thirty-eight percent of our population is nuttier than a squirrel turd. Even factoring in the disingenuous parochialism of the cynical and manipulative media, there’s plenty of evidence that a lot of under-educated, under-achieving white folks with little or no dental insurance are loosing their grip on whatever small sliver of reality they were previously in contact with.

My sources for this information are not just CNN and MSNBC, but even my local Fox affiliate and the Wall Street Journal. Beginning with Sarah Palin campaign rallies and progressing through “Tea Bagger” tax protests and the recent Health Care Town Hall meetings, the tone and volume of outrage and derision directed against President Obama and modernity in general is pretty disturbing. Now I will be the first to note that I was highly critical of former President G.W. Bush and often stated that he was dumb as raw cookie dough, not to mention a war criminal, but at least I was criticizing him for things after the fact, as opposed to being enraged by the mere possibility that he might actually exercise the power of the office to which the majority (sort of) of Americans had elected him. It is true that during the Bush administration there were many Americans, myself included, who were inclined to believe that the President was putting the interests of oil companies and Halliburton above the safety and security of our nation. We were also inclined to believe that the President had a primitive view of human society and that his actions may have been influenced by a deeply rooted messiah complex. Subsequently revealed facts have generally borne this out, but for the most part Americans did not hate George Bush and even those of us who despaired at his policies felt he was likely a bit slow and that Dick Cheney was the real asshole. Just like Harold and Kumar, most of us would have enjoyed having a few beers with George and shooting the shit.

It generally holds that Liberal outrage is more often expressed through sarcasm and unflattering analogy, while outraged Conservatives typically scream unintelligible epithets and flex the veins in their necks. This is, of course, because Liberals are way smarter than Conservatives, and also at least in part because Liberals want to be sure that any unbiased observers know it (we middle-of-the-road types, on the other hand, are probably way smarter than either Liberals or Conservatives because we know that truth is complex and extremism is in fact a vice, and a dangerous one at that), but the current loathing of our President by a significant minority of Americans seems to me to have a decidedly extreme tenor to it. The bulging eyes and semi-toothed grimaces of the inbred, pathologically suspicious and exclusively Caucasian haters reminds me of the cannibalistic hillbilly families in several bad horror movies, and their general inability to coherently articulate an actual fact leads me to conclude that what they are so angry about is not a policy or even a concept, but simply an image.

You could write a few dozen dozen Doctoral dissertations about the issue of race in America and they would pretty much all start around 1607 and run through a tragic set of facts which we have all memorized and forgotten until we arrive at November 2008 and the cleansing of the national soul. The problem is, there are citizens of our fine land who still do not accept the biological commonality of humankind and who cling to fear and resentment as the Rock of Gibraltar against the raging storm of change and the ungovernable tide of diversity that is swallowing their world. As they become less and less able to understand the events that surround them, they become more and more convinced that change must be bad and that among the most likely suspects are, as they have always been, the lazy, watermelon-eating piccaninnies who don’t respect the proper order of things.

Of course, not everybody that disagrees with the President or questions the wisdom of his policies is a racist. I have taken the President to task myself on a number of issues and I am quite concerned, among many other things, about the effectiveness of any potential reform of the health care system which is overly-compromised simply to be able to claim success. There are many decent, intelligent Americans who oppose much of the President’s agenda and the freedom to express an opinion, no matter how dunderheaded the opinion may be, has always been essential to our success as a nation, but we better learn the difference between canasta and dog-fighting because dull-witted, frightened people are dangerous and complacency is the mother of regret.