Wednesday, March 3, 2010

Malaise

I have entered a state of malaise, or ennui, finding myself increasingly unable to listen to or read analyses of the day’s events. I fear I have been overcome by the repeated lies emanating from the enemies of our current regime—they wish “regime change” it would seem. Mainly, I’m just worn out by lies. The opposition simply makes up stuff and then feeds it into their well financed PR outlets, such as the Faux News Network, but really all of the news outlets. Their lies become amplified, and repeated until they are accepted as fact, by repetition alone. And then, when the lies are exposed to truth, they go on to other subjects, undeterred.

Leonard Pitts wrote of the tea baggers that their extreme anger is not borne only of simple racism, but of a larger fear that “their world” has been usurped through the election of Obama. Yes the fact that he is an articulate, highly intelligent black man is part of their rage. But he believes that they see their world crumbling, and they are, as a result, damned mad, and not going to let it rest.

I argued back that there are many differences in the land between what would have been with a republican victory and where we are now because Obama sits in that National CEO seat. Certainly, I have greater confidence that decisions made by the chief executive will be made from positions of honesty, thoughtfulness and with an eye fixed firmly on the future of our nation. But I doubt that the tea baggers have any clue about such things. So what gives rise to their potentially violent approach to our current government? Well racism is certainly one explanation. The notion that a Condi Rice as president (they make this claim) would have been welcomed by these same people, thereby nullifying any charge of racism, seems to me hypothetical poppycock. That is, because such a proposition is not a real possibility--never was--it allows them to argue at no risk that they would have welcomed her with open arms, despite the race thing.

But even if we assume that is true, what then are we to make of their cherished beliefs? They can be seen with little effort as people without serious principles at all. It comes down to their extreme hatred of Democrats, or Liberals?? But what's that all about? I am forced to conclude that these people have been so captured by the right wing media machine (thank you Rupert Murdoch) the right wing corporate money machines (thank you Supremes), and their local right wing churches that they have been inflamed and made into some kind of robots, incapable of rational thought. Perhaps they never were terribly rational to begin with.

But they are also inflamed by lies, invented out of whole cloth by unscrupulous republican thugs who wish now to regain power at any cost to the nation.

Indeed, our current “national debate” about almost any subject is so filled with absurdities, that we must be the laughing stock of the world. Dispiriting does not begin to describe my feelings about our little world

And elsewhere the South Dakota state legislature passed a law requiring that their schools teach their kids that global warming is simply a theory, like evolution, and that many possible explanations exist, including astrological and they are equally valid. Apparently, drawing up horoscopes for the world is next.

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