All-American Hate Speech

Let's believe her. When she says she's a patriotic American and that she typifies patriotic Americans, let's agee that she does. American history is filled with people who have used hateful words to enrich themselves and to destroy others who were quite often weaker or more vulnerable than themselves. On every middle school playground in America, right now, some bully is tormenting some other, weaker child out of the sight of the adults, and some of the other children are egging him on, and still other children are watching from the sidelines. It's as American as apple pie. As she demonstrates with the filth she spews out of her mouth and her pen, Americans aren't nice or decent people, and conservative, overtly patriotic Americans are even less decent and less nice. They do harm, and they like to do harm, just as she likes to do harm, and they even expect to profit from the harm they do. At the very least, they expect to get a laugh. That's been her defense all along--she's just making jokes and liberals don't get the jokes. But there are other motivations: Maybe her real motivation is making a buck, and obviously, making a hateful buck is easy, because it's the all-American thing to do--look at Father Coughlin or Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson. The number of bucks she's making is an index of how hate-filled and indecent Americans are--not fake Americans, but real Americans. If real Amerrtican didn't have her on their shows and buy her books, then they would have nothing to be ashamed of, but they do, and they have.

Or maybe she was just not reared properly. If I were to laugh at her "jokes" or buy her book, I would be ashamed of myself, but if I were her parent, I would really be ashamed of myself. I would say, is it nurture? Did I just not teach her how to be a good person? Or is it nature? Is there just some inherited flaw of temperament that she got from my family or her father's family that shows that we shouldn't have had children in the first place? Because clearly, she is bringing world-class embarrassment to me as a mother, and I would want to hide the fact that she is my daughter. If I were, for some reason, to take any pride in her "success" as a purveyor of hate, well, then there it would be--prima facie evidence that I, too, am an indecent and hateful person.

She looks crazy and frantic, even in the few pictures I've seen of her online. She's losing weight, as if there's some kind of underlying pathology going on, as if she's eating herself up from inside. Fear and hatred and paranoia do take their toll, and if this is her problem, I would normally be sympathetic, and see her utterances as a cry for help, but then we are faced with the enabling problem--members of the mainstream culture must be enabling her for some reason of their own, and so we get back to the first principle--Americans, true patriotic red, white, and blue Americans like hate. They feel comfortable with it and always have. Over the years, they've hated the Irish, the Italians, black people, foreigners of all kinds, Catholics, Chinese workers on the railroad, Jews, Hispanics, gays, fans of the White Sox--the list is as long as your arm. And, of course, it makes any decent American uncomfortable, but "real" Americans are beyond shame--they are so ignorant and poorly brought up and fearful and pandered to by haters in the media that they don't even hear themselves disgorging sewage from their mouths, they don't see the ignorant, vicious looks on their faces, they don't hear the stupidity of their own laughter.

Every time she opens her mouth, she poses a test, and every customer who buys her book fails that test. Every show that puts her on the airwaves fails, too. She's not the only one--there are others on radio and TV who pose the same test, but she's the craziest one. The test is a test of humanity. How low can you go? What sort of vileness it is that you enjoy? How base are your motives? How little shame do you have? And what does that say about America?