"You really do hate America!" This was the parting shot from a man I had just debated on a television show shortly before the invasion of Iraq. Because he's a notorious right-wing blowhard, I laughed it off as the ravings of a crackpot in extremis.
Little did I know...
Soon, those of us who opposed the Iraq war, torture, "extraordinary rendition," Guantanamo, spying on innocent Americans and other illegal tools in the Cheney/Bush black bag began to hear variations on that theme from people one would have expected to know better. And it's gotten worse as they've become more desperate... or do the depths to which we've fallen suggest a fault-line in America's culture?
Only a short time ago we dissenters were called "Saddam-lovers," "America-haters" or, when they really wanted to cut deep, "French!" But that usually came from the relatively unhinged, like my debate-partner. Today, similar imprecations fall readily from the lips of media bloviators while the hoi polloi moves toward lynch-mob tenor with screams of "traitor," "terrorist," "kill him," and "off with his head" - these not aimed at lowly actors but rather the next President of the United States. Worse, it is winked at and ignored, then defended and embraced by some of those from whom we expect better.
As one in the crucible of this volcanic yet potentially transformative moment, John McCain, who claims to put "Country First," should re-read "The Ugly American." Sarah Palin can watch the movie.
Fifty years ago, Eugene Burdick and William Lederer's book exposed the boorish behavior of some of our citizens when abroad, warning that a "mysterious change seems to come over Americans..." when amid people and cultures seen as 'different.' While the ensuing half-century proved those in developing countries to be neither less intelligent, less capable, nor less interested in improving their lives than human beings anywhere, this breed of Americans, inclined to "isolate themselves socially," per Burdick and Lederer, seems to have turned inward, chanting "USA, USA!"
As the world prospered behind their backs, this insular strain of American metastasized into swaggering jingoes full of Cold War machismo, content to wave the flag and "Go for the gold." For them, the collapse of the Evil Empire proved the world's sole Superpower could do as it damned well pleased: "We're Number One," baby! Anybody who doesn't like it should get the hell out of the way.
"[L]oud and ostentatious," per the book, this parochial group bequeathed its "mysterious change" to generations of Know-Nothings who stuck to their own, seeing 'difference' as a threat. Dumbed-down by television and wary of anyone lacking sufficient fervor for their triumphant "Christian nation," they made those of different color, heritage, or belief into "the other," a practice encouraged by coded appeals to racism from would-be leaders. With Nixon's "Southern Strategy" and "silent majority" setting the stage, Reagan's "Welfare Queens" and Bush the First's "Willie Horton" spread the contagion while conferring it legitimacy.
Embraced as true conservatives and stoked by hate-radio millionaires, these changelings seduced the Republican Party, laid claim to the flag and launched a "culture war." Adopted by anti-government hucksters, empire-seekers and profligate free-marketeers, they divided the nation with a 'God and Country' ethos that declared the Bible inerrant, reviled homosexuality, "permissiveness," liberalism and critical thinking, denied women equal rights, children any at all, and cowed the media into submission.
For them, the horror of 9/11 lay at the feet of the enemy within - the ACLU, abortionists, pagans, gays and lesbians, secularists. And a stunned public, reeling from the assault and sinking into Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, was led into a flag-waving frenzy of revenge-seeking and other-hating that targeted "Rag-heads" and "sand-niggers."
Drunk with power, this mob took heart from W's "you're either with us or with the terrorists," their malignant hostility dividing us more sharply at each iteration, until the enemy became the world of Islam and anyone who disagreed. Forsaking constitutional freedoms in favor of "security," they turned our very nation inside out, with Americans pitted against one another in states red and blue.
And today, while some dream of change, a perfect storm of cultural division, failed leadership, lost principles, military disaster and economic collapse have ripped the mask away, exposing a virus that has undermined and rendered quaint American values of tolerance, generosity, equality and fairness, replacing them with chauvinism, avarice, confusion, fear and despair.
But struggles that have trampled the principles urging America toward greatness are not new. That they have not destroyed us but rather helped us grope toward maturity is due to some who have called on our better angels and re-inspired the triumph of decency that ennobles our promise. Even with chaos at the doorstep people look for hope, for change, for reason to believe that the America of song and story persists.
Yet today, unable to rise to the challenge of hope, would-be-president McCain chooses expediency over country, placing the priestess of parochialism, a barb-tongued, inanity-prone neophyte, a heartbeat away from his Oval Office. Schooled in "Who Wants to Be A Millionaire" and "American Idol," she energizes the pitchfork mob, dividing "real America" from the rest, reviving faint echoes of white superiority and "manifest destiny" as her sponsor deafens himself to it all.
This failure of leadership affirms the ugly America, the misanthrope nation. Yet the heartbeat of promise persists. There is hope. There is truth. If the people demand them.
Mike Farrell, co-chair emeritus of the Southern California Committee of Human Rights Watch and President of Death Penalty Focus, is the author of "Just Call Me Mike: A Journey to Actor and Activist."
I hope Mike Farrell is giving this as a speech in as many places as he can--it reads like one, and would no doubt horrify a lot of people who have never put 2 and 2 together like he has. Many good people are too busy and uninformed to figure out why they have been led so seriously astray under the Republicans, their rightist evangelical churches, Wall Street, and the other moneychangers.
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/6/10/10532/8283/610/533309
Read that
Seriously
My personal favorite is Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006
I sure had a good laugh a month or so back when Governor Palin pledge to make the McCain Palin administrations federal budgets available online.Thing is see Senators Obama and Coburn got a bill through congress to do that very thing in 2006.
The site is here.
http://www.usaspending.gov/
I hope you check it out.
The perversions, unethical and dirty tricks started by Lee Atwater and carried on by KARL ROVE
must STOP.
No more years of Republicans creating and encouraging THE WORSE ELEMENTS in American society
and threatening the survival of America.
Obama-Biden '08
This is why the rules of democracy of law and justice of decency and ethics have to be the strongest possibel for the democrats. We progressive have to fight for our nation. W eahve to lead in fairness, justice and brotherhood or there is only the abyss becuse the other side is just pulling down an dis no help.
For the first time in so many years, I have HOPE...and that hope is cenetered on Barack Obama, a man of extraordinary intelligence and grace! God bless him, and God bless the United States of America!
I'm not so sure it's all that mysterious. Agent provocateurs have been as ubiquitous in America as have been haters and -- what I see as the biggest problem of all -- bystanders. Agent provocateurs and haters you will never be able to change, but it's the bystanders who are really under stress and, since they comprise not the extreme or the corrupted but the majority of citizens, they're the biggest risk factor for this evil cabal. Here's how they're coopted.
http://my.barackobama.com/page/community/blog/ashleystearns.
I would put my thoughts here, but Huffington only allows me a tiny piece of real estate to do it in and, let's face it -- these are complex issues which require 488 words, not 250.
Thanks, Mike, for your persistent and eloquent witnessing.
A woman queried of Susan Sarandon, "Why should we listen to you? You're not even married." To this woman, I suppose, Sarandon was living in sin and that meant she had lost her moral authority to voice an opinion on anything.
I thought she was a nut and laughed it off. I still think that woman's crazy, but I 'm not laughing anymore. After 8 years I've learned that it's not just some people.....HALF of our country is crazy.
Now McCain finally is going to go on Meet the Press - the first time he has subjected himself to such a visible interview in months.
The question is will Brokaw have the integrity to ask him the hard questions AND FOLLOW UP.
Had he not dodged these kind of interviews, the McCain campaign knew that eventually these other matters would start to develop legs like the disgraceful unsubtantial smears against Obama regarding Ayres and ACORN.
The campaign looks over now, but had the media any sense of fairness it would have been over a long time ago.
Though in general the Media and the electorate in general is less tolerant of the Swiftboating strategies used by Republicans, still they were manipulated shamelessly once again.