"God hates fags."
I'm not a witch.
Tea baggers.
Beheadings.
Pirates.
What a time to be alive. Extremists: it's our time to shine!
Like the tip of a cracked whip, extremists make the most noise and do the most damage. Oh, and get the most press.
Because after decades of defining the humble American dream of owning a home, feeding your kids and having a decent steady job, The Middle has become boring. So boring it's being relegated to a place verging on obsolescence, misappropriated by those who resent its discipline and sense; misnamed and demonized by the greedy and the corrupt so it's easier to dispose of and ultimately destroy. The once peripheral polar extremes are the players now.
But hell, even a cretin of a Creationist will tell you that without a middle, there's collapse. And not just of literal things like houses of cards or pyramids of rictus-sporting cheerleaders but abstract things like ideas, history, education, culture, institutions, nations. But such things don't enlarge when you pinch their screens or pull each other's hair out while wearing Daisy Duke bikinis. Borrrrrinnnng!
Our relentlessly low-aiming and opportunistic media have extrapolated from the sporadic televised car chases (that would ensure hard-on-producing ratings spikes) to giving considerably more air time to the human car wrecks out there, encouraging any lunatic with a flag pin on his lapel take some makeup, hit a mark and talk into a lens, conflating utter cluelessness with ordinary, average Americanism. Talk about hard-on-producing ratings spikes. Why, Roger Ailes has built an entire network on the time honored premise of the freak-show. What's old is new; what was once radical is now run-of-the-mill.
But once again a bill of cheap, shiny goods is being foisted upon to the American public: those baggers/birthers/deathers/haters may get the lion's share of cameras pointed in their direction, and they may speak as though they represent the vast swath of ordinary, normal, put-upon Americans. But they are in reality...now listen up...extremists.
That's right. They're just louder than moderately inclined folks who, seeing a bearded raving nut job ranting on a subway platform, avert their eyes and read their newspapers (read newspapers??? Those elitist bastards.).
Without a sane, moderate middle to form a foundation, the Fox Newses, the Becks, the Limbaughs, the Fred Phelps, the Palins, the Demints, as well as the steady diet of insane-in-the-brain candy "reality" programming keeps the collective IQ down and the levels of know-nothing extremism up.
Time for the middle to reassert itself by voting in the upcoming midterms, by staying strong and focused and restoring the purposely distorted symmetry and repairing the imbalance caused by callous indulgence of forces which serve society best from the fringes.
Before extreme means produce an extreme end.