Remember attacks on German Americans during World War 1? How about more of the same in World War 2? The Japanese internment camps? The perennial demonization of Jews? Gays? Catholics? Not to mention those who toiled and died in slavery and lived lives of humiliation under Jim Crow.
It's all there in the history that seems to have been almost purposely mislaid by those who know too well that a public which knows its own story knows itself; it is an activist public, educated and energized against forces which inevitably seek power through oppression and division.
Like a recalcitrant child who refuses to see the lesson of its past imperfect behavior, the mobs who lately decry Islam and discharge their fatuous bile are only the latest in a long line of porous intellects railing against convenient scapegoats and destined to replay an episode that, were history a requisite part of this nation's diet (instead of just another quaint castoff from the pre-iPhone era), would surely have evolved out of existence.
Instead, the tenacious low-brow rabble will inevitably grow and spawn yet more generations of imbeciles, rotten apples dropped from the blasted bough of a diseased tree (see Mike Judge's "Idiocracy" for some seriously terrifying comedy on the subject).
Because, despite the still reverberating echoes of recent history, echoes which have to fight to pierce the driving blizzard of bandwidth, these routine displays of ignorance have come to define the face of America, the one the world sees and recognizes as the face of a once great, now mad, deposed king.
And since 9/11, there's money to be made in the fear game and keeping it alive and aflame is lining many a capitalisto-fascist's pockets. You know who they are: the loud, the unruly and the pissed, the chicken hawks and the hypocrites, the ones who make no bones about damning an entire people if it fits their writ-in-crayon credo. These are the folks who look at the darker aspects of our nation's history and take away not lessons but blueprints: it can be done again, only slicker, bolder. Using a socio-political-media infrastructure already in place, the cynical purveyors of xenophobia prod a nervous public into making choices already shown in ancient record to be senseless and destructive. But after making them dumb and fat like their bygone antecedents, they become compliant, and embark on their faithful recreation of hateful episodes in human history, like civil war re-enactors who are unaware that they're re-enacting.
And without the essential introspection provided by history's hard lessons, the nation's sanity threatens to descend into dementia in the form of these scurrilous attacks, unchecked by a bought and sold media, pushed to see how far these drones will go before they either riot or revolt.
History shows it's all been done before. Maybe that's why it's so damn easy.