While there, the spawn - probably bored shitless of listening to a bunch of tight-assed white people fulminating about sluts aborting snowflake babies
(while, frankly, if they were anything like I was at 17, randomly daydreaming about how they could get to make a snowflake baby or three if they could ever get enough Long Island iced tea into Suzy Creemcheese, the head cheerleader at St. Mary Magdalene)got all in the face of a couple of black guys and drew the attention of an elderly native American who was there for a veteran's thing.
The little bastards then got all up in his face, doing all sorts of Fightin' Whities nonsense like the Tomahawk Chop, chanting "Trump" and "Build The Wall".
The fact that a bunch of teenagers, bored (what's that Chesterton line about tormenting the cat?), restless, and stupid took out all that on a bunch of bystanders who represented things their white asses disliked is about as shocking as finding gambling at Rick's Cafe' Americain.
No. What's irritating is the reason they felt that it was just fine to do this in public. Because of the people who currently run this country, and, especially, the jackass whose MAGA hat represents every vile stupid thing these kids put on show last week, have told them that White is Right and that they need to "stop apologizing" for it. That "we won" means the right, and the need, to rule like conquerors and punk everyone they hate.
What's insanely irking is realizing that these morons are just the fingertip on the idiot fist of the Trumps and Millers and Bannions and all the other MAGAts that our ridiculously goofed up electoral system foisted on us two years ago. These people are crawling out of the woodwork like roaches out from under the baseboards because they believe they are led by the bigger vermin at the top.
I mean, how fucking stupid do you have to be to chant about building a wall to prevent illegal immigration at someone who, if their ancestors had any idea of what was coming and even the dimmest sense of self-preservation, would have build themselves a wall and exterminated yours the moment their pasty asses fell off the boat?
That's the infuriating part. I've worked for some people I had very little respect for. I've worked for some people who I didn't trust, or who worried me. But nothing was as frightening as realizing that the people who were your boss were just too goddamn stupid to see trouble ahead and too goddamn vicious to avoid it even if they did.
I've said this before in this place, but that while I loathed and despised Dick Cheney I also gave him the fearful respect for a true Evil Boss. He was a bastard, but a cunning bastard. He did things that harmed people and things I loved and I hated him for that. But I also knew that his acts were done with some dark intelligence to further his aims. I disagreed with those aims, but not with his skill in working towards them.
These people? They're ALL like these idiot kids, from Mango Mussolini all the way down. They just want to dance around and preen for their fellow racist morons and Ayn-Rand-fapmeisters. It's feels like being the astronaut realizing that you're the monkey in the Planet of the Apes.
Except these aren't the sentient apes of the movie. They're just goddamn poop-flinging, chest-thumping, banana-gobbling moron monkeys that managed to find themselves in the executive suite and are going to show their whole ass to the humans.
I could stand being ruled by Evil. I'd hate it. I'd fight against it. But I'd at least have some respect for my enemies.
It's being ruled by Stupid and Vicious that utterly galls the hell out of me.
12 comments:
Here are a couple of interesting links.
One is Matt Taibi's latest take on moral panics.
And two is an article suggesting that things might have been more nuanced than portrayed.
I have no actual knowledge of what happened, but I do recall being a stupid seventeen year old.
The Taibbi piece is behind the paywall, but it sounds like it's mostly about the Buzzfeed Russiagate thing, and Taibbi has been consistently anti-anti-Trump on the Mueller investigation.
The second link is to the "American Conservative" which is Trumpkin Pravda, a sort of dead-tree Fox and Friends. Of COURSE they're gonna say it was "more nuanced", since they'd have to otherwise admit that these little bastards were just typical Trumpkins, full of racism and bile like the third of the country that still gives Trump an 89% "positive" rating. They'd tell you that Orange Foolius shooting the guy on Fifth Avenue was "nuanced". They're a bunch of bought-and-paid-for "conservative" liars.
I was a stupid seventeen-year-old, but I was also a stupid seventeen-year-old in 1974, when calling people "redskins" or "black bucks" was already being hammered on for being rude, racist, and stupid. I still carried with me a LOT of the racist shit I'd learned growing up in the Sixties (I once caught myself using the expression "jewing down" for haggling over price, which was an ugly reminder of how fixed in my head a lot of that stuff was and is). By the time I was a stupid 25-year-old I was a GI and learning to screw my head on differently.
These rotten apples clearly haven't fallen far from the racist-shithead-tree. You bet their mommies and poppies are proud MAGAts and treasure their spawn for standing up for Whiteness and triggering the libs. They won't suffer a moment's regret for this.
But We the People are going to find out what happens when a third of our countrymen openly fight for the return of 1949. And I don't think a lot of us are going to find that it doesn't really Make America Great Again, seeing as it wasn't Great for anyone but the rich white guys back then, either.
"And I think a lot of us are going to find that it doesn't really Make America Great Again, seeing as it wasn't Great for anyone but the rich white guys back then, either."
Fixed.
And, to the point, these people are the symptom, not the disease. The white supremacist morons on Capitol Hill and down Pennsylvania Avenue are the disease. And, unlike most diseases, they make OTHER people - like me - sick.
Here's a link that does a better job, IMO, of describing what happened and what will happen: http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2019/01/presumption-white-male-innocence-face-available-evidence
"Does this mean that the kids in the video are beyond redemption? In the abstract, of course not. In this particular case, I don’t know. More crucially, I don’t care, because the more salient fact is that they almost certainly won’t try. Why would they? Not only are their school and families hotbeds of the kind of racism they expressed towards Nathan Phillips, but the media has immediately rallied to offer them a way out in the form of pleading youthful ignorance. They’re being offered field trips where the people they hurled abuse at are expected to teach them what their parents and teachers failed to—or rather, didn’t even try to. What, exactly, is the motivation here for change?
For the most part, people don’t get better because they want to be better. They get better because being bad has negative consequences. And when it comes to white men of a certain class, those consequences simply don’t exist. Instead there is a narrative of innocence that is impervious to all common sense and contrary evidence, to everything in our experience that tells us that a person, even if they’re a teenager, doesn’t just fall into shouting “Build the Wall!” at a man old enough to be their grandfather. I don’t know what the solution is to the problem exemplified in this video, for either the boys themselves or society as a whole. But I do know that ignoring the actual parameters of the problem is not it.
Too bad you can't read the Taibi article. It isn't behind a paywall for me.
The article talks a lot about "moral panics" where the press takes an incident and blows it all out of proportion in order to get eye balls. This goes a long way back.
He traces out some notable incidents and what happens afterwards.
The point I was trying to make was that, yes, seventeen year olds do stupid shit. Oh yeah, and dog bites man. However, viral media outrage is something to be extremely wary of and not to be needlessly fed.
If people are doing *bad* things then someone should do *something* and that something always involves important people placing restrictions on the rest of us, because, you know, there are bad actors among us.
So, you need to be careful about your outrage, otherwise you are just whistling up a man on a white horse.
FDChief, I'm SO glad you are back writing your blog. A fresh wind blows from your writing providing the faint scent that not all is lost in all quarters.
Walt.
Other than being fairly full of shit on subjects outside of the Vampire Squid, I'm not sure what Taibbi's take has to do with this. The circumstances are simple enough and require no press-fluffing. And it's not as if we haven't seen enough of this sort of Fightin' Whities vomit out of the MAGAts before and elsewhere. These idiot kids are simply parroting the vile spew coming from their parents, teachers, and their political idols. Are you suggesting that all this is actually some sort of faked up thing, that the MAGAts are really peaceable savants who want Small Government and Low Taxes? If so, please send some money to my friend the Nigerian oil minister.
I don't know if I'm properly conveying this, but my outrage at Republican mafeasance has burnt hotter than a thousand suns ever since Dubya and Dick betrayed my country into imperial war in the Middle East, compounded that betrayal with negligence and greed that condemned my fellow soldiers and American civilians to their deaths and immiseration, tortured and lied and then capped it off by strolling off whistling as Obama promised to look forward, not back.
Now all this shit has returned, only slathered thickly with the sort of open racism and hate for the Others that these stupid kids are gleefully showing openly.
Outrage? You have NO idea. I want to bomb these bastards like Cologne. I want to go through them like Sherman through Georgia. These people are traitors to every ideal of this country, and are even more galling for claiming to represent the highest aspirations of it, just as their treasonous forebears the slavers claimed back in 1861.
The paradox of liberalism is that the American Left has always found a way to excuse this racism and xenophobia and theocracy and plutocracy from the Right. It still does. I am NOT the Voice of the Left, simply a helpless old man who is watching my country regress to a meaner, dirtier, lesser time. I cannot, and will not, be able to summon the sort of cleansing fire I would like to see.
But.
If you think that the Man on Horseback hasn't already ridden into the public square you aren't paying attention. The instruments of supposedly-republican government are failing, largely because old white people like me love this sort of loathsome hate and white pride. Vote suppression, gerrymandering, and the ultimate cruel cosmic joke, the rule of "activist judges" legislating "conservative" talking points from the bench.
We the People are fortunate that the current white horse rider is a tangerine-hued idiot who could fuck up a wet dream, because when you hear things like declaring a "national emergency" over a fake immigration "crisis" (and, pace Taibbi, THERE is an actual piece of press fluffery, the ridiculous degree to which the "news" organizations (I discount FOX and other propaganda outlets like American Conservative because, duh, of course they're going to megaphone this lie) have simply passed on the Trumpkin hysteria.
Taibbi is flat-out wrong. The problem is that the press isn't hysterial ENOUGH about the damage these people are doing. There's not enough outrage over their multiple betrayals and lies and wrecking.
Don't kid yourself.
That Republican elephant is already in the room, and the press has spent generations squawking "Both Sides!".
And here's a link that discusses the problem that this sort of Trumpkin poses to the body politic: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/01/right-wing-terrorism-trump-rhetoric.html
"Right-wing extremists have embraced Trump. According to extremism scholar J.M. Berger, in the right-wing Twitterverse, “Support for Trump outstripped all other themes by a wide margin,” with #MAGA slogans and imagery pervading much of their content. The van of Cesar Sayoc, who is suspected of sending 13 pipe bombs to prominent Trump critics, was covered in pictures of Trump and combative stickers embracing his favorite themes, ranging from “CNN sucks” to depictions of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and others as swamp-dwelling criminals. All political causes have a loony fringe, but the president’s reaction to his most extreme supporters is at times sympathetic and in other cases a genuine question mark, in contrast to other leaders who openly rejected objectionable individuals and movements on their side of the political spectrum.
The president’s reactions, and nonreactions, make right-wing terrorism much more potentially dangerous. They give more attention to extreme voices and legitimate their cause. In addition, the Trump administration has not devoted resources to right-wing terrorism despite the danger it poses. As such, it is more likely to continue and has a greater political impact—the goal of terrorism."
Sorry Chief, I am not explaining myself very well. I will try again at a high level.
1) America is ruled by oligarchs. More so now than when I was a child.
2) The main tool of control is to segment the population into fragments and then set the fragments against each other so that the oligarchs can control the balance of power.
3) An important aspect of shaping these fragments is to get people in one fragment to de-humanise the people in the other fragments.
3) The Republican Party and the Democratic Party are two sides of the same coin controlled by the oligarchs.
4) An outrageous event is a convenient thing as it hardens people into their allotted fragment and allows for dehumanisation of the other.
5) This MAGA schoolboy idiot versus Native Activist sure feels like another outrage-de-jour.
6) The ensuing chest thumping and bellowing are entirely predictable and serve the interests of the ruling classes.
7) We need to find a different approach, otherwise we will continue to be lead around like a farmer leads a cow through the ring in its nose.
Nonsense.
The Democratic Party is a fractious coalition of everything from neoliberals to outright socialists with every breed of wild cat in between.
The GOP is John D. "The Public Be Damned" Rockefeller, the standard bearer of the New Gilded Age.
The "ruling classes" don't have to lead these MAGAts; they're self-slaughtering cows who will gleefully sell the rest of us into slavery, who will herd us into the showers so long as they get to be the kapos and get butchered last.
They have already shown us, like these idiot kids, that they will show us their whole ass in return for "hurting the right people"; the poor and the brown and those of us richer and whiter who want to make the nation better for the poorer and browner.
You can't engage that. How the hell could you? What "different approach" do you suggest? Give them just a teensy bit of racism instead of the full meal deal? A smidgen of plutocracy rather than full-blown Gilded Ageism?
Why the hell would they take that? Their Pravda - Breitbart and InfoWars and Fox and Rushbo and Pirro and Coulter - tells them that the Leader is advancing the Glorious Cause against the lib'rul traitors. They don't consider us Americans. They don't listen to our "fake news". The dragon's teeth sown by forty years of nonstop lies and bullshit have sprouted their vile crop; reprogrammable meatheads that will howl at every ridiculous FOX lie. It'd be sad if it wasn't so revolting.
So. There's no winning over these people. There's no "converting" or "rescuing" the other side. These people and their party MUST be driven howling into the wilderness as they were in 1932.
And the ONLY way to do that is through 1) a massive groundswell that completely realigns the political situation in the US, or 2) takeover of the Democratic Party by progressive force, the way the teabaggers were led to take over the GOP.
(con't)
(con't)
I know I keep hammering on this, but first-past-the-post voting means there's no other way. The entire political history of the US has been dominated by two parties, because that's what FPTP voting does. The only time there has been anything else has been when one of the two big parties is dying, as the Whigs did in the late 1850s.
But that didn't result in a third party. The southern Whigs became Democrats (well, traitors, first, and then when fear begat wisdom the survivors became Democrats), the northern/freesoil Whigs Republicans.
The closest the US has EVER come to a viable third party was in the election of 1912, when Roosevelt and Debs and Taft split the "progressive" vote and put Wilson in office. The consequences of this were a renewal of the sort of racist shit that Wilson may or may not have loved but was certainly indifferent to suppressing, and the US entry into WW1 with the disasters for economic and political liberties that entailed.
So, no. There's no indication that there is political support for a national surge for, say, a Green Party or a Berniecrat/democratic socialist party. The way back to sanity is twofold:
1 - take over the Democratic Party from the conservaDems, and
2 - destroy the GOP by driving their partisans out of US politics in shame, the way the actual Nazis were destroyed and driven out of German politics.
Until We the People can agree to that, these radical reactionary scum, young and old, will be with us forever.
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