Baby, I've been waiting,
I've been waiting night and day.
I didn't see the time,
I waited half my life away...-- Leonard Cohen
Buried deep inside his tragicomic Grand Guignol expose of Our Lady of the Holy Killbot, Matt Taibbi accomplishes something else: The discovery of America.
Not the pastel flyover-country American cartoon that Beltway professionals blur quickly past as they invoke the fiction of th'murricanpipple a thousand times a day, but the real America.
The real, ugly America.
The America that no longer has any functional understanding of this world. The deeply ignorant, deeply angry, deeply paranoid America that has been swallowed whole by Hate Radio. That remakes its own past, present and future into whatever suits today's batshit Two Minutes Hate Fox Special News Alert.
The America where the minds of millions of our fellow citizens have grown so pudding-soft and devolved from crouching in their spider holes and waiting for the Second Coming of The Imaginary Reaganator to save them from their Imaginary Enemies, that they can now effectively be lead any-damn-where by anybody with a Bible, a conspiracy that flatters their psychosis and a big, cheery, teevee smile.
Taibbi explains in autopsic detail why trying to reason with the Pig People is simply impossible, and, I would argue, why trying to hide inside a snuggle sack of Fake Centrism slung between Michele Bachmann and Barack Obama is insane.
Michele Bachmann's Holy War
...
In her runs for Congress, Bachmann discovered — or perhaps it is more accurate to say we all discovered — that a total absence of legislative accomplishment and a complete inability to tell the truth or even to identify objective reality are no longer hindrances to higher office.
Emboldened by the lack of consequences for her early freakouts, Bachmann's self-mythologizing became more and more overt. In October 2006, she stepped before a packed house at the Living Word Christian Center in Brooklyn Park, Minnesota, and told her life story. All of history's great madmen have had that one gorgeous moment where the cackling hairy hunchback that has been gestating within for years finally comes out and shows itself, strutting up and down the catwalk for the world to see. This was Michele's catwalk moment, a lengthy autobiographical speech in which she claimed "callings" from God had pushed her to every major decision in her life — from studying tax law to running for Congress. She even told the congregation that she and hubby Marcus — who by then had opened a Christian counseling center — had been united not by love but by a unique series of divine visions experienced by three people simultaneously.
Bachmann claimed that back in her college days, she was up one night praying with a female friend of hers when "the Lord gave each one of us the same, exact vision... It was a picture of me, marrying this man, in the valley where his parents have a farm in western Wisconsin." Meanwhile, miles away, Marcus "was repairing a fence on the farm where he worked, and the Lord showed him in a vision that he was supposed to marry me." According to Bachmann, Marcus initially complained to God that he wanted to see the world first, and only later relented.
Snickering readers in New York or Los Angeles might be tempted by all of this to conclude that Bachmann is uniquely crazy. But in fact, such tales by Bachmann work precisely because there are a great many people in America just like Bachmann, people who believe that God tells them what condiments to put on their hamburgers, who can't tell the difference between Soviet Communism and a Stafford loan, but can certainly tell the difference between being mocked and being taken seriously. When you laugh at Michele Bachmann for going on MSNBC and blurting out that the moon is made of red communist cheese, these people don't learn that she is wrong. What they learn is that you're a dick, that they hate you more than ever, and that they're even more determined now to support anyone who promises not to laugh at their own visions and fantasies.
...
Michele Bachmann has found the flaw in the American Death Star.
...
There is an orc army on the move in America.
And they are coming for us.
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15 comments:
Seriously, DG, you should be a commentator on Keith Olbermann.
Bachmann doesn't come across as the Terminator, they were all slow, relentless and methodical. In this piece the movie monster she comes across as Geiger's alien. Sleek, fast, deadly, prone to attacking from weird angles and unfathomably dangerous to underestimate.
"anybody with a Bible, a conspiracy that flatters their psychosis and a big, cheery, teevee smile."
You said it brother.
And the Reaganator image says far more than they want said.
"When you've fallen on the highway
and you're lying in the rain,
and they ask you how you're doing
of course you'll say you can't complain --
If you're squeezed for information,
that's when you've got to play it dumb:
You just say you're out there waiting
for the miracle, for the miracle to come."
Hand them the keys for the next two terms and they won't see the white house for a generation or more. After they wreck what's left of the middle class. Social security will be gutted which would make half the towns in the country under 5k ghost towns. Healthcare costs would skyrocket with the abolishment of the EPA and Medicare as we know it. No collective bargaining for anyone as unions are hippie constructs of a bygone era. All states would go in the red, forcing a tax increase on everyone but the top bracket or two, of course. How bad would it really have to get before the schizophrenic republican base realizes that all the ideas floated as "serious" by their braintrust would make us unrecognizable from North Korea.
No, the US is already Pakistan - a thin layer of ruling elites and a waste swath of poor dominated by religious fanatics.
Jesus. I better mainline my next cup of coffee.
Hand them the keys for the next two terms and they won't see the white house for a generation or more.
Isn't it pretty to think so. If that were true, we wouldn't be having this discussion. Never underestimate the ability of the aggrieved fantasist (read: Christian extremist) to...not ignore reality so much as be oblivious of it.
A Bachmann administration could indeed turn the U.S. into a combination of 1970s Brazil and 2011's North Korea, and the faithful would--on cue; on request--blame everyone but themselves, her, and the theocratic liars responsible.
Look at what they already believe. What basis is there for thinking they'd ever snap out of it?
Batshit crazy and people who follow her are condumb. There is an easy way out of this mess, go hydrogen, and Obama has just taken a baby step.
I was watching... well... a "Monsters Hunters" episode about Sasquatch last night. They made a reference to feral humans, and that phrase really stuck with me, and I wondered if that happened.
Then I read this article, and I realize that we are looking at an industrial post-literate pack of feral humans. They really have reverted to a feral level, keeping only their Glowing Rectangular God and web browser. They can read, but choose not to because it's hard. They can think, but they choose not to because it's hard. They really are the orc army, but with Facebook and YouTube.
Mike.K.
I used to wonder what it would be like to be the rare person in the
5th Century capable of pondering life and morality but knowing that those around you were similar in appearance only and incapable of more than drooling, bestial sadism. I had no reason to doubt that the general run of humanity had risen up over a thousand years or so to a level of basic existential awareness. Now I walk around knowing every moment what it would have been like. Like now. Man, I hate my species for doing that to me.
FUCK!
They are here.
Did you see the latest on the TSA adding the rest of the country to its airport surveillance job?
You rock.
S
And they are coming for us.
__________________
There is an orc army on the move in America.
And they are coming for us.
Yes. And the Democratic Party establishment won't lift so much as a blessed finger to help us.
I take that back. The Democratic Party establishment will lift a finger alright, but it sure won't be the helpful kind.
Heh - so this is what it looks like when people wish they and theirs could just exterminate the worthless vermin swamping their land, but don't really believe in their heart of hearts that they're able to do it. It's all the spite- and loathing-laden terminology and othering of eliminationism without the triumphalism that can at least make the real deal uplifting if you're part of the Us that's against the Them being identified.
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