The Blair Witch Party

We’re afraid of everything.


There are any number of things in this world to be legitimately afraid of, and four millions years of “better part of valoring” ourselves expeditiously away from the business ends of predators has served us, on the whole, very well.

Yes, human beings stand and fight against impossible odds every day and we rightly call such people heroes and feel no little pride-by-species association in them. “Yeah,” we’ll say with smug pleasure when the aliens come and ask us about Martin Luther King or Oskar Schindler or Nelson Mandela, “They were one of us.” But heroes stand and fight in spite of being terrified, not because they feel nothing. It runs right though our fiction and mythology; The reason we cry at the end of Casablanca isn’t because the film shows us a robot being marched off to war, but because we are watching a flawed and wounded man knowingly give up the thing he loves most in the world for the greater good.

It’s why Hemingway defined it as “grace under pressure.”

So there’s plenty of peril in this world towards which we should show some respectful fear; from terrorists to avian flu to the idjit in the Canyonnero on the cell phone making a fresh cappuccino and tweezing his nose forest and apparently checking to make sure that he’s still circumcised all while bearing blindly down on you…shit’ll get you if you don’t watch out.

But fear can also make you irrational, make you pliant, make you willing to do some amazingly stupid things because your common sense gears have been stripped, all of which – as we all know – makes fear a useful political tool.

You read through or listen to GOP propaganda for the last many years – especially the bile that gets extruded out of the Conservative Evangelical core of that party – and the text is certainly HATE, but the subtext is fear. Always fear. And you read enough of it and after awhile you might start to ask youself, Holy Slasher Film Batman, are these motherfuckers just afraid of everything?!

And the answer is no, they’re not.

They’re afraid of ALMOST everything.

In fact, I’ve made a list…(Big “thank you” to the Phobia List website from whence I pinched this)

Centophobia or Centophobia - Fear of new ideas

Enosiophobia or Enissophobia - Fear of having committed an unpardonable sin or of criticism.

Eurotophobia - Fear of female genitalia.

Gallophobia or Galiophobia - Fear France or French culture.

Geliophobia - Fear of laughter.

Hedonophobia - Fear of feeling pleasure.

Hylophobia - Fear of forests

Kainolophobia or Kainophobia - Fear of anything new

Kolpophobia - Fear of genitals, particularly female.

Melanophobia - Fear of the color black.

Medomalacuphobia - Fear of losing an erection.

Medorthophobia- Fear of an erect penis.

Ouranophobia or Uranophobia- Fear of heaven.

Judeophobia- Fear of Jews.

Logophobia- Fear of words

Panophobia or Pantophobia - Fear of everything.

Photophobia - Fear of light.

Lutraphobia- Fear of otters.

Homophobia - Fear of homosexuality or of becoming homosexual.

Levophobia - Fear of things to the left side of the body.

Prosophobia- Fear of progress.

Mnemophobia- Fear of memories.

Oneirogmophobia- Fear of wet dreams

Peccatophobia- Fear of sinning or imaginary crimes.

Phronemophobia- Fear of thinking.

Polyphobia- Fear of many things.

Sesquipedalophobia- Fear of long words.

Sophophobia- Fear of learning

Stygiophobia or Stigiophobia- Fear of hell.

Xenophobia- Fear of strangers or foreigners

Wiccaphobia: Fear of witches and witchcraft.

And to be fair, let’s look at the “-phile” list too. The things that Republicans seem to enjoy, or take up as a hobby.

Myxophilia- Takes pleasure in slime. (Blennophilia)
Maniaphilia- Takes pleasure in insanity.
Ochlophilia- Takes pleasure in mobs.
Zemmiphilia- Takes pleasure in mole rats.
Peladophilia- Takes pleasure in bald people.
Proctophilia- Takes pleasure in rectums.
Alektorophilia – Takes pleasure in chickens


Yes, they have parleyed hate and fear and ignorance into a razor-thin electoral edge that I firmly believe we are on the way to slowly undoing. And, yes, they are shitting the place up badly, but look at the price they pay for that path to power. To vote Republican these days – and to be a true Original Conservative – means handing power to a junta of thugs who make you watch while they poison every single thing you say you love and believe in, and I can hardly think of anything more primally perverse and sinful than that.

To run Republican these days, as Herr Senator Doktor Frist so amply demonstrates every single day, means invite the Shining Path Succubus into your bed, and wearing her “Senator Bitch” collar forever, and for all the public to see.

To be a Republican these days is be Rick Blaine and, in exchange for a $600 tax cut, you turn Ilsa over to the Nazis ‘cause hey, what the fuck; $600 bucks is $600 bucks.

And then they make you stand witness as they stretch Ilsa's neck until her eyes pop out and her tongue turns black and she kicks and gurgles and dies. And once the one you said you loved is dead and left as a portion for foxes on the cold ground, you can look forward to a life of groveling and bootlicking and living in constant fear while the ones that murdered her tug on your leash every now and then to remind you of your complicity in her execution.

You, Moderate Republicans, are the reason your Party is so deeply soaked in blood and lies.

You, Moderate Republicans of the Party and of the Press, are personally responsible for the fact that your party is so steeped in naked corruption and duplicity. That it casuallyh deals in in torture and murder in your very own Inquistion Gulags of Guantanamo Bay and Abu Gharib, presided over by our very cadre of Torquemadas, administered by your very own “hounds of the Lord" and sheathed in the very same kind bright, lying, rhetoric that attended Torquemada’s funeral when Sebastian de Olmedo called him, "the hammer of heretics, the light of Spain, the saviour of his country, the honour of his order."

I guess the heretics, "were either with us, or against us."
And guilty or not, who cares if they burn if God is with us, right?

Because the vile men that control your Party celebrate horror. They're not just unashamed of their depravity, they’re PROUD of it and since they have the Master’s end of your tether wrapped around their fists, you are reduced to begging them not to make you look at the treachery they purvey in your name. As fresh, new lies are piled on the rotting old ones, more and more you are forced to live blind, on your knees, in constant fear that you might have to face at what you have allowed to happen and be held to account for what you have done.
And every day, whatever my circumstances, I try to give a little thanks that I don’t have to live like that.