Life in the Age of the “Totalitari-yentas"

Today he’d be President of the College Republicans.


We do seem to be positively awash these days with pie-faced, self-righteous Republican douchebags of either gender who both loudly and loutishly insist on the righteousness of Their War, and shamelessly dredge the filthiest dregs of the blue-blood, racial-superiority, “Bell Curve” barrel to excuse themselves from having to actually fight the war that they tout.


Consider this brief excerpt from this article from “The Nation” via DC Media Girl and Steve Gilliard...

Generation Chickenhawk
Max Blumenthal

…
At a table by the buffet was Justin Palmer, vice chairman of the Georgia Association of College Republicans, America's largest chapter of College Republicans. In 1984 the group gained prominence in conservative circles when its chairman, Ralph Reed, formed a political action committee credited with helping to re-elect Senator Jesse Helms. Palmer's future as a right-wing operative looked bright; he batted away my question about his decision to avoid fighting the war he supported with the closest thing I heard to a talking point all afternoon. "The country is like a body," Palmer explained, "and each part of the body has a different function. Certain people do certain things better than others." He said his "function" was planning a "Support Our Troops" day on campus this year in which students honored military recruiters from all four branches of the service.

OK, sure, one could, I suppose, ungraciously point out that every Body does need an Asshole, which is why we have Republicans, but that would be (almost) too cheap and easy a laugh to go for, especially considering how fundamentally sinister and deeply un-American what it is they are really talking about here.

The through-line that links all of these little lying tubeworms together isn’t just their naked and unabashed cowardice. For that, the term Chickenhawk is certainly appropriate, but not, I think, sufficient.

The through line is fascism. Giddy, beer-drunk, unabashed fascism.

Because what they’re really talking about is eugenics.

About a Master Race.

They are unashamedly arguing for their Feudal Right and Privilege to stake and lose the lives of the low-born as casually as they would use Daddy’s Amex card to bet the pot in an all-night poker game.

Once, perhaps, being this craven, this hypocritical, this hyper-gutless might have been the source of a twinge of shame, but no longer.

Gilliard opines that, “Their excuses are so palid, so insulting, so vile that it makes me ill. They want someone else to win a war they cheerlead. They think that all it takes is a good speech.” It’s a sentiment with which I entirely agree, but I don’t think goes quite far enough.

That they are pusillanimous little daubs of corn-studded poo there is no doubt…but at the end of the day, I strongly argue it’s their malevolent ideology from which they draw the nerve to be so defiantly yellow. Without a carefully articulated and deliberately nurtured framework of Red, White and Blue fascism to hold them upright, these boneless chickens would simply collapse into a heap of simpering pudding.

I mean, the Founding Fathers of the nation and the Pillars of the Original Republican Party would all whiz ‘round and ‘round their graves like Funny Cars until they puked up their last meals if they knew that the leadership of the country had been bequeathed to these fat-headed, morally corpulent chuds. These new Republican -- these “totalitari-yentas" -- who so gleefully and hectoringly proclaim a de facto Caste System where Epsilon Minuses are bred specifically to perish for the pet causes and fantasies of the Alpha Class.

This kind of thing has always been with us, but expressions of it used to be confined to White’s Only Country Clubs. Well, OK, and the Entire South, but for awhile at least, while our boot was on their throats, the Slave Staters at least pretended to be ashamed of their perverse, anti-American dogma.

But now the crossbreeding of Wealth and Ignorance, License and Racism is again blossoming out into full, dark, totalitarian flower. Now we see the rise, yet again, of the same, tired, brutal, cowardly, nakedly feudal and self-serving argument -- always from the affluent -- that (surprise!) Affluence is a proxy for a Divine Mandate.

That some among us have a God-given and genetically-endowed right to Rule the Earth from safe and pampered sinecure, while others have an equally Divinely and Evolutionarily Mandated purpose, which is to toil and suffer and die when they are told to do so by Massa up in the Big House.

In fact, since “the country is like a body” the thralls should actually feel deeply happy and fulfilled as they die for the greater good of the Merchant Princes, knowing that they have performed their noble servitude all in accordance with God’s Great Plan. As happy and fulfilled as, say, the Chickenhawks feel getting drunk, padding out their resumes, ass-fucking their brain-dead girlfriends and bravely writing inspiring letters on the Glories of Sacrifice. Each to his own Holy Purpose makes for a Happy Collective!

So who the fuck has been weaning the Children of the Small Gummint on this undiluted Stalinist drivel?

I mean, this is Police State 101 stuff: once a population had been dehumanized into mere components of a single organism, and one Caste has set itself up as the Big Giant Head, everyone else becomes nothing but raw material. Everyone but the Parti –- which has declared itself to be synonymous with the Nation -- always and automatically becomes Soylent Fucking Green in the Greater Glory of the Cause…or is annihilated without a qualm as a disease.

So where are these trustifarian veal dimwits picking up such bad habits? I mean, who else has ever gotten a lot of mileage by referring to his country as a “corporate body” or a "single organism"?

Maybe a few excerpts from an essay on “The Human Body and the Body Politic: Genocide as an Immunological Fantasy” can shed a little light. I'll even add a little emphasis here and there for, um, emphasis...

The purpose of National Socialism, according to Hitler, was to "maintain the life of Germany." He called Germany a "corporate body," a "single organism" that consisted of the German people as cells of this organism. The Jewish people also constituted cells of the national organism. These cells, however, made no contribution to the life of Germany. Rather, as bacteria, viruses and parasites, they lived and fed off the body politic, draining the nation of its energy and capacity to exist.

Hitler defined his mission in medical terms. …Hitler conceived of himself as that unique leader who had identified the nature of Germany's disease and possessed the ability to affect a cure. In Mein Kampf, he stated that Germans would choose as their leader the individual who "profoundly recognizes the distress of his people" and who, after he has attained "the ultimate clarity" with regard to the nature of the disease, "seriously tries to cure it."

In his diary on March 27, 1942, Goebbels described the process of extermination as "pretty barbaric and not to be described in detail" but had no compunctions because after all this was a "life-and- death struggle between the Aryan race and the Jewish bacillus." ...Therefore one could calmly reach the conviction that the struggle of nations against Jews--of life against death--was quite as much a law of nature as "man's struggle against some epidemic, as the struggle of a healthy body to eliminate plague bacillus."


Why did Nazi leaders employ biological metaphors to articulate the genocidal
project?

…
Rudolf Hess often declared that "Hitler is Germany, just as Germany is Hitler." This statement articulated Hitler's fantasy that his body was fused with the body politic, the boundaries of his own body co-extensive with Germany's boundaries. Insofar as Jews were a disease within the body of Germany, Hitler therefore experienced the Jewish disease as present within his own body.

…
Hitler, an early embodiment theorist, insisted that Germany was not merely an abstract idea or imagined community, but rather a "real substance of flesh and blood." Killing Jews for Hitler was equivalent to destroying a diseased part of the body.

At last, in the terrible light of war, we see clearly how far the Party of Lincoln has fallen. How despicably low it has sunk.

140 years ago, this was the the clear, principled voice of the Republicans:

“With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow and for his orphans, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and a lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”

Today, within the GOP, nothing of the Spirit of the Emancipator remains but dead statuary.

Today, the message is craven and loud and brazenly totalitatian.

Today Big Brother is The Nation.

And The Nation is Big Brother.