We have nothing

but fear itself.


It’s easy to get caught up in the Blind Men Groping an Elephant Game when trying to encompass the perfidy and horror of the modern GOP.

There are so many details.

So many crimes. So many affronts to democracy on so many fronts. So many concussions inflicted on the skull of Liberty. So many boldfaced lies, and vaster, dumber, more transparent lies to cover up the original lies.

So many new shocks in the paper each and every day, a fraction of any one of which would have sent the GOP “lawmakers” en masse in a howling mob to the White House demanding blood and impeachment...if the WH occupant were a Democrat.

But of course the GOP does nothing, because they are Republicans. And as we say around here, in the Age of Dubya you can either be a Good Republican or a Good American, but you can no longer be both.

No what passes for Republicans these days are girded ‘round the bonfire into which this Administration is feeding all that is good about America. A dog-loyal mongrel mob of shrieking halfwits, bigots and suicide-pact Christians with swords. People who, in this 21st Century, actually take pride in their dumbfuckery. Who brag to each other like free divers about the depths to which they can ram their heads up their own asses, and the length of time they can keep it up there without breathing anything except their own flatulence.

Drunk on their own Rapture Narcosis, blissfully refusing to listen or learn, they are the base of the Party that makes all the crimes and tragedies and incompetence possible. That incomprehensibly ignorant army who refuse to acknowledge the existence of the fascist conflagration that is burning their asses…while simultaneously and ferociously guarding the arsonists who set and tend the blaze.

And like mercury or PCBs, their pollution now taints everything, so tracking and cataloging each mutagentic nugget of toxin that they leach into our democracy can seem overwhelming. Until the proper context swims into view and you can see that all of their skirmishes on every front – from pulpit to classroom to pharmacy to school board to Congress – all are bred from the same DNA.

Fear.

That, in the end, is all they have. They mine it, mill it, extrude it, tuckpoint it into every sermon and speech, deep-fry it and package it a hundred different ways in a thousand scary packages...but in the end its always the same product.

Fear.

Which is a useful emotion in small doses, but anyone who is trying to keep you afraid all the time is your enemy.

And anyone who is afraid all the time is their ally.

A fearful man can’t be reasoned with; he just wants everything that scares him to die and will pay a premium price to anyone who will do the job for him, even if the killers he hires just happen to be the same thugs who have a vested interest in keeping him perpetually panicked. The same people who are jabbing his fear-sac with knitting needles to make sure not a day goes by when he isn’t terrified out of his right mind.

Which brings me to this terrific essay by Ms. Susie Bright about another front in this same war.

The National Struggle Against Terror-Mongers.

Our Onward-Christian-Bullshitter Administration is on a crusade to crush sex, sensibility, and science. They don't separate one from the other. Just when you think it can't get any worse...

In Bed with Susie Bright 244: Shame Spirals

One of the most outrageous examples of the moment is the Bush campaign against a new vaccine that eradicates the human pampilloma virus (HPV).

HPV causes genital warts, which have never been fun. But in its most deadly strains, it's the primary cause of cervical cancer.

Why are Bush's appointees on the FDA trying to stop a genius medicine that will save thousands of women's lives?

It's the same reason they're standing in the way of emergency contraception, or RU486, or developing a vaccine for HIV/AIDS. It's the same argument W.'s henchmen use to try to probibit birth control altogether.

The White House is against anything that would make sex less of a risk. The fundies believe the HPV vaccine will encourage women to be sexual— that it will "disinhibit" them, if they believe they can fuck without fear.

But they don't put it like that. No, they say crap like this:

"Premarital sex is dangerous, even deadly. Let's not encourage it by vaccinating ten-year-olds so they think they're safe." — Senator Tom Coburn, (R) Oklahoma.

"I never thought that now, in the twenty-first century, we could have a debate about what to do with a vaccine that prevents cancer," says David Baltimore, a Nobel Laureate and president of Cal Tech, speaking to The New Yorker. His interview with Michael Specter, and the accompanying article, is a MUST-read for anyone interested in sex, medicine, or going out of their minds. It's also the topic of my audio show this week.

Baltimore, a short, intense man, has spent much of his life studying the relationship between viruses and cancer. He stood up from the couch and crossed the room to his desk.
"Politics plays a role in all these decisions, and so does belief," he said. "I have no problems with that. But this is religious zealotry masked as politics, and it runs against everything that I as a scientist believe in, that I have devoted my life to.

"We are talking about basic public health now. What moral precepts allow us to think that the risk of death is a price worth paying to encourage abstinence as the only approach to sex?"

Many of us feel whipsawed every time we read about a new story about the fundies' scientific revisionism. They make Stalin's history-book campaign look like child's play.

On Monday, they're trying to keep "evolution" out of the classroom. On Tuesday, it's the law to keep teenagers from kissing in Kansas. By the weekend, they're in NASA claiming that no one's allowed to say "Big Bang" because that's just an odd little theory.

It's a whack-a-mole game, where just as we fire or disgrace one lunatic, another pops up behind us.
…

I’ll stop there -- because you should just go very quickly to her place and read the whole of it – to add one thought. That the opposite of Fear isn’t Recklessness or Bravery or Folly or even Hope.

The opposite of Fear is Caution.

Fear is a cheap and useful, political tool because it gets us fighting or fleeing blindly. Get a nation scared enough and it’ll stampede right off a cliff.

And the opposite of this kind of madness -- the Progressive Value that stands in starkest contract to this Dark Ages worldview-- is not denial that the world can be a dangerous place, or a false hope that good intentions lead to good results.

The opposite view requires that sober grownups look at a situation as it is, dispassionately examine all the available evidence with no ideological thumb on the scale, and then carefully chart the safest course based on where the evidence leads.

An ideology of hope, compassion and humanity can and should play a role in deciding which direction we as a nation should take…but ideology should never have any part in the gathering or weighing of the facts, and this is where we radically differ from the Republican Party.

Because the great majority of that Party no longer even believes in evidence or caution or Reality.

The believe only in Fear.

Putting fear in harness with ignorance and theocracy and flogging them with all of their might has forever been the tool of despots, and it is the dark Troika that forever lurks at the fringes of democracy.

The creation of the United States was itself the eloquent-if-imperfect expression by the Founders of their explicit rejection of this breed of tyranny: they could not have been clearer about it if they had bound the Constitution in Theocracy Haz-Mat stickers and stenciled “Don’t Ever, Ever Fuck with This Stuff" over the Preamble in 100-point boldface font.

They knew Reason was the hope of mankind: The firm ground into which the caissons for all government should be sunk, and on which all of freedom's defenders must make their stand.

They also knew that fear, ignorance and theocracy are to liberty what rat poison is to baby mice.

Fear is the nuclear warhead of politics. An eternally tempting weapon for the demagogue that efficiently annihilates dissent and cauterizes opposition, but only at a terrible price.

By sinking to that level -- by eagerly seizing and using this nuclear flashblinding option for petty, partisan gain for the last 20 years -- the GOP has unleashed horrors into the world that will take generations to put right.

They have gained power, but only at the expense of destroying anything that was ever noble about their movement. Only by enlisting the labor of the scum of the Earth to help them rip down our two-century-old democracy and erect on its bones an Empire of Fear.

Only by deliberately pumping into the body politic the toxic wastes that mark them as the true and eternal enemies of democracy.

Only by keeping America so afraid that it stops being America anymore.