The Choler of Money *

Trouble on Monster Island.

What fascinating days we’re living: watching the Party of Money trying desperately to swing 180 degrees around on brittle hips to hurry-up-quick airbrush a thin coat of nobility over the same ideas they’ve spent the last 30 years violently denouncing, and do it without smashing the Pig People coalition on which their political power completely depends.

Fascinating, because in being forced to pivot so abruptly and aggressively, they have had to expose that carefully-concealed Monarchical rift at the heart of the GOP -- the fact that Brain Caste of the Money Party has never given a shit in a shoebox about the Culture Wars -- more nakedly than at any point in a generation.

The fact that "Guns, God and Gays" are just the Mardi Gras makeup they have to dutifully trowel on once every two years to angry up the Pig People and win elections. And the fact that it worked because the Base of the GOP are basically idiots.

The fabulous Thomas Frank (author of “What’s The Matter With Kansas” and “The Wrecking Crew”) laid it out here:

The GOP Loves the Heartland To Death

By THOMAS FRANK

...
Leave the fantasy land of convention rhetoric, and you will find that small-town America, this legendary place of honesty and sincerity and dignity, is not doing very well. If you drive west from Kansas City, Mo., you will find towns where Main Street is largely boarded up. You will see closed schools and hospitals. You will hear about depleted groundwater and massive depopulation.

And eventually you will ask yourself, how did this happen? Did Hollywood do this? Was it those "reporters and commentators" with their fancy college degrees who wrecked Main Street, U.S.A.?

No. For decades now we have been electing people like Sarah Palin who claimed to love and respect the folksy conservatism of small towns, and yet who have unfailingly enacted laws to aid the small town's mortal enemies.

Without raising an antitrust finger they have permitted fantastic concentration in the various industries that buy the farmer's crops. They have undone the New Deal system of agricultural price supports in favor of schemes called "Freedom to Farm" and loan deficiency payments -- each reform apparently designed to secure just one thing out of small town America: cheap commodities for the big food processors. Richard Nixon's Agriculture Secretary Earl Butz put the conservative attitude toward small farmers most bluntly back in the 1970s when he warned, "Get big or get out."
...

For 30 years, the GOP has invested enormous amounts of time and money dumbing down several very complex concepts into artificial, Manichean bumper stickers. Turning them into Majyk Conjure words, and whamming them into the collective semiconsciousness of their Base, to be redeemed at later dates for Big!Cash!Prizes!

A partial list might read:

Capitalism, Conservative, Deregulation – Good.

Socialism, Liberal, Regulation –- Bad.

Profits -- Good

Taxes – Bad.

Self-reliant – Good.

Welfare – Bad.

Business -- Good

Government – Bad.

Armageddon Jebus -- Good.

Science – Bad.

Small Town – Good.

Big City – Bad.

Kicking Ass! – Good.

Mercy – Bad.

Simple – Good.

Elite – Bad.

Fox – Good.

Media – Bad.

Gut – Good.

Fact – Bad.

Personalities – Good.

Policies – Bad.

The reason this simple list becomes so terribly powerful is that once a Conservative’s critical thinking skills are sufficiently lobotomized, it becomes transmuted into their own internal, cultural vocabulary. It becomes the language they think in: one that impeccably serves the interests of the Party of Money by concentrating wealth and power upwards (“Self-reliance and unregulated markets will solve everything”) while simultaneously reinforcing the squalid, ignorant bigotries of the Base (“Big City government elites want to give Tax!Money! to lazy welfare cheats”.)

Which is why, alongside Angry Black Man, Dirty Fucking Hippy, and Lazy Union Guy, the sepia-tinted image of Saint Ronald Reagan’s mythical and explicitly-racist “Welfare Queen” --

"She has 80 names, 30 addresses, 12 Social Security cards and is collecting veteran's benefits on four non-existing deceased husbands. And she is collecting Social Security on her cards. She's got Medicaid, getting food stamps, and she is collecting welfare under each of her names."

has upholstering the grubby, bigoted imaginations of the Pig People for a generation.

Didn’t matter that these stereotypes were horseshit. Didn’t matter that Reagan:

"…specialized in the exaggerated, outrageous tale that was almost always unsubstantiated, usually false, yet so sensational that it merited repeated recounting… And because his ‘examples’ of welfare queens drew on existing stereotypes of welfare cheats and resonated with news stories about welfare fraud, they did indeed gain real traction."

Any brutal, inhumane, ludicrous, anti-labor, anti-environment, anti-science, anti-American policies, were acceptable as long as the Pig People believed it was keeping their hard-earned money out of the grabby, lazy hands of the bogey men the GOP kept stuffing under their beds.

Of course this is a recipe for training seals, and not educating citizens, which is why, by the time Dubya arrived, these people were standing ippy-tippy-toe on their Bibles, primed, ready and practically begging to trade in their Constitution for that nice, tidy, White Christian Police State that would make it all better.

Which is why, over the last few decades, attempts to “reason” with a Modern Conservative has become progressively more ridiculous; because once that fucking, liberal-biased reality rear its ugly head, Conservatives start running in circles, quacking out meaningless GOP Newspeak phrases, and smirking triumphantly as if the bleating sounds coming out of their mouth-holes were Lincoln’s Second Inaugural.

And this last week, that awful, shrieking you were hearing from the Right was the sound of an inexorable blast of horrible, wounding facts shotgunning down on Republican Monster Island like that big, bright thingie in the sky on that last and Very Bad Day of the Cretaceous Period.

These last few months, as the Ponzi(1) scheme the Money Party has been running finally collapsed, without batting an eye they jettison their Faux Market/Blame-the-Brown-People rhetoric like the fright wigs and fake noses they always been.

Because mouthing those ritual phrases which they never believed anyway no longer served the goals of the Money Party.

They then casually turned around, and with perfectly straight faces and coiffed hair, these rich, white men demanded a hundred-million times more in handouts on terms a hundred-million times more ludicrous than Reagan’s fictional welfare queen ever dreamed of.

Because openly holding the economy hostage now does serve the interests of the Money Party, and because they believe -- for very good reasons -- that the tiny brains of the Pig People are infinitely reprogrammable. That they’ll thrash and squeal a little bit as new slogans to shout, new gods to worship and new reasons to hate Negroes, Queers, and Liberals for all their discomforts are rammed down their throats, but insofar as these are the same shitkickers that elected the Stupidest Man in the World to run their country because they were told he was on Jebus' buddy-list,

and then enthusiastically re-elected him after it was clear that he was also a liar, a traitor and a war-criminal, like the good little brownshirts they are, they’ll eventually fall into line.

Still, it’ll take a few weeks until the new firmware can be fully installed, so until then I plan to enjoy the operatically ear-splitting, gear-shredding sound of the two halves of the Republican Party – the rich and the ignorant – slamming into each other at 2,000 mph.

* (my little shout-out to the late Paul Newman)

(1)[Thanks marshall]