Sunday Morning Came and Went

In which I find myself being a little harsh with that nice Roger Ebert and that nice Frank Rich, links to both of whom landed in my email box this weekend.

Both Frank's and Roger's pieces were thoughtful and well-written --

(Shorter Rich: "Why the fuck are the asshats who have been wrong about everything for the last eight years still being listened to?"

Shorter Ebert: "My God! Can you believe how fucking unhinged the Right has become?")

-- but both left me feeling strangely...meh.

Like reading well-crafted travelogues of some "Vanity Fair" writer's trip to Rocky Mountain National Park...years after everyone you know has already spent every summer there, camped there, gotten married there, conceived children there, photographed every inch of it a million times and shared meticulously narrated slideshows of all of it as far and wide as their email contacts list would carry them.

Shorn of their specific references to Barack Obama, the sad truth is that both Frank's and Roger's essays could have been written a year ago, or three years ago, or five.

Yes, Frank, it is true that a very long line of clowns on the Right have been loudly and self-evidently Wrong about virtually every aspect of American foreign policy. Wrong for years and years. Wrong at the cost of trillions of dollars, thousands of lives, the health of our military and the respect of the world.

But that is no longer an interesting story. No longer "news".

What would be "news" would be a story -- naming specific names, dates and decisions -- about how and why these blood-spattered "Always wrong but never in doubt" clowns Still Have A Fucking Job?

How about it, Frank?

Why is John McSame still on my teevee every fucking Sunday?

And when he is, why aren't his shriveled, war-mongering prune-hammocks being roasted over a small, cheery fire for making "every wrong judgment call that could be made after 9/11"?

When he took "no responsibility for any of this" -- when he was "asked by Katie Couric last week about our failures in Afghanistan" and then "spoke as if he were an innocent bystander"-- why didn't Ms. Couric rip his heart out of this chest?

Why is it that, short of one, flirtatious turn on the dance floor with the Scary Truth on "Meet the Press":

David Gregory: ... Where were the Republicans who want all these troops now and want McChrystal to be listened to eight--during these eight years when this appears to be an underresourced war?

followed by one, long, hilariously weaselly blathering-to-the-point-I-thought-he-was-having-some-kind-of-seizure word-fart from Bob Woodward:

Bob Woodward: Well, as we know, we were fighting and resourcing the war in Iraq, and, and that was the focus. But I mean, how--you know, who knows what the outcome is going to be. But it is good that they are questioning these assumptions. Paul suggests that politics is driving this. I think that obviously politics is there, as it always is. I don't think it's driving it. And I think, from the reporting I've done, Obama is forcing them to dig into this. And the people who are on one side or the other are kind of--it's, it's having a calming effect on them, because they realize this is a really hard course...

...no one -- and I mean no one -- ever dares to complete the following statement:

"People like John McSame are allowed to come on teevee and dissemble with impunity over and over and over again because _______"?

It's fucking eerie, Frank. And it would make a helluva story.

Roger Ebert's piece was more vexing because my first read was mostly sympathetic, and I had to think extra hard about why exactly it bugged.

Yes, Roger, the Right has completely lost its shit.

But the Right was a ranting cesspit of ignorance, bigotry and fear in 2008, wasn't it?

And in 2006.

And in 2004.

And in 2002.

And in 1999.

And in 1997.

And in 1994.

So we find ourselves confronted with another, sad case of “Meme-ento”:

That inability of some people to form any new political memories that conflict with the way they desperately want the world to be.

And Roger seems to want what lots of people want.

Symmetry, in world that is much nicer than the one we really live in.

A world where our real social problems are obedient to the imaginary physics of the literary (or cinematic) plot. A world where our cultural conflicts -- regardless of how wild and balls-out-Miserlou they may begin --

will eventually conform to a predictable path from Thesis, through Antitheses, until finally coming to a satisfyingly resolution at Synthesis.

Roll credits.

Fade to black.

Sweet.

Except such literary constructs are usually pure wishful thinking. Fragile human fictions built around a Reality that is often broken, raw, jagged and wildly asymmetrical. A Reality that jams a world down our throats that is, more often than not, a "cruel and shallow money trench" (as Hunter S. Thompson once described the teevee business) where "thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs, for no good reason."

So in the service of this need to contain the ugly, terrifying reality of the Pig People within a safe and familiar Academy ratio frame, Roger entitles his piece “The anger of the festering fringe” and counterpoises two Americas: An innocent, bygone America when "most of the American people were reasonable" and only kook fringe groups like the John Birch society put any stock in wacky theories like "Kennedy was a communist"...and a present-day America where a still-reasonable "mainstream Republican Party" is merely timid and "afraid to alienate a ‘base’ it should be ashamed of."

But that’s not really true, Roger, and that's what really bothered me about your post.

Yes, once upon a time a tiny army of Birchers flared across the cultural landscape like political syphilis and, yes, they were fringe nuts, but somehow in your rush to squeeze modern American history into a comfy, halcyon, Procrustean Bed of American “reasonableness”, you somehow seem to have forgotten everything South of the Mason-Dixon line.

Forgotten how the remnants of the Confederacy were run as collection of segregated fascist states which ruthlessly exploited their minority Black populations as de facto slave labor, while systematically depriving them of their most basic human rights and enforcing their totalitarianism with state-sanctioned incarceration, terror and murder.

Systematically, Roger. Systematically.

Not just a bunch of kooks jerking off to mimeographed copies of “The Black Book”, but a vast, efficient racist machine, brutally enforcing the dictates of a centuries-old White Supremacist ideology, and aggressively passing that ideology along – generation after generation -- through the schools, churches, politics and social institutions under its bloodthirsty control.

A system that not only produced vicious, racist monsters like George Wallace, but also produced millions upon millions of American citizens who happily elected vicious, racist monsters like George Wallace to the highest public offices available.

A system which -- during this period of American “reasonableness” -- held your marriage to be a crime

under laws that were not completely cleared from the books until 2000.

And that system -- its ideology and economic interests -- didn’t just vanish into the pellucid ether. Instead it evolved, mutated, acquired a light patina of respectability courtesy of the Republican Southern Strategy (from the NYT) --

“You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger,’ ” said [Lee] Atwater. “By 1968, you can’t say ‘nigger’ — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things, and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.”

-- and went pneumonic thanks to the concerted efforts of the GOP, the Christian Right, Hate Radio, Regnery Press and Fox News.

For decades, the Right has oh-so-carefully cultivated, fertilized and harvested an all-purpose, bone-deep contempt for anyone who is not White, Southern, Male, Conservative and Fundamentalist even as men and women of conscience warned them -- over and over, louder and louder –- that they were making a pact with the Devil and that Devil would one day come for his due.

Few on the Right listened -- they were having way too much power-drunk fun building a political empire out of all the lovely-lovely rage and paranoia and ignorance their marketing, media and think-tanks were producing –- and so Limbaugh and his filthy imitators were turned loose to dump their poison onto the public airwaves for more than 20 years.

Not 20 months, Roger. 20 years.

20 years of Limbaugh.

30 years of Jerry Falwell.

40 years of the deliberate recruitment of Southern racists via the Republican Southern Strategy.

This is not exactly a New Revelation –- anyone with access to a couple of history books can draw a virtually straight line beginning before the Missouri Compromise, through each of these tragic milestones and many others, to where we are today -- but facing the ugly reality of who we are and how we got here demands that we jettison the dangerously abridged and Disneyfied version of political history on which Roger’s thesis depends.

Because the sad fact is, Roger, the people who alarm you in 2009 when they rant:

"Obama is a Muslim. Obama was born in Kenya. Obama was a terrorist. Obama will destroy Medicare. Obama will kill your grandmother. Obama is a racist. Obama wants atheism taught in the schools."

are the very same people who were ranting:

“Clinton is a rapist. Clinton murdered his political opponents. Clinton is a drug dealer. Clinton assassinated Vince Foster. Clinton is a Socialist. Clinton isn't the legitimate President.“

in 1997.

Only now they’re 12 years dumber and crazier and have developed an open, sneering contempt for the rule of law and the democratic process during their eight glorious years of the Cheney Regime.

And those “conservatives” you doubt would really support “…the overthrow of our government by a coup”?

Those are the very same "conservatives," who were perfectly willing to shut down the federal government out of political pique, cripple a presidency with endless ginned up scandals and Congressional hearings, and try to bring down the Clinton administration via impeachment.

Only now they’re better funded, better organized, better armed, and come to the party with an invincible sense of entitlement, and a voracious appetite for power.

I would be genuinely delighted and relieved if Roger's fiction were true, and the Republican Party was indeed a fundamentally reasonable and "mainstream" organization being outshouted by a loud but tiny "lunatic fringe, the frothers, the extremist rabble".

But after eight years of mindless hatred of Clinton and eight years of mindless worship of Bush -- after 16 years during which anyone with a conscience got the Hell out of the Party of God -- we are left with absolutely no reason whatsoever to believe that the Right is anything but terminally depraved from crotch to crown.


UPDATE: Roger Ebert responds.

Ebert: A nice piece. In a strange way, you disagree with me because you agree with me.