The American Garage

Our American Garage is stuffed as full of treasure as the National Archives, and as full of crap as the scariest episode of "Hoarders" imaginable.

Stacked in one corner are buckets of gunpowder.

In another, crates of old dynamite ooze nitro into gooey puddles.

In yet another, a teetering pile of oily rags is stacked up as high as a man, and in another, leaky Jerrycans of gasoline fill the place with choking fumes.

Strewn across the floor are nine billion bullets.

Poking through the ceiling, untreated mental illness fires off loud, scary arcs of electricity every now and then.

Along the walls, the bare wires of the violent media culture that feeds its wild current to The Crazy showers the place with sparks.

And having surveyed the tinderbox and the treasure that fill our American Garage to overflowing, the American Conservative Movement -- which speaks openly and longingly of bloody revolution and cleansing Armageddon -- chooses to stand in the doorway.

Smirking.

With a big box of wooden matches.

Which they strike by the fistful and toss into the shadows.

And every now and then something goes "Boom"


And we pause for a nanosecond to try and calmly and rationally clean up our open-air cultural ammo dump.

And the Right screeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeams about gun rights and freedom and Socialism and Hitler and Censorship and how nothing has anything to do with anything.

Because Calm doesn't get the wingnuts to the polls and Rational doesn't get keep them coming back to Fox and Hate Radio.

Because without its mobs of paranoid, rage-drunk idiots living in constant, heavily-armed terror of imaginary hippies, the American Conservative Movement would evaporate tomorrow

and all of that lovely, lovely power and wealth that comes from stoking the imbeciles would evaporate with it.

Which is why they will never stop (from Esquire):

...
The activist Right wants this rhetoric for 2012. It wants the same dark energies that helped it win the House last fall. It wants to be able to say the same things with impunity that it's been saying since 2009, as though Tucson never happened. Oklahoma City might as well have happened to the Hittites.

Which is how nothing ever changed. Which is why Oklahoma City wasn't enough.

One-hundred and sixty-eight people.

One-hundred and sixty-eight lonely, empty chairs.

It wasn't enough.

The political culture is not what it was in 1996. It's worse. The wild-assed, Clinton-centric conspiracies — death lists! Vince Foster! Mena airport! — look positively quaint compared to the grand paranoid delusions spouted on television and on radio these days. And the casual mainstreaming of vicious mendacity isn't the property talk radio alone; we have just seen installed a Congress full of thunderous loons. Against all odds — and, arguably, against all decency — what Bill Clinton so carefully criticized has degenerated into a time in which the governors of major states talk glibly about secession, and automatic weapons are casual accessories at political rallies.

One-hundred and sixty-eight people.

That wasn't enough.
...

Because Crazy doesn't do "enough".

As usual, Athenae comes through with some practical advise.