Is it possible we have reached the zenith of dumbing down or has our quirkiness just become more overt as devotees of hate radio and TV parrot what they hear and non-facts become an acceptable basis for debate? It sometimes seems that the most sought-after attribute among Republican standard-bearers is that they be photogenic and articulate enough to deliver flawless conservative dogma. Thus perennially tan minority leader John Boehner, Indiana’s Mike Pence, Texas’ John Cornyn, Minnesota’s Michele Bachmann, Tennessee’s Marcia Blackburn and of course Sarah Palin are ever front and center to keep reminding us how utterly vapid political expression can be.
When questioned, Palin supporters rarely know what her positions on issues are; they insist “she tells it like it is.” Even if she tells it like it isn’t, that doesn’t matter in the least to her supporters. It’s the old ‘my mind is made up, don’t confuse me with the facts’ mentality. Michele Bachmann is said to be a bright woman, a trained legal mind some say. But if that is true, has partisanship so addled her brain that her public comments take foolishness to a new level? And the Blackburn lady was able to dig up a talking point out of the enormous health-care bill on “This Week” and beat it to death as if it were the centerpiece of the proposed legislation. As for the men they keep up the steady drone about “socialized medicine” and the government getting between you and your doctor, presumably something much worse than what insurance companies do now.
People keep saying everyone has a right to their opinion although that right is abused every time one of these folks steps in front of a microphone or is glorified by some party hack. We are told we mustn’t dismiss Palin out of hand, for example, because look what happened with Ronald Reagan; one party consultant said she just needed to bone up on issues and background to reach a larger audience. And Republicans insist that Reagan defeated the Soviet Union ending the cold war and who would have thought in the beginning he could have been so effective? But they tend to ignore the fact that he was dealing with the closest thing to a reformer Russia ever had in Gorbachev whose Glasnost policy had begun an era of openness. And they rarely mention the deficit Reagan created with the massive military buildup he undertook to challenge the Soviets.
Deceptive glorifications of people like Reagan put us at risk of being forever lost in historical rewrites. Today in the midst of a recession, the right pulls out all the old tax-and-spend bromides about Democrats and criticizes those who have had the temerity to suggest we actually pay for the wars in which we are engaged with a war tax - - funny how fiscal responsibility only seems to apply to health care. Government spending is, in any case, broadly accepted as a means of avoiding a total meltdown of the economy. It is more than just disingenuous to use a precarious financial situation many years in the making to bludgeon the president’s attempts to ameliorate that very condition.
But the most worrying aspect of our current national state of mind is the shameless exploitation of a gullible public by fringe groups and media zealots. There is no sense of responsibility to speak to issues without the ration of hate that accompanies their rants. And one begins to hear their freakish mantra repeated by people indifferent to facts and too inward turning to venture intellectually beyond their own self interest. A recent report about hunger in America devolved into a discussion about what a hunger pang was and regurgitated a favorite theme about poor people accessing cable TV instead of buying food and tending to their children.
Seemingly ordinary Americans embrace rhetoric that purports to represent their views, and public anger over real and imagined slights translates into the kind of vitriol that has become de rigueur on the right. When lovable old gramps, bemused by too many hours of watching Fox News, says on Thanksgiving Day that his dead brother who fought in WWII must be turning over in his grave because of “that man in the White House,” that Socialist menace, you know there’s a hate-filled, dangerous fifth column in play.
Ironically, that billboard in Colorado that conflates a cartoonish turban-clad President with “jihad” and those signs showing him with a Hitler mustache, among other hateful images, at tea bagger rallies are the very kind of devices Hitler’s main propagandist Goebbels used against the Jews in Nazi Germany. Is that the kind of society people who keep saying they want to take their country back have in mind?
Buzz this on Buzzflash.net
In defense of 'hippies'
the only particular in which the critique of the State from the left is similar to the critique of the State from the right is that both are critiques of the state.
Beck and his ilk, being creatures of the Corporat oligarchy, are blind to the baleful and malign influences of corporatism on liberty. Hence they do not attack or threaten that aspect of the hegemonic structure, and are therefore permitted to exploit popular disquiet, because they direct it against the enemies of the Corporat state.
The critique of the state from the left is about the privileging of ORDER to the absence of or the threat to equality, fairness, and justice. The Rightist critique mainly bemoans the absence of, or threat to, ORDER represented by increases in equality, fairness and justice.
OF COURSE THE NEOCONS ARE
OF COURSE THE NEOCONS ARE THE HIPPIES!
One need only look at the genesis of the "government is bad" mantra begun with the hippie movement. Don't be fooled by corporate media labeling. The 'hippies' started it all.
Holes in the bucket
Excuse me, the mantra of "government is bad" predates hippies. Secessionists, neo-confederates, the KKK and other such ilk liked to justify their existence on that particular meme. Billy, your argument don't hold no water, by jiminies!
Speaking of holes in an argument -- I'm not inclined to argue that regressiveness isn't a serious problem, but I'm more concerned about the administration deferring to that influence. For instance, the Stupak amendment attached to the healthcare bill would undermine the almost 40 year old Roe vs Wade precedent for a woman's choice. Then there was the capitulating to the death panel cries by removing the end of life counseling. There has also been appealing to the lowest common denominator of fear, similar to the Bush warmongering, where the escalation of the war in Afghanistan is portrayed as a war against terrorism with 9/11 being invoked.
I find a number of progressives bashing fringe movements and the past administration while not holding the present one to adequate standards of accountability. And that's terribly ironic when you think of the similar blind support given to the Bush administration by its followers.
Yes, not just "government is bad"
Although there might be a family resemblance between Charles Manson and Aryan Idaho communes.
I'm making more of a meta-culture, French philosophy sort of argument. That the hippie movement distributed drugs to people who were completely unprepared for that sort of thing and unbalanced the foundations of American culture in ways they had not intended. Most of the 60s psychedelic leaders like Aldous Huxley and Timothy Leary were _way_ overeducated. For them, drugs were a cool way to play with their minds. But you give LSD to a redneck in Alabama, he sees Jesus, and BY GOD, JESUS WAS RIGHT THERE ON MY SOFA! FOR REAL, MAN!!
That's the foundation of my argument. That the psychedelic movement took good, old American faith-based Protestantism and shot it up with a paranoid psychosis-inducing dose of methamphetamine (to mix drug categories in a mixed metaphor) by propagating drugs indiscriminately to everyone. There may have been Elmer Gantry's of a sort throughout American history, but the "Jesus Freaks" and Hal Lindsey's apocalyptic movement came fast on the heels of the psychedelic movement. Hippies won't want to take credit for it. Neocons and revelationary evangelicals won't want to admit the heritage. But that's the cultural link I see.
It's long past due to revoke Rupert Murdoch's FCC Licenses
Ann,
You pointed out billboards of President Obama as "a cartoonish turban-clad President with jihad” and/or showing him with a Hitler mustache." These are expressions of free speech. However, when Rupert Murdoch blocks advocacy groups from running messages in his NY Post/Fox News/DirecTV, then he is violating FCC regulates and his licenses should be revoked.
American leadership has had a fascist bent since the popularization of Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto. In the United States, Henry Ford sponsored the printing of 500,000 copies of the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion," and from 1920 to 1922, published a series of antisemitic articles titled "The International Jew: The World's Foremost Problem," in The Dearborn Independent, a newspaper he owned. George Bush's grandfather, the late US senator Prescott Bush, was a director and shareholder of companies that profited from their involvement with the financial backers of Nazi Germany. Joseph P Kennedy, JFK's father, had a close friendship with Nancy Astor. The correspondence between them is reportedly replete with anti-Semitic statements. As Edward Renehan notes: As fiercely anti-Communist as they were anti-Semitic, Kennedy and Astor looked upon Adolf Hitler as a welcome solution to both of these "world problems" (Nancy's phrase).... Kennedy replied that he expected the "Jew media" in the United States to become a problem, that "Jewish pundits in New York and Los Angeles" were already making noises contrived to "set a match to the fuse of the world."
Communism is dead. It's been dead for twenty years since the Soviet Union collapsed and went bankrupt. Fascism is alive and strong in America. It's public faces include Sarah Palin and Ann Coulter. What is missing is a free press that points out the obvious, that hate speech is not conducive to civil behavior. For example, a casual analysis of the American healthcare system would conclude that the only solution is a Single Payer Healthcare System. Yet the Corporate Media claims fascists like Max Baucus is a "moderate" and his muted "public healthcare option" is the "best" America can politically attain. What a crock of cow dung! Only in a fascist society could this pig poo pass the smell test.
Buzzflash should support the complete overhaul of the American media system. American democracy is dead. It died a quiet death when Al Gore's presidency was criminally stolen by the Renquist 5. The American Corporate Media aided and abetted this criminal conspiracy and continues to aid and abet the fascist system that is American government.
Credible faces of Fascism
"Fascism is alive and strong in America. It's public faces include Sarah Palin and Ann Coulter."
I disagree, those faces are representative of the World Wrestling Fascism. People watch these two entertaining clowns, but most people know they truly are two clowns.
The truly credible faces of Fascism include Bush, Cheney, Yoo, Obama, Biden, Rahmbo, Pelosi, Reid, Geither, Gates, and many more, both Neocon-Fascist and Blue Dog DINO-Fascist alike!
Of course, we should not forget the MSM, outlets for fascist propaganda coming from the faces of Fascism.
Neocons ARE The Hippies
It is the great disgrace of my life to admit this. I remember the great disappointment I felt as the most liberal people history ever knew reverted to hate-filled conservativism as soon as Vietnam ended and their sorry asses weren't on the line anymore.
I've often wondered: Are Neocons the offspring of hippies?
Follow me on this one.
America has always had a strong anti-intellectual element that I think is grounded in protestantism. If you've got faith in your heart, damn it, you have a right as an American to believe _anything_. That had always been balanced by a pragmatism that kept the country grounded in reality and working sensibly.
But that grounding in reality has been lost. We're left with our God-given right to spout nonsense but the corresponding right of others to laugh at our nonsense has been prohibited. What I noticed in late 60s, early 70s, dorm living was that one year LSD was in, the next year Jesus was in, and I've always wondered whether there was a connection. One year people were telling me about their cool visions, the next year people were telling me that the end times had come and "people were being raised from the dead in India. For real, man!" It's like the Jesus People were one of the direct offsprings of the psychedelic movement. Coincidence? Or was a Pandora's box of insanity unleashed upon society and the Neocons are, in fact, one of the bastard children of Timothy Leary?
Neocons are not hippies
The vast majority of people who I knew that were 'hippies' in the 60s and early 70s have continued to maintain liberal, progressive views until the present. Sure, some have changed, or perhaps never were strong adherents to the counterculture in the first place. People seem to forget that in the 60s and 70s there were many young people who were not hippies. I would say that well over 50% of 60s college students were not hippies. Some young people from the 60s became leaders of the College Republicans, and they are now leaders of the neocon movement. Ya' think Dick Cheney was ever a hippie?
Percentages
I'd guess fewer than 25% were even quasi-hippie at the peak. Most young folks were pretty 'straight' even in the 60's.
Probably a lot more returning veterans became hippies than most people realize, possibly over half of us on the coasts?
Nope
You and neoconned are wrong about that conjecture. The REAL Hippies have aged and evolved, but definitely did not become conservatives or neocons. We might not look the 'part' anymore, but are liberally scattered throughout our society ......... exceping of course in its unsocial professions.
Note to author: The reference to 'zenith' should have been to 'nadir', but this piece is excellent.
also, "it is more than just disingenuous"
might be shortened to "it is beyond disingenuous" while retaining its full meaning. Again, a minor point.
I thought she meant
we had achieved the heights of dumbness...
whatever, it works either way...
and either is/both are equally true.
anybody who tells you the USer school system is failing does not understand the purpoase of theUSer school system...
Last paragraph
I agree with this article, especially the last paragraph. I thought to myself that these people are fanatics and can't hear or be reasoned with. Take for example a few wks. back I was chastised by someone for replying and giving her links to the facts that are on line. She said she didn't care if what she sent was true or not, and I should not have given the links to her friends so they could research for themselves. Some of "her" friends are also mine. Those people didn't come back and tell me that I shouldn't have given them the right tools to reference.