Progressive Vs. Regressive: The Right Wing Wants History to Go Backwards

BUZZFLASH EDITOR'S BLOG

By

Mark Karlin

The latest right wing psychotic hysteria over Barack Obama's Nobel Prize is part of a broader movement of primitivists who fashion themselves "conservatives" because they can't emotionally cope with progress.

Obama represents the reintegration of America into the international community and an effort to move toward peace, rather than conflict.

Both internationally and domestically, as Gore Vidal once noted, the Republican Party is the political equivalent of advocating death; either in permanent wars or in a desire for a lifestyle that runs counter to the evolutionary progress of America and civilization.

When Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh or the GOP politicians repeatedly talk about returning to the world of their childhoods, they are repudiating the historical reality that the history of men and women has been one of evolutionary progress. Our heritage as the human species is to build upon the foundation of those who have come before us.

Perhaps that is why the religious right is so latched onto the concept of Creationism, because with such a worldview life is fixed in a glass bubble from the moment of "Divine creation" to today.  There is no history, no advancement, no rational enlightenment, no progress; all is in frozen in the "Divine Word."

Of course, the brownshirt media populists (who are just in it for the big bucks) shill for a less celestial -- although interrelated -- concept of going backwards: they evoke an emotional yearning for a white Christian nation when minorities knew their place, and the male was king.

Ironically, as Barack Obama is awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace, the right wing Goebbel wannabes of the airwaves stir up a cauldron of atavism and Know-nothingism that puts America farther and farther behind the rest of the world, which is continuing to advance without the hindrance of a Neanderthal populism that seeks the reversal of evolution, the denial of evolution itself. (Just look at "Communist China" and India, who are economicaly, industrially and scientifically moving forward full steam ahead.)

It is sometimes so difficult and terribly painful to realize that a nation that came so far on its innovation, free spirit, scientific exploration, and liberation from the constraints of feudal systems in Europe is now hampered by a segment of its population and a large part of its media that wallow in ignorance and dreams of going backwards.

Barack Obama represents hope to the world that we can once again become a nation of enlightenment and international engagement, if we can ever overcome the disabling distraction of an army of fools egged on by multi-millionaire media demagogues who live the good life while dangerously stirring up the prejudices and fears of their listeners for a past that reverses the course of human history.

BUZZFLASH EDITOR'S BLOG

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