I find it eye-popping to observe the shared ignorance we are seeing at these town hall meetings. Many of our fellow Americans (yahoos, in effect) vomit the word socialism continuously when I know damn well they have no idea of what it means nor are they in the slightest degree aware of the honorable and progressive history of socialistm in 19th century Europe. I want to ask the most heated of them to name one socialist in history if they can. If it were not for W.W.I, the advent of socialism would have continued. So we have these schmucks using socialism because it scares them; no use in asking any one of them to differentiate between socialism or communism because that is too fine a distinction for them to draw. The ignorance is appalling. You have born again Christians — wasn’t once enough? — condemning Arlen Specter with the fires of hell. You have the cherubic Glen Beck calling Obama a racist and doing a skit in which he gives wine to Pelosi in an attempt to poison her. He has no degree in journalism. Fox News keeps him on because Fox News is the sleaziest “news” outfit around. We have Shawn Hannity preaching fire and brimstone, for he has been so religiously conditioned that he has Aquinas and Augustine up his tight ass. Freud was dead on when he mused about how fragile civilization is, like a weak pie crust. It’s that old valid axiom that if righteous men and women do not stand up and vigorously challenge these negative eruptive forces, we will be overrun by barbarians.
Many of the yahoos, one even wore a pistol to a fracas, just mouth slogans and offend history by misinterpreting facts. The schools of this presently wretched nation have failed miserably to educate our population. And the students themselves have failed as well. On Hardball, with Chris Mathews, one woman, a face in the crowd, was invited to be interviewed about her opinions. A mother, 35 or so, she used the word socialism in her screaming at a town hall. When asked about social security and medicare, she had no idea that they were pragmatically socialistic in nature, as well as our postal system. She was a rather empty young woman, who knew little, was poorly educated and gave outer-directedness a bad name. The interviewer was not harassing her. He was trying to elicit from her how she arrived at her political points of view. Admittedly, she said that she only recently “woke” up. I was mortified watching her. Pure, unadulterated ignorance mixed in with rage and foolish passion, all to produce a mental eunuch. Her children are condemned to live with this mother.
The one good thing coming out of all this is my conviction, like Caligula, I could bring a horse to the U.S. Senate, make him a senator, and he would do just fine. The level of ethics is beyond deplorable. Karl Rove is an example of a ruthless, vindictive son-of-a-bitch. The good note here is that a reasonable intelligent human being should run for office. All he or she should do is hang up a sign in the office — If you are personally corrupt, get the fuck out of my office. These are not good times for rearing our children, for models of moral excellence are few and far between. How could a parent expose a young teen, let us say, to Fox News with its biased reporting, venom and vituperation without instructing the youngster how to apply critical thinking to what he is observing and hearing. Walter Cronkite, Brinkley, Sevaried, Murrow gave us the news and we had to determine what we thought about it; rarely could you find a slanted newscast. In today’s world as the news is being given on Fox News, the reporter will smirk, editorialize or laugh, thus revealing his or her own opinions. Don’t believe me. Watch Fox News for awhile; it becomes nauseating. Present the news and keep yourself out of it is no longer journalism. Instead we have the moronic Beck, the religiously constipated Hannity, the steely, coquettish Coulter and lumbering Limbaugh giving us pure, unadulterated opinion without substantiation. As to O’Reilly, what can one say? He was a New York City teacher (so was I) and probably was insufferable to his students, dogmatic , religiously conditioned, with all the values of a Christian crusader. I see no significant difference between the Spanish conquistadores and their Franciscan friars, the sword and the cross, who brought havoc to the Americas and the aforementioned “Christians.”
Underneath a significant part of this rage, of course, is fear. So-called death panels bring the elderly jumping out of their chairs, thinking that fellow Americans will cast them out on ice floes when they are too old to be treated. Goebbels would have smacked his lips as he watched the big lie growing bigger and bigger every day and all the suckers buying into it. If Hitler reached his twisted pinnacle, he did so by thuggery, shouting down dissent, fist fights, and street brawls. We are moving in that direction. I need only cite the murder of the abortion doctor a few months back; even the term “abortionist” has come into use as if this were a kind of demonic enabler. I’ll end this rant with a thought. Sarah Palin represents, in my mind, the shallow and sleaziest part of America, candidates ill-equipped to deal with their own lives much less the country, individuals who are remarkably empty, ill-prepared, who make their appeal to the Joe the Plumber types, using the same old corrupted American values that have gotten us into trouble across the world. “Mission Accomplished,” oh, yeah!
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