Playing to the Groundlings

The parallels between the Teabaggers and the brownshirts are too numerous, but the commonality remains. (OK, Godwin's Law applies here.) When in doubt, get the simple folk riled and stand back while they do your dirty work.

Recent events remind me of Kristallnacht: shrill rhetoric resulting in mobs of thugs out to vandalize homes and offices of people who support a bill that begins to offer more comprehensive health care to Americans. One might take hope, though, in the great tradition of bullies being more hot air than action. Still, the "ex-soldiers and beer hall brawlers" that made up the Sturmabteilung did make quite a mess.

It's sad that one of the best pieces of political oratory in recent memory came from a fictional character (President Andrew Shepherd in Rob Reiner's film The American President).

America isn't easy. America is advanced citizenship. You gotta want it bad, 'cause it's gonna put up a fight. It's gonna say "You want free speech? Let's see you acknowledge a man whose words make your blood boil, who's standing center stage and advocating at the top of his lungs that which you would spend a lifetime opposing at the top of yours. You want to claim this land as the land of the free? Then the symbol of your country can't just be a flag; the symbol also has to be one of its citizens exercising his right to burn that flag in protest. Show me that, defend that, celebrate that in your classrooms. Then, you can stand up and sing about the "land of the free". I've known Bob Rumson for years, and I've been operating under the assumption that the reason Bob devotes so much time and energy to shouting at the rain was that he simply didn't get it. Well, I was wrong. Bob's problem isn't that he doesn't get it. Bob's problem is that he can't sell it! We have serious problems to solve, and we need serious people to solve them. And whatever your particular problem is, I promise you, Bob Rumson is not the least bit interested in solving it. He is interested in two things and two things only: making you afraid of it and telling you who's to blame for it.

After a protest at the University of Ottawa resulted in the cancellation of Ann Coulter's speech, one of my acquaintances wrote:

Ann Coulter is right on just about everything, she just says it in a way that is offensive to liberals. The Canadians showed just how important whatever they call their free speech law is by being incapable of listening to an opposing viewpoint. Doesn't surprise me. Some day I suspect we will just send Rhode Island up their to kick the crap out of their Army. I guess I really should give some credit to the Canadian armed forces that have served in Iraq. Supposedly both of them were above marginal soldiers.

(Ironical note here: that author's father was Canadian.)

The way Ms. Coulter, Rush, and Glen talk about "liberals" reminds me too much of the way Jews and other "non-Aryans" were demonized. "Them" is a useful term when playing to the groundlings. In a complex world, simple answers are attractive. Deceptive, but attractive. It worked in 1919 and it works in 2010. Chances are that the plebs were played just like the Teabaggers are these days.

An Articulated Mystery

A way of articulating a great mystery occurred to me in church last Sunday morning. During the time for children, the minister asked them to raise their hands if they knew Jesus loves them. Then she built a few more questions, ending with:

"Do you know that Jesus wants us to be kind and good to one another?"

When I heard that I was struck with the paradox of Fox News. We have removed it from our house for exactly that reason.

While she is an extreme example, the titles of the works of Ann Coulter come to mind, when she belittles a whole category of people (broad-brushedly called "liberals") with a mean-spiritedness that astonishes me. The same sort of thing comes from Limbaugh and others on talk radio, as well as on Fox News and, particularly disturbingly, in emails that get forwarded endlessly by people whose participation in propogating such hate speech is truly disappointing.

Do we know that Jesus wants us to be kind and good to one another?

I want our children to know and act accordingly.

When I'm helping my parents with their email and I see forwarded "Liberal"-bashing emails in their inbox I wonder, "If the sender had Jesus' email address, would He be on the distribution list?" What about repudiation? When is it incumbent upon us to stand up, hit "reply all", and say "That's not OK!" Should we actually be kind and good to one another, or does it not count when we're talking about "them?" There are many different kinds of them. Which ones are OK to speak unkindly about? Which are subhuman? Which deserve ridicule?

That's part of why you can't see Fox News on our TV. It's not OK in our house to be cruel and unkind and unfriendly, and that's how people like us get treated by that network. We happen to believe in some of the ideas that would have us branded (I wouldn't be surprised to learn that some people would support the use of branding irons for this) as Liberals. And we think that it is a good idea to be kind and good to one another.