Writing history in real time: Why zombies shouldn't become columnists
While fact-free rightwing history is in the process of being written, we might as well pay some attention to just how reality-challenged some of it is now while the Iraq War is still going on. If Cheney and Bush get their way, we'll still have at least another two years to do that.
The Tanker Brothers posts I discussed in my previous post were mild compared to Hippies still trying to ruin the country by Jenean Mcbrearty Lexington Herald-Leader 11/12/06.
Before quoting the column, I want to be clear here that I'm not equating this columnist's rant with the posts at Tanker Brothers. Even basing your views on the factoids from military press releases keeps a person far more in touch with what's actually happening in the world than Jenean Mcbrearty appears to be from her column.
She writes:
America won't win another war until the 1960s flower children are pushing up petunias.
Radicalized, the flower children morphed into lefty loonies who now masquerade as social progressives. No matter what they rename themselves, however, their agenda hasn't changed.
They still want utopia, and it wouldn't be worth mentioning except that their naiveté has aged into a persistent denial of reality that may have devastating consequences.
For example, consider their continued belief that America's armed forces are neo-Nazi stormtroopers who delight in burning babies to further the aims of imperialistic corporations.
Continued below the fold:
If you can stand to read more, that is:
Such nonsense, now treated as legitimate by the left-leaning media, denigrates the patriotic values and sincerity of half the nation. It undermines the war effort, insults the dead and the survivors of battle and their families, and supports the aims of the enemy. Translated into immigration or national defense policy, it is an invitation to the world to destroy our country.
Yet, this Vietnam-era idée fixe about the military, despite 40-plus years of proof to the contrary, is understandable when analyzed in the context of the flower children's religious zealotry. ...
Whose life is more important: the 12-year-old Iraqi firing an Uzi or a soldier from Kentucky? ...
Their [the "aging hippies"] BAWL (Buddha-Allah-Wicca-Lenin) is better than some old Judeo-Christian God.
There's more along those lines in that particularly witless column. I feel silly even pointing out the painfully obvious flaws in something like this. For instance, can anyone whose brain has not been pickled in OxyContin really think that prominent war critics like Generals Wesley Clark, William Odom and Brent Scowcroft or the newly-elected Senator Jim Webb from Virginia are "flower children morphed into lefty loonies"?
Lord, is that columnist some John Bircher who hasn't left her house in forty years and is terrified that flower children are going to break in and steal the stacks of newspapers that go from floor to ceiling except for a narrow path to walk from one room to the other?
That Herald-Leader columnist reminds me of Kate Campbell's song, "Petrified House", about an isolated old lady, who isn't a particularly sympathetic character:
She don't read the paper and she don't watch the news She thinks it's all lies made up by New York Jews
Sadly, Mcbready's kind of fact-free raving is taken as perfectly normal in today's Republican Party. Here again we see in no small part the influence of old-time segregationist thinking. Respectable white folks back in the day would smile indulgently at some of the more out-there raving about the Jew-Negro-Pornographer conspiracy to shut down the Baptist churches. But in the next breath they would be saying, "But still, I can see how people get upset at some of these Negroes and Jews who ... [fill in the white people's whine of the day]". This kind of thing fills the same function.
I've got to admit. Even after living a long time in California, where I'm convinced that every religion that ever existed still has some active adherents somewhere in the state, I've never encounterd the Buddha-Allah-Wicca-Lenin Church. Or cult. Or whatever.
Apparently she thinks that whoever or whatever this new sect worships is quite different from the "Judeo-Christian God". Let's leave aside for a moment whether "Judeo" and "Christian" can be hyphenated in a meaningful way (because one of those religions sees God as a Trinity and the other as simply a single God in a single Person). One of her rhetorical questions is, "Whose life is more important: the 12-year-old Iraqi firing an Uzi or a soldier from Kentucky?" The implication is that only some America-hating "hippie" would even compare the life of an American to some dang A-rab foreigner. Also, I don't actually recall ever seeing a report of a 12-year-old shooting an Uzi at Americans in Iraq; I guess I missed that issue of New American.
But for, you know, practicing Christians I can't imagine that the answer would be anything other than, "Their lives are equally important in the eyes of God". That would also be the answer from Jews and Muslims, as well. I wonder why Mcbrearty has such contempt for basic Christian values.
Maybe it comes from hearing drivel like this growing up in Mississippi. But I still sometimes marvel at the thought processes that go into a sentence like the one where she says the "flower children" nuture a "continued belief that America's armed forces are neo-Nazi stormtroopers who delight in burning babies to further the aims of imperialistic corporations".
For what it's worth (which is nothing at all in the fact-free dimension inhabited by characters like Mcbrearty), the actual hippies of the 1960s and 1970s tended to be a fairly non-political bunch. I'm very sure that more of them are now organic farmers and computer programmers than utopian "lefty loonies", although that category covers a wide range in the minds of today's Republicans.
Also, who the [Cheney] today says that that the US military is made up of "neo-Nazi stormtroopers"? Talk about making up a straw man to slap down. I don't even think the "God hates fags" crazies from the Westboro Baptist Church and their few followers say that, much less any living, breathing liberal Democrat.
And as I wrack my brain, I have to say that this is probably the first time I've encountered the concept of "imperialistic corporations". I've come across several varieties of theories of imperialism, including those of the neoconservatives who like to think of the US as an empire, but I really don't remember ever hearing the concept of "imperialistic corporation".
To quote again the conclusion Mcbrearty draws from these made-up factoids:
Such nonsense, now treated as legitimate by the left-leaning media, denigrates the patriotic values and sincerity of half the nation. It undermines the war effort, insults the dead and the survivors of battle and their families, and supports the aims of the enemy. Translated into immigration or national defense policy, it is an invitation to the world to destroy our country.
What can you say about something like that? I believe the technical term for that kind of argumentation is "making shit up".
But this is the kind of foolish bigotry that many, many Republicans today nurture their brains on. For someone who actually is thinking in these terms, actual reality-based argumentation is pointless. But, Lord, what a strange, disturbed view of the world it is!
