The Toxicity of Demagoguery

Even apart from the violence and threats of violence at McCain/Palin rallies, the vandalism at offices of the demonized ACORN, the eliminationist rhetoric spewing from the puke-holes of Limbaugh, Hannity, et. al., we must all say again and again and again that the ugliness of the politics of the last forty years, particularly the last twenty, has real consequences.

Very real consequences.

My parents won't come visit me here in New York City because a spread-the-wealth communist/islamo-fascist/terrorist-loving/elitist celebrity/muslim "fake" christian/inner-city Chicago Harvard-educated thug like Obama will be our next president and they can't bear to visit me in such an "anti-American" part of America where so many people can and do support such a person. The subtext? Such a "negro" person who will "bring back all those problems from back then, after they had been getting so much better these last few years." That is a direct quote.

I wish I was kidding.

When I asked my mother if she thought I was a traitor, she said (after a very long pause) that she thought I was "misguided." Maybe sometime after January 20th, she said, but they were depressed about all of it and scared about what was going to happen when "that person" took office. They probably couldn't bring themselves to visit me even then, and maybe not ever again.

So, in order to garner votes, in addition to all their other crimes, the Republican Party is also guilty of destroying my relationship with my parents.

Sorry for the online therapy session, folks, but politics isn't the mere game the Karl Roves of this world take it to be.

Thusly, I quote driftglass at length to describe what has happened to my parents:

The last lie a junkie tells himself isn't "I’m not an addict."

The last lie a junkie tells himself is "My being a addict doesn't matter."

And in the Conservative Crack House of Many Doors, Ronald Reagan was that first cocktail. The first line of coke. The first needle. The first "Holy Mother of God!” WOWGASM that shotguns right through the blood/brain barrier, reformats your entire ethical hard drive, and scrimshaws a brand new Prime Directive on the inside of your skull.

Listen to any aging wingnut sighing and jerking sadly off to a tattered photo of Saint Ronnie -- despite the fact that the catastrophes we are now reaping were sown by his ruinous ideology -- and you can hear every addict who ever lived pining for that first Perfect High. The one they spend the rest of their days chasing, regardless of the size of the debts they run up or the ruined lives they leave in their wake.

Clinton? Objectively, Clinton qualifies as the greatest Center/Right President in history, and with balanced budgets, GATT, welfare reform, NAFTA, DOMA, record surpluses, foreign and domestic terrorists brought to book, and an actual military victory, he arguably delivered to the wingnuts more of everything they ever said they wanted than anyone else.

And they hated him for it.

Why?

Because Clinton was mere addiction maintenance delivered in measured doses under adult supervision: all policy-wonk that wasn’t cut with that industrial-waste-grade bigoted, psychotic bloodlust that gives Conservatism its wild, freebasing edge. Clinton was methadone, and for the hardcore lifestyle junkie, that shit is for babies.

And Dubya? Dubya was meth with a ketamine chaser delivered hammer-and-anvil directly to the lizard brain.

Dubya was 40 million Pig People tired of the hard, fussy job of being a tolerant, powerful democracy finally once-and-for-all blowing America’s family inheritance on an eight-year, blood-drunk bender.

Dubya was the United States crawling through dumpsters at our national soul’s midnight, killing anything that moves, licking out the contents of random baggies, hoping the little white flakes clinging to the plastic is crank and not rat poison, and waking up the next day -- that horrible, horrible sun-also-rises morning after -- broke and twitchy, arguing over what more they can sell off to keep the party going and who they can blame for their gone-to-shit lives.

So what is the last lie a Conservative tells himself? The last lie that the junkies and their suppliers both fight like hell to keep alive and twitching?

That, whether or not their ideology is depraved or deluded, it doesn’t matter because:

“Both side are always equally wrong about everything all the time.”

Doesn’t matter the who or what. The when or how. Doesn’t matter who was driving the bus towards the cliff and who was waving the red flags, throwing their bodies in front of it, trying to make it stop. Doesn’t matter who was trying to douse the conflagration with hoses shredded by 20 year of Reaganism, and who was lobbing milk cartons full of jellied gasoline onto the bonfire.

It is the lie the hagged-out Cokie Roberts pushes week after week after week on “This Week…”

It is the lie that David Fucking Brooks pushes in the pages of the New York Times.

It is the lie that made David Broder the “Dean” of the Villagers; the lie on which the quarterly profits of the entire Murdoch media empire now rests.

Because these people and thousands more like them are not journalists or “pundits” or expert who offer facts or interpretation or a philosophical framework for illuminating and contextualizing the events of the world.

They are pushers, selling that last, nihilistic lie to the junkies on the Right who will pay any price and cut any throat to escape the fact that they are personally and specifically responsible for the destruction of the country they claimed to love in the name of a God they claim to believe in.

Which is why November 4th is so much more than an election.

November 4th is an Intervention, because the junkie-pusher spiral of the Republican rank-and-file and their leaders has finally hit bottom: we need to heal this country or lose it, and arguing -- "reasoning" -- with wingnuts and their enabling shills and hacks is as pointless as trying to reason with addicts and dealers.

The only way this country is going to be saved is by taking it away from them, school board by school board, city council by city council, congressional district by congressional district, state by state, election by election until they are driven back into the political sewers from whence they came.

My parents are hate junkies and, like any junkie, if you can't save them you have to be willing to cut them out of your life. This has been a long time coming. I didn't name this blog Expatriate Thoughts in a fit of pique. I meant it then and I mean it now.

Another victim of George W. Bush's America.

I am an expatriate.