Read it!

I hope that yesterday's post sufficed to send you to Hal Crowther's essay on the November 2 election ("Gone Missing: The Country's Conscience, Brain, and Heart," in The Independent). It's that prescient. All thoughtful citizens owe it to themselves to read it, and we should be thankful that we have a few fellow citizens like Crowther, who I believe lives only a few miles from me, over in Hillsborough.
    In case you need to sample some more of his essay before deciding to read the whole thing:

...Though the troglodyte triumvirate of [Rush] Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and Sean Hannity is paid $114 million annually to seduce the subliterate multitudes—for nine hours daily on Fox Radio—the usual lavish smorgasbord of reactionary bile and gibberish was deemed insufficient for 2010. Unleashed by a Supreme Court majority who ruled that corporate campaign spending, even anonymous spending, was the exact equivalent of First Amendment free speech, those dark forces "outside" the political system reached deep into their well-lined pockets and spent nearly half a billion dollars, a quarter of it from "undisclosed" sources, to underwrite attack ads and steer a staggering, half-bankrupt nation to the right.
    ...Shrinking or neutering the government never helped anyone with a net worth less than eight figures. You can sell almost anything in America but common sense. This country is notorious, and unique, for all its poor people who want to keep wealth unchained, just in case they should acquire some.
    ...It may be that voters below a certain level of ratiocination, their logical faculties permanently maimed by reality TV and video games, are no longer able to resist the kind of attack ads that came at them in a $4 billion tidal wave. The big corporate contributors wouldn't fund this operation so generously if they weren't confident of a handsome return. Never in human history has so much cash and so much expertise been devoted to what would once have been called mind control, or brainwashing, and is now called free speech. [emphasis mine¹] There's no apparent limit to what the right-wing coalition can spend, or will spend, to bring out the worst in Americans.

To paraphrase what many people have said with reference to Strunk & White's Elements of Style², read Crowther's essay!
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1. George Orwell must be turning over in his grave. I'm thinking of his "Newspeak," from Nineteen Eighty-Four (which was only ten years before the election of 1994, with which this series of posts on Hal Crowther's writings began).
2. "Read the little book!"

America's angry "debaters"

This morning, a friend brought to my attention Newsweek's series of pictures ("of angry 'debaters'," as he said) from the recent town hall meetings ("Town Hall Face"). My friend commented, "The town halls are a true hallmark of today's American democracy: pure, direct, misinformed, and opinionated." And he asked, "Who subverted this direct form of democracy, after the indirect parliamentary form had long been chained by interest groups?"
    Well, I wonder whether part of the answer lies with the 1988 Willie Horton ad campaign against Michael Dukakis on behalf of George H. W. Bush for President. During that campaign, George W. Bush and Karl Rove received their most intense tutoring from Lee ("You gotta go negative") Atwater¹ (not that Rove hadn't already learned and practiced much of the art). (I read about this in two books: Molly Ivins's and Lou Dubose's Shrub: The Short [unfortunately not short enough] but Happy Political Life of George W. Bush, and Carl Cannon's Boy Genius: Karl Rove, The Architect of George W. Bush's Remarkable Political Triumphs.)
    Not to exempt Democrats, but no one among their ranks comes to mind who was or is even half as committed to going negative as Atwater and Rove were.
    And possibly Newt Gingrich's 1994 "Contract with America" might have been significantly involved. At any rate, that Congress seemed to shelter and feed hugely subversive figures like Tom DeLay. And (my friend mentioned interest groups) I don't believe that lobbyists had ever experienced anything like the golden age that began to flourish about then (despite Ike's January 17, 1961 speech about the "military-industrial complex").
    I think that the willful exploitation of certain "party bases," along with a policy that any means are okay so long as the end to be achieved is necessary surely influenced what has come to pass with respect to "America's angry 'debaters'." (For Rove and DeLay, the end was for the Republican Party to control all three branches of government, not to mention the media, to be led, of course, by Fox News [sic].)
    And when did Rush Limbaugh arise? Ah, 1988!
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1. Whether Atwater's deathbed "I'm sorry" for the Willie Horton ad was sincere or a last-minute effort to try to win eternal bliss, I guess we'll never know, unless all things get revealed to the Elect someday in heaven.

The reason for my recent disappearance

To my regular readers, who may be wondering why I haven't posted anything lately, I think I owe an explanation. The simple truth is that my spirits have been rather down lately over the utter banality and craziness of one-half of the "health care debate" in this country. I don't know which depresses me more, the fact of Fox News [sic] and Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin, or the fact that a large number of supposedly adult Americans listen to and believe them.
    And it doesn't help that some of these bewildering (and possibly bewildered) people are my neighbors and relatives. A letter printed yesterday to the editor of a local newspaper castigated another letter-writer, saying, "I don't know where that liberal gets his information, but a recent poll on Fox News says...."
    And a cousin emailed me this morning about a conversation in his extended family:

Yesterday I visited them, and they started telling me about Hitler, and how he wanted to socialize everything. I'm like, "Whoa! Obama is nothing like Hitler. It's irresponsible to compare the two. Hitler was like the most evil person of the 1900's."
    Then they were like, "You know what would happen if the Democrats got their way? They would euthanize H----d's son because he's mongoloid."
    It's not even worth arguing with them anymore. A lot of senior citizens watch Faux News most of the day and listen to AM radio when they aren't watching their crazy propaganda "news." It's mind-boggling how irresponsible some of those crazy right-wingers are. They are scaring people into starting militias, and that shit is dangerous.

Are any of you depressed about this, too? The false rumor-starting, the fear-mongering, the hate-inciting? If you want to unburden yourself a little (as I have here), my comment box is open.