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Sunday, August 12, 2012

Once Again, A GOP VP Choice Tears the Lid Off of Hell

In the Moot for my little bit of post-VP prognostication Ryan As Reset -- for Karl Rove I was just treated to a rather surreally enraged comment. The comment -- offered up by a bravely "Anonymous" reader, natch -- and my response to it are quoted below, or you can follow the link to see the exchange in the context of the original. Probably the comment was a hit and run matter and my response won't reach its author -- if such a response could reach a person who says such things. But what interests me most about the exchange was that it was triggered by my analysis at all.

I realized in reading it that we are probably in for an intense amplification of the racism that is always sliming the surface of GOP discourse in the months to come. Although Paul Ryan is a more experienced and more affable politician than Sarah Palin was the choice of Ryan is functionally the same as the choice of Palin in terms of the way the campaign will likely proceed from here on out, since he was chosen to reassure GOP base voters and since the GOP base is characterized by white-racist know-nothing anti-science greedheads, theocratic patriarchal pricks, and gun-nuts: it will function as a permission slip for the unspeakably ugly Republican id to give full public vent to its vileness.

I doubt that Mitt Romney, who seems to lack even the occasional conviction of John McCain (and that's saying something), is going to shut down the full-throated expression of the racist ick of Republicanism in this consummating moment of its final turn into desperate marginality. He is far more likely to blame Obama for the worst excesses of the bigots on whose votes he utterly depends for a chance at victory and a chance at the plutocratic prevalence that victory would represent, from which he would benefit so much personally at the expense of the vast majority of people who have to work for a living (among them many of the bigots whose votes he depends on).

I still feel quite confident that at the end of this ugly and demoralizing road Obama will emerge victorious and in a way that may well have the coattails to retain the Senate and regain the House and allow for a couple of years at least of functional governance in the face of our urgent shared social, economic, ecological, geo-political problems. But I am steeling myself for eighty six days of some serious yuck in serious muck.

And, now, here's the exchange itself:

Anonymous said...
Try to understand this simple fact friend: NO SANE PERSON GIVES AWAY THEIR POWER! That's a liberal mental illness found mostly among complacent, comfortable, well-conditioned white sheeple. Until leftists can find less bankrupt arguments than "We're coming for you straight white man, we're demographically disempowering you and taking over", America will continue to be in a state of escalating civil war. This is also why so many millions who might otherwise be attracted to liberalism can *never* support your side. Viscerally, they know that their demographic is under attack at every level and have no choice but to fight back. My response to these relentless attacks is simple and perfectly rational: Give me MORE POWER! MORE POWER! MORE POWER!

Study your history: your ideology is TOTALLY DELUSIONAL AND UNPROVEN! It is an invented, artificial social order which your kind are trying to impose upon the Western world, with predictable results. The sword of Islam is coming for you and for the West, your societies are disintigrating into warring ethnic factions, and your only response is to attack white Christian men? Wake the fuck up, or fuck off!

Look around: We live in late Rome, an age of total dissolution, decadence and collapse. As you yourself have noted, our progressive mythology is utterly bankrupt. America is terminally infected with an incredibly shallow liberalism, and when we go all of Western civilization falls. Then comes a Dark Age, an Age of Steel when people will look back on your kind with utter contempt that such weakness and decadence was allowed to spread like a cancer and destroy the most powerful civilization in history in such short order.

Your kind have much to answer for, and little time to do it, leftist college professor man. Good luck in the new Dark Age -- you're going to need it!
Dale Carrico said...
Look, in your everyday dealings it is highly unlikely that you live in a way consonant with what you are claiming to believe so ardently. People solicit the agreement or changed conduct of others all the time. People compromise, people change their minds, people discover unexpected allies, people find common ground in shared endeavors while at once differing in others. Power in its political sense refers to these dynamics and to the strategies we deploy in the face of stakeholder diversity to solve shared problems and accomplish shared ends. Power isn't something you shore up like a caveman piling up poop in a corner of the cave or a warrior piling up skulls in a castle or a corporate raider piling up dollars in a vault. Learning to live with others isn't asking you to "give up power" it is a matter of opening up to available possibilities of becoming powerful enough in alliance with actually existing others to solve actually existing problems that beset you in the world and enjoy actually-available occasions for expression and change in the world.

In the picture accompanying this analysis imagining the Obama team laughing at the strategic ineptitude of this VP pic that slots so perfectly into their preferred campaign narrative there are white Christian men as far as know. I speak of the palpable reality of a diversifying and secularizing America, in which white Christian guys are obviously as much a part as other people are. If that is experienced by you as an attack it is reality that is attacking you and you should possibly take that under advisement before you start howling about the delusions and unprovable assertions of others. Not every straight guy is a patriarchal prick, you know, not every Christian is itching for a Pentecostal theocracy, you know, not every white guy is a racist asshole. There, there, little boy, you will discover soon enough that to be part of the diversity in a multicultural world is not such a bad thing and that you are wrong to pretend that you have "no choice" but to fight for your infantile fantasy that you are the God of the Mountain when you are really another citizen-stakeholder with the same rights and responsibilities as everybody else, no more, no less.

By the way, you do realize that there are over one and a half billion Muslims on earth and something like two and a half million in America? Do you really think it makes any kind of sense to reduce all that diversity of human beings to the image of a "sword" presumably aimed at your heart? For somebody boasting about manly strength you sure sound scared. Do you know any non-christian people? I know lots and lots and lots. We are all more similar than we are different. I daresay that includes you and me, too, once you chill out a bit and unclench.

You talk a lot about "my kind," whatever that is supposed to mean -- a middle aged white guy with a longtime partner and a cat who works for a living as a teacher and writer. Can you really think I'm a different species from you just because I'm more interested in taking seriously the way people reconcile differences to facilitate the solving of shared problems than pissing in my diaper and barking like a big bully all the time like you seem to want to do? How small and scared you sound. Surely there is more to you than this?

You seem to think you have a lot of big ideas about Rome and a clash of civilizations and historical forces and cultural struggles and human psychology -- and strictly speaking it is hard to square this sort of respect for knowledge with your contempt of my education and my chosen vocation teaching in a university. Unfortunately for you, I do know quite enough history to know who historically are the sorts of people who talk like you do.

How interesting it is that the corporate empty-suit Romney's choice in Paul Ryan of a zealot devoted to a self-contradictory anti-government anti-choice stance is bringing you out of the cracks in the floorboards to howl for blood.

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