Everywhere you go today you’ll find another righty, from Sarah Palin on down, blaming crazy people for their craziness, loudly and revealingly attempting to exonerate not just their heinous words, but more significantly, their disastrous policies, which both are almost designed to precipitate just such craziness. Nearly lost amid the narcissistic pout-rage of which Palin’s, well, “reprehensible” Facebook blather today was only the clumsiest, nobody is talking about the 12th paragraph or so of all these stories, wherein unlikely bipartisan agreement finds that the collapsing economy, lack of mental health care, and skimpy government services leave a lot of crazy people roaming the streets. Mission Accomplished, Republicans.
It’s depressingly familiar by now that Republicans like to crash the economy and benefit politically from doing so; in classic “Shock Doctrine” protocol, they revel in the kind of destabilizing insecurity that allows fiscally debilitating policies like the Bush tax cuts or multiple wars to be implemented, and then the resulting catastrophes make their other, even more undesirable programs seem necessary and right, leading to further disasters, crazier solutions, and on and on. But you have to hand it to them for covering their bases. Who knew that Reagan’s deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill, punishing recessions, elimination of the Fairness Doctrine, relaxing of gun control laws, aggressive militarism, and top-down class warfare were all designed, and rather well, to serve a singular purpose? At least until halfway through Bush’s tenure, anyway?
Well, here we are. Unlike anything since Weimar Germany, we have all the elements required for the establishment of the kind of fascist dictatorship ol’ Prescott Bush et al longed for back in the day, thanks to a series of either conscious or at least lucky moves by the right over the last thirty years. Shocking income inequality, massive unemployment, and widespread poverty. National humiliation from failed military adventurism. Crippling debt. A two-tiered legal system that pits the all-powerful government against its lowliest citizens and leaves the well-connected unscathed. Those horrendous, Banana Republic characteristics aren’t bugs, they’re features. From there, all you need is repetitive, 24/7 demonizing propaganda against some easily marginalized Other and a lot of money to put it out, and you’re off to the races. ”It works the same in every country,” as they said at Nuremburg, and as the escalating political violence and stiflingly narrow political discourse in America today shows, that ol’ Nazi was right.
You see, the right needs violent crazies roaming the lightly-policed streets to convince people that a more repressive police state would be good. They rely on economic insecurity to goad the non-rich to learn to get by with less. They require “Others” to blame for the serial disasters they create with such alacrity. They even create enemies abroad, usually to simply grab resources, but just as often to make a mess that will inevitably lead to a lavish payoff, win or lose, to the military industrial complex and enable them to denounce and even prosecute their critics in a “Time of War.” Heads they win, tails we lose.
This probably explains the extreme aversion to criticism Palin’s otherwise just routinely offensive video exemplifies…. Anybody capable of fogging a mirror could see through a blindfold that the mess we’re in, of which the Tucson shooter is just a small but telling part, is completely a Republican creation, the logical result of the fearful, fact-averse, and Darwinian society they had to have in order to realize their larger goals, and every so often, somebody is going to get killed. That’s the way the cookie crumbles.
Right wing hero Winston Churchill once described his political nemesis, Clement Atlee, as “a modest man, with a lot to be modest about.” In a world deliberately made crazy, mostly for profit, that practically seems like a compliment today. Given the untold horrors their ideology has produced at home and abroad, Palin and her ilk have a whole lot to be modest about, but what do you know? They aren’t modest at all.
