The ATF has announced that they have broken up a white supremacist plot to kill Senator Obama along with over a hundred black people in a Tennessee murder spree.
Who knows how far they would have got, but who knows what other evil lurks in the hearts of such people, stoked up on campaign libel and "Joe sixpack bigotry."
No comment has been obtained from Palin headquarters yet, as to whether these are some of the "real Americans she's been talking about.
Yes, saw that news today--these twisted racists pose a danger, make no mistake about it: irrational, conspiratorial, violent, prone to delusions of grandeur. So far, they've been so unprofessional that they get caught well before making it beyond the crazy-talk stages, but nobody can count on that pattern continuing. In his 1879 essay "Death of Abraham Lincoln," Walt Whitman writes a somber passage about his sighting of Lincoln in 1861 outside the Astor House in NYC; it may be worth pondering for the way it describes the hostility, ambivalence, and potential for violence always swirling around Lincoln's person, and how the man somehow kept himself together, like the calm at the center of a hurricane. The link is Whitman on Lincoln, and the passage begins "He look’d with curiosity upon that immense sea of faces, and the sea of faces return’d the look with similar curiosity."
ReplyDeleteI saw this too. We have a blind sight to this continuing hate/racist sub-culture forever in our midst. And yes I mean - forever - as in continuously. We like to think we are past this - but we are not. Every time I receive a newsletter from the Southern Poverty Law Center in the mail I am startled by the reminder of this continuing, festering sore in our country. The idea of an Obama presidency is just the trigger it needs to boil to the surface. Oh SO sadly. Shame on the republican campaign for ignorantly & irresponsibly stoking the flames. By ignorantly I mean that they are just as blind as the rest of us to this continuing presence. A presence we as a society have convinced ourselves is no more.
ReplyDeleteSquid is right. This has always been and will always be a violent, racist element in American society and it will probably be even more dangerous in the future with advance communications technology. Obama is going to have to be ever mindful of his security and exposure. I'm just keeping my fingers crossed.
ReplyDeleteAnd Whitman is right too - we're still too close to the Civil War and its shadow still hangs over us and the division is still sore and itchy and gets infected frequently.
ReplyDeleteI think that division is not well described by north and south, but as the Judge said about pornography, I know it when I see it and I see it all over. There's them and us and what's "real Americans" to Sarah Palin is them to us.
In fact I think sometimes that it's genetic as much as or more than environmental,that dichotomy. I think there's something in the DNA that predisposes one to the kind of thinking or lack of it, if you prefer.