I hesitate to write about this, since everyone and his horse will
undoubtedly pick up on the latest Republican hilarity. It's an easy
target, but it says so much about what the Republican party has been
party to: the degradation of truth, logic, decency and freedom. Yes, we
have another Republican telling us that women probably can't get pregnant from being raped.
Denial,
as I've been saying ad nauseam, is the flip side of belief and every
belief requires a denial. Denial of what you know to be true, is
hypocrisy and to avoid hypocrisy, too many Republicans will defend what
they know to be false and tell themselves it's heroic; tell themselves
that lies are not lies if they're useful in defending the faith. Some of
what one needs to defend in order to gain party support is immoral,
indecent, mean-spirited and nasty too. Much of it is just a series of
damned lies, but that's another story.
There's just no
truth to the idea that God or biology protect a rape victim from
pregnancy but the creed demands that one oppose terminating a pregnancy,
whether unwanted or repellant or dangerous, so you -- forgive my
technical jargon -- have to make shit up in order to defend the
belief and deny the truth, be it incontrovertible truth about evolution,
cosmology, geology, economics, law, mathematics or history. In many
cases, being a Republican requires that you park not only your brains,
but your honesty, your decency in the alley behind the GOP bar next to
the dumpster, lest any of the clergy see it.
I won't deny
that I take a certain satisfaction in presenting this one small,
relatively unimportant demonstration of the mental processes that
produce and direct the American Opera Buffo. I delight in airing their
dirty laundry, not because I like the rancid smell of batshit, but
because it's time to burn it and bury the ashes. It has been time
forever.
The prevalence rate of mega-amygdala megalomania in American politics is one of those constants in the Universe – like the rate of radioactive decay throughout the Milky Way, like the incidence rate of psychosis in the general population, like outbreaks of cholera and typhoid around open cesspools, like the frequency of malignant lymphomas surrounding chemical waste dumps, and pervasive outbreaks of End Time hysteria whenever reason rears itself.
ReplyDeleteNo, it never goes away. Someday, however, the mass of all craziness in the Universe will collapse around some mysterious gravitation force and coalesce into a Singularity of Absolute Stupidity.
It may take a trillion years – if the forces of entropy don’t claim us first.
Sometimes the willfully ignorant cross a line from mere comic stupidity. Sometimes the worst among them engage in outright intimidation, stalking and threats of violence - as in this news account: Fox News Guest Receives Racist Rape And Death Threats. When people can longer make a distinction between free speech versus a hate crime, its time to prosecute.
ReplyDeleteI saw that one this morning. I try to remember that a dozen or a hundred and maybe a thousand such threats are statistically meaningless; that one in a million means at least 300 in the US, but even so, my level of disgust at the level of hate and anger and savagery makes me question whether I really care if the clock is running out on America.
DeleteOur Civil War isn't just an item to study in a history class, it's a way of life -- an American way of life, and that e pluribus nonsense is just wishful thinking. Sure, we can cringe at Ted Nugent machine gunning pigs, making not so veiled threats at the President, but he's not the threat -- not directly. It's the fact that such media celebrities and the media themselves make these fringe lunatics feel justified, feel confident that they're part of a movement with legitimacy. We've seen it all before. We've seen it in civilized and educated countries and I don't think we've seen the last of it.