Tuesday, August 4, 2009

Tea Baggers, Birthers, Deathers, Brown Shirted Clackers


I am watching Morning Joe and he is denying that this locust like blight of conspiracy theorists in the GOP party are from the GOP. Tea Baggers hate all tax. Birthers see conspiracy in everything. They (the locusts) are now stating that proposed health care reforms are designed to kill old people – Deathers.

Now you have all these retired people, presumably on Medicare, being bused around to thirty states according to the MSM to populate Town Meetings and shout down anybody who disagrees with them about whatever they think they believe. Not GOP? The charter buses are paid for by Health Insurance Industry lobbyists. In the tradition of hecklers in theatres I call these bused in actors as HMO/Pharma Clackers.

The clackers and their shouting down all opposition in town hall meetings that many times are conducted in sincerity by Congressmen in their home districts reminds me of the Brown Shirt tactics of the National Socialists in early 1930s Germany. Am I exaggerating? Well - non of these shipped in HMO/PHARMA Clackers are carrying or using billy clubs yet!

It is this corruption of something older than the republic itself – town hall meetings – where I draw the line in the sand of my tolerance for this fringe fascist outbreak trying to further erode civility from what little is left in the American town square.

Never the less, it seems like a hole has developed in the heart of the fabric of the GOP – like American Culture itself. These activists, borderline crazies, used to be good to get out the vote in past elections. It would seem that with the death of Jerry Falwell, the outing of Ted Haggard and a long, long string of sexual improprieties, perhaps more on the GOP side than the Dems – the old boundaries of morality and decency in the culture have eroded. But the GOP was supposed to be morally superior as the party of “Family Values” whatever that really means (wink, wink, nod).

Is this an army of nuts, of cast off downsized outsourced part-time political soldiers, no longer needed players in the phony GOP Morality Play? Are they adrift? Ready to latch on, hire on (per diem), to any current PR project? Are they the Oakies of this modern economic depression not spoken about by the MSM?

Some of this decay in the social fabric on the GOP side is part of the void, no man’s land, that the ongoing evolving culture is going through. Religion no longer anchors us. Some of us perhaps. Some of us take responsibility for our lives and our salvation. Ninety plus percent of the culture has been hooked on the materialistic god of consumerism of the past generation. Happiness has to do with things: houses, SUVs, Ivy League diplomas, iPods, clothes, plastic credit, etc.etc.etc. Heaven is on this material earth. No need for a spiritual heaven. Hell and Satan have retreated deep into the cultural background.

In the meanwhile, blue dog Dems are determined to earn the big lobby bucks and sabotage the health of all of the American Public. Obama, the corporate lawyer, will sign off on whatever and call it success.

These are the dog days of Summer and thinking about the situations mentioned above I am reminded of the words of the Irish poet Yeats. He, in the midst of the Irish Rebellion and the First World War felt the pain, the shouting of people who were not in control of technology ninety years ago and acting like soulless robots in response to that sad age – which blends into this sad age – “nothing is new under the sun” – when he wrote the following:


The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity…

The Second Coming - W.B. Yeats