GOD TRULY HAS AN IRONIC SENSE OF HUMOR
A spot-on piece --”The Rage is Not About Health Care” -- from Frank Rich in this morning’s NY Times tells it like it is:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/28/opinion/28rich.html?src=me&ref=homepage
Basically “the rage” is about once-dominant whites — males particularly -- resenting their loss of unchallenged position, preeminence and power.
Some highlights:
The conjunction of a black president and a female speaker of the House — topped off by a wise Latina on the Supreme Court and a powerful gay Congressional committee chairman — would sow fears of disenfranchisement among a dwindling and threatened minority in the country no matter what policies were in play. It’s not happenstance that Frank, Lewis and Cleaver — none of them major Democratic players in the health care push — received a major share of last weekend’s abuse. When you hear demonstrators chant the slogan “Take our country back!,” these are the people they want to take the country back from.
No Republican or conservative leader of stature has taken on Palin, Perry, Boehner or any of the others who have been stoking these fires for a good 17 months now. Last week McCain even endorsed Palin’s “reload” rhetoric.
Are these politicians so frightened of offending anyone in the Tea Party-Glenn Beck base that they would rather fall silent than call out its extremist elements and their enablers? Seemingly so, and if G.O.P. leaders of all stripes, from Romney to Mitch McConnell to Olympia Snowe to Lindsey Graham, are afraid of these forces, that’s the strongest possible indicator that the rest of us have reason to fear them too.
All of which brings to mind the warning attributed to Edmund Burke: “All that is needed for the forces of evil to succeed is for enough good men to remain silent.”
Rich makes a chilling analogy:
How curious that a mob fond of likening President Obama to Hitler knows so little about history that it doesn’t recognize its own small-scale mimicry of Kristallnacht. The weapon of choice for vigilante violence at Congressional offices has been a brick hurled through a window. So far.
To which I would add:
The scary part is that, like the Nazis in Germany (which level-headed Germans regarded as an embarrassing fringe group in the 1920s), the Angry Right in the U.S. may someday acquire mainstream political legitimacy and power through demagoguery, violence and intimidation. This possibility is heightened by economic hard times, which, as in Weimar Germany, brings demagogues and rowdies out of the woodwork.
To those who say: “It can’t happen here” consider this: High culture, education, sophistication and wealth provide no antidotes for collective insanity within advanced civilizations. Germans were not unreasoning, primitive barbarians, but rather exemplars of the heights to which human culture and intelligence could aspire. Germany prior to the World Wars stood at the apex of civilization: a formidable industrial economic power; a paragon of culture, literature, philosophy, history, archaeology, music, art, architecture, science, engineering; a people of refined manners, delicate sensibilities, passion for order and irrepressible energy, imbued with the high moral principles of the Protestant Reformation.
At present, Sarah Palin is the closest thing to the Angry Right’s charismatic, national leader. Who’da thunk the next incarnation of Hitler would be a sexy hockey mom? Well, who’da thunk the supreme Führer of Germany would be a Bavarian corporal? Such are the foibles of democracy.
God truly has an ironic sense of humor.