11.11.12
WhiteManistan
Not intended to inspire friendship and good feeling. But valid, with a capital “V.”
Mitt Romney is the president of white male America …
Romney and Tea Party loonies dismissed half the country as chattel and moochers who did not belong in their “traditional??? America. But the more they insulted the president with birther cracks, the more they tried to force chastity belts on women, and the more they made Hispanics, blacks and gays feel like the help, the more these groups burned to prove that, knitted together, they could give the dead-enders of white male domination the boot.
Forty years ago, reprinted from Fear & Loathing On the Campaign Trail ’72:
Hear me, people. We now have to deal with another race — small and feeble when our fathers first met them, but now great and overbearing. Strangely enough they have a mind to till the soil and the love of possession is a disease with them. These people have made many rules that the rich may break but the poor may not. They take their tithes from the poor and weak to support the rich and those who rule. — Sitting Bull, 1877
The ugly fallout from the American Dream has been coming down on us at a pretty consistent rate since Sitting Bull’s time — and the only real difference now, with election day ’72 only a few weeks away, is that we now seem on the verge of ratifying the fallout and forgetting the Dream itself …
There is almost a Yin/Yang clarity in the difference between the two men, a contrast so stark that it would be hard to find any two better models in the national politics arena for the legendary duality — the congenital Split Personality and polarized instincts — that almost everybody except Americans has long since taken for granted as the key to our National Character. This was not what Richard Nixon had in mind when he said last August, that the 1972 presidential election would offer voters “the clearest choice of the century,” bur on a level he will never understand he was probably right … and it is Nixon himself who represents that dark, venal and incurably violent side of the American character every other country in the world has learned to fear and despise. — Hunter Thompson
Below, the plentiful evidence of widespread self-delusion and the corrosive legacy of Norman Vincent Peale.
Pay the pearl-clutchers no mind. That way lies disaster. The actual fine print on the label of reality reads: “Kumbaya” not included.
