05.15.13
Is WhiteManistan un-American?
That’s the question professor Stanley Fish asked at the New York Times Opinionator blog today. Actually, the title is “Is the N.R.A Un-American?” — something that immediately is useful as another provocation from the elites.
So to answer the question — and I’d answer and have answered it, the same way. Yes and no.
Yes, America’s always had a lot of ugly sides, much in its character that deeply black. But WhiteManistan has become special in that it is now so obviously divisive and predatory.
Last year I mentioned, on a number of occasions, that the present GOP (and the Tea Party) were the heirs to John Wilkes Booth.
Ted Nugent is the living example. He’s even earned a visit from the US Secret Service, something 99.8 percent of Americans manage to avoid in their lifetime.
As a result, he’s moved to center stage in America, not for his music, but for his glowering ideology and nihilism. It needs to be reiterated in case you don’t quite get it: The current national social environment is such that the US Secret Service visit seems actually to have been good for his career!
From this blog, in 2012, here’s Nugent making one of his metaphorical references to shooting an animal when discussing the president of the US, at a GOP fundraiser in Sangamon County, Illinois, the county Abraham Lincoln represented in the state legislature:
“We have a guy in the White House who is an absolute, America-hating punk,??? Nugent said. “And it isn’t really the punk’s fault. It’s we the people for bending over and letting the punk in the door.???
“How about a welfare program … (where) for every kid who gets a sandwich from the welfare program, there’s about 10,000 pigs buying bling-bling, dope and meth with my welfare money,???
“If we don’t fix the United States government this November, we will get exactly what we asked for,??? Nugent said, “and it won’t be the rabid coyote’s fault for getting into our living room – it will be our fault for not shooting him.???
What happens when these utterances hit the press? Well, the local newspaper journalists really don’t know how to deal with it. And so it appears funny and idiosyncratic, someone just being a colorful character.
But it’s built up over time and now the din is continuous from WhiteManistan, which is not a place, but an ideology, a way of life.
And it has paralyzed the government of the United States because it refuses to recognize the elected legitimacy of the president of the United States.
The country can run itself on automatic, through apparatus and structure, but there will be no progress. And that’s because the ideology of WhiteManistan has taken up a adversarial position.
The country cannot be governed when the legislature and the executive branch are engaged in a duel to the death.
It doesn’t take any genius to see the John Wilkes Booth element in WhiteManistan.
At the Times, Stanley Fish writes:
“Secession is near. Can’t wait. Which by the way is Constitutional.???
It’s constitutional, in this view, because a government in the act of eroding constitutional values is itself unconstitutional and has become a tyranny. Therefore to oppose it by whatever means available, including force, is not to undermine constitutionality, but to affirm it. It is in this spirit that John Wilkes Booth cried “Sic semper tyrannis??? (“thus always to tyrants???) just after he shot Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln famously said, “A house divided against itself cannot stand.??? Booth’s modern successors are saying that a house in the hands of tyrants does not deserve to stand and they are ready to bring it down with their constitutionally protected guns.
As Police Chief Johnson said, this is creepy and scary, but is it — to return to my original musings — un-American? Yes and no. On the one hand, nothing can be more American than throwing off the shackles of a government that has overstepped its bounds and disregarded the rights of its citizens. That’s how it all began. (“No taxation without representation.???) But on the other hand, the American tradition of accepting the results of elections — even when they bring with them policies you believe to be misguided at best and disastrous at worst — is in danger of being undermined when groups of armed people decide that the present leadership is infected by unpatriotic, socialist ideas and must be resisted at all costs.
A government founded in a revolutionary moment is always vulnerable to a determination by a zealous minority that its revolutionary ideals have been compromised by itself. When that happens, each side will engage in its favored rhetoric, one proclaiming, watch out, they’re coming for our guns, the other warning that militant right-wing nuts are preparing themselves for armed insurrection. One side will cry “tyranny???; the other will reply, “You guys are crazy.??? And both will claim the title of true American. That’s where we are.
I don’t claim the title of “true American.”
But there is no equivalence between my beliefs and those labeled the intellectual property of “Booth’s modern successors,” as Fish refers to the N.R.A.
There is just bad.
And in American history, if there is an obvious linkage between America’s former leading tribe and the man who shot down Abraham Lincoln at the end of the Civil War, that’s where the bad lies.
WhiteManistan lost the last election and is having a collective paranoid nervous breakdown. This, in turn, has severe repercussions for everyone.
Anyone can go to Google and search images for Americans carrying guns openly, all taken during the years of the present administration. And there are more always coming. It’s what I did for the WhiteManistan Vacation video.
It’s interpreted, by some, as Americans exhibiting their freedom. But when you look at all of it, it’s just creepy and off-putting. It’s a collective pathology, a sickness in the soul.
I am not the only person, by far, who’s said it.
Why should millions of people who don’t carry arms feel encouraged and heartened by this? I refuse to believe people with any empathy for their fellow citizens think and feel this way. I was not raised in a community where even a small minority thought it was an act of freedom to march around on the sidewalk or at the supermarket with a gun strapped over their shoulder.
I think you wouldn’t be normal, considering the state of the nation, if you weren’t unnerved by someone carrying a weapon in a common place. “There goes a real asshole,” is a gentle reaction.
With WhiteMan, it goes way beyond this, too.
One is just not not paying attention (or being willfully obtuse) if you haven’t seen the routine displays of rage and the threats, sometimes veiled but often very obvious, that come with the gun carriers, the defenders against the socialist usurper non-American who is the president.
Don’t get in the way, or we just may have to shoot you, traitor/gun grabber.
That’s the message. There is quite frequently perceptible pleasure, an enjoyment, in this public bullying.
I’m sick of it. But there’s no remedy, coming together or rapprochement in the future.
This makes the phenomenon of WhiteManistan one of the foremost security challenges facing the nation.
If the country, and the people in the majority who vote, cannot remove the ideology of WhiteManistan from its blocking and corroding position on the center stage of American government, the country will remain in paralysis.
Worse will come from it. A recent West Point study on domestic terrorism from the violent right in the United States drew the conclusion that one factor was the statistically most important as a predictor for increases in the incidence of right wing violence.
That factor was the number of Republicans in the House of Representatives.
The authors speculated this was perhaps because the ideology, or the atmosphere created by this governing body, was seen by people liable to commit domestic terror attacks as favorable to their cause.
Notice, this is not insurrection, but something far more common: right wing, politically-motived violence, almost always against non-whites, or groups, businesses and agencies viewed as enemies of white male American universalism and supremacy.
That’s WhiteManistan.
It has always been present in the American body politic. But when the country was stronger and better governed than it is today, the worst aspects of it could be kept from overturning everything.
That’s not the way it is now.
The United States won’t get another Fort Sumter. It will just become more brutal toward non-WhiteManistan in states were legislatures and local government are controlled by extremists, the federal government dysfunctional and incapable of reining it in.
The paradox will lie in that kicking the shit out of anyone who isn’t white, right-wing and pro-corporate fascism will be embedded as the meaning of freedom.
When making WhiteManistan Vacation there had to be an absurd quality written in. And so with the embarrassing juxtapositions, cartoon lettering and queasy color changes over pictures of gun-toting white Americans and their shelves of ammunition. Because without laughter the impact of such an outlook is too hostile.
Who on earth thinks a country is great when one very public reaction to a massive slaughter of children is marching around in public with assault rifles and shopping runs on guns and ammunition?
But that’s the Ted Nugent-ization of the country: “Fuck you, idiot! We’re gonna keep buyin’ them guns and ammo, yearrrrrrgh!”
From the New Yorker, related, on WhiteManistan central, Texas:
This very month, the Texas House of Representatives passed twelve bills in a single day designed to soften gun laws, although Texas is already among the most permissive states in the Union when it comes to firearms. One of the laws allows college students to carry handguns to class. There is no waiting period to purchase a weapon, or any need to register a firearm. Machine guns, sawed-off shotguns, and silencers are perfectly legal. Indeed, one bill now under consideration exempts assault weapons and high-capacity magazines from federal regulation in Texas. If that provision is ruled to be unconstitutional, another bill now in the Senate would make it a crime for any law-enforcement office in Texas to carry out federal rules restricting gun rights.
In bold-face, the now commonplace strategy in the neo-Confederacy of WhiteManistan: nullification.