I regularly run into people who rant against the government, vote Republican, who’s lives are utterly dependent upon various aspect of the social safety net.
The working class’ earning power has been so squeezed by corporate America it has fallen to the government to keep many from abject poverty.
Yet large numbers of the people dependent on government programs watch nothing but Fox News, detest the current President and argue vehemently to destroy all the things that make their lives survivable.
The New York Times has done a long story on them. It is a must read.
Ki Gulbranson owns a logo apparel shop, deals in jewelry on the side and referees youth soccer games. He makes about $39,000 a year and wants you to know that he does not need any help from the federal government.
“I don’t demand that the government does this for me. I don’t feel like I need the government,??? said KI GULBRANSON, who counts on an earned-income tax credit and has signed up his children for free meals at school.
He says that too many Americans lean on taxpayers rather than living within their means. He supports politicians who promise to cut government spending. In 2010, he printed T-shirts for the Tea Party campaign of a neighbor, Chip Cravaack, who ousted this region’s long-serving Democratic congressman.
Yet this year, as in each of the past three years, Mr. Gulbranson, 57, is counting on a payment of several thousand dollars from the federal government, a subsidy for working families called the earned-income tax credit. He has signed up his three school-age children to eat free breakfast and lunch at federal expense. And Medicare paid for his mother, 88, to have hip surgery twice.
[Dean P. Lacy], a professor of political science at Dartmouth College, has identified a twist on that theme in American politics over the last generation. Support for Republican candidates, who generally promise to cut government spending, has increased since 1980 in states where the federal government spends more than it collects. The greater the dependence, the greater the support for Republican candidates.
And, here, the man who resent others who spend “his” money, doled out by entitlement check, in the same boat:
Brian Qualley, 49, has a sister who survived a brain tumor but was disabled by its removal. The government pays for her care at an assisted-living facility. Their mother scrapes by on Social Security.
Mr. Qualley said that the government should provide for those who need help, but that too much money was being wasted. Mr. Qualley, who owns a tattoo parlor in Harris, north of North Branch, said some of his customers paid with money from government disability checks.
“They’re getting $300 or $400 tattoos, and they’re wearing nice new Nike shoes that I can’t afford,???
Having played in a biker rock band for many years I’m intimately familiar with the tattoo parlor crowd. The logical mind is not one of its defining characteristics. You find no gentleness, expansive spirit or progressive value in tattoo parlors and this can hardly be news. Momentarily, I wondered why the Times even saw fit to interview someone who ran one. (The paper also uncovered a bigot — the resentment over “nice Nike shoes” being the giveaway. The reporter and editors certainly know it.)
However, scapegoating is a common characteristic of societies enduring hard times. And Paul Fussell noted in Class that the afflicted kick down at those of their own circumstance.
There’s a very thin line between disdain or contempt and outright hate between the divisions which make up our various middle-class tribes. And often there are no lines at all. Needle someone hard enough in a tribe different from yours and see it erupt.
It is easy to understand the great anger in the Tea Party, or anywhere in the hinterlands. The urge to give a presumed tormentor a good punch in the face when you get the opportunity to swing is strong and human. The presumed tormentor is usually someone within arms reach.
Here I often marvel at the many folk music videos the opposition puts on YouTube, all with more enthusiastic fans than anything from my side.
The music may be bad, the lyrics awful, the sentiment horribly misguided. It’s easy to laugh at material by people who couldn’t pass an introductory college economics course singing about Ron Paul’s love of “sound money” and returning to the gold standard.
However, one thing it doesn’t lack is gutsiness; the willingness to be taken for a fool in letting the raw shout of hurt out.
A predatory economy has set into stone conditions in which Americans now always find themselves moving down. So they’re always going to be bitter. How many people on food stamps vote for pols who want to destroy the food stamp program?
A lot more than you think, I imagine.
“There used to be room at the top,??? Paul Fussell wrote in Class.
The channel commissioned an online survey of 1,007 adults in the USA, and found that 61% of Americans believe the country will experience a major catastrophic event within the next 20 years, but only 15% feel they are fully prepared for it.
“I think between the survey and the show, people will get to examine their own beliefs, compare them to the survey, see how people in the show are spending their lives and learn to prepare themselves,” says Brad Dancer, senior vice president of research and digital media at the channel.
So it’s a public service to show lamentable crazy people, collateral damage of the fear-based economy.
Another bit:
Prepper Tim Ralston of Arizona views destruction of the electrical grid caused by an electromagnetic pulse weapon or solar flares as his worst-case scenario. To prepare, he regularly conducts a dry run to an underground bunker with his kids.
It’s a familiar term. It’s what happens when an article you’ve written gets linked to by Matt Drudge.
An onslaught by tens of thousands occurs in the space of a few hours, with almost everyone in it bearing the triple handicap of being nuts, stupid and extremely right wing.
The server may topple from the weight. The e-mail box overflows with slurs and calumnies upon your house. The comments section will be flooded.
A train full of crazy people has arrived, ejected its passengers, now all ranting, cursing and waving nonsensical digital placards. They pay no attention to what you’ve actually published, chew the carpet for a few hours and then depart, never to return.
Tomorrow Drudge will loose his army of fools and cretins on some other person or random net posting. And the entire process will repeat.
In the meantime you’ll be deleting all the comments and mail espousing violence and bigotry.
What happens when a nation forgets their God and makes football of greater importance on Sundays. And worships the work of their own hands above God. This is what they deserve. But in the end, ??? Those who lead into captivity shall go into captivity???. This system that all these elites are devising to control the masses will become their own prison and it will be just the opposite. It will be used upon their own heads. Our only hope is for a massive solar storm to destroy all the satellites and GPS and Comm of all these totalitarians. The PEOPLE are safe without them and their CONTROL. We have GUNS. So there is another reason these Marxists phags are doing this. To assume total control. Got news for ya. Our GOD is going to take your power and destroy you. Patience of the Saints.
May a solar storm destroy you Marxist totalitarian phags.
Pete Hoekstra, an old Republican tool from Michigan who has occasionally appeared in this blog, is big news today for his Super Bowl ad. In trying to drum up fear of his opponent, it invokes the Yellow Peril with an Asian American actress speaking in stilted, jeering English, while on a bicycle riding out of the rice paddies.
It didn’t air here in Pasadena and I would assume most of the country did not see it. Until now. It’s a bit beyond words.
Hoekstra will never win re-election unless everyone in his district is a ragingly paranoid crazy person.
Hoekstra was chosen to receive the Team B report in Congress precisely because he is a well-known bigot. Although its authors wouldn’t put it quite that way.
They knew that because way back in 2006 Hoekstra was trying to convince everyone Muslim terrorists were everywhere in America.
And DD blog covered it briefly, here, along with a map of our allegedly Muslim-terror infested country.
I captured a picture of Hoekstra’s terror map back then and relabeled it “Al-Qaeda-Land.”
Reality television is the perfect place for monetizing kooks. In this case it’s National Geographic’s Doomsday Preppers series on what I’ve called End Timers. I caught a commercial and won’t be tuning in. (It begins airing Tuesday.) Topics common to the blog have already shown all one needs to know.
The central focus, of course, is the collapse of the power grid, the end of American civilization and the people determined to be ready for it. One of the reasons for this belief is, of course, because it has been published ad nauseam in the news over the last decade.
Whether it’s an electromagnetic pulse from a barge-launched a-bomb, a cyberattack on the national infrastructure, or man-made plagues and totally unrealistic terror onslaughts, it’s been pounded into gullible heads, often several times a week, as probable, easy to do and often imminent.
The prepper movement shows all the collateral damage it has wrought on the suggestible and unbalanced.
Conspicuously, this increasingly nuts demographic is almost entirely white, far right, heartland, fundie Christian religious and breast-beatingly patriotic.
It is not a surprise that cable television feels this niche large enough to monetize. Death cults/apocalypse believers have always been part of the American experience. However, until social media, micro-casting and the Internet there wasn’t an easy way to cynically gather all of them up into a nice exploitative package for advertising.
Up until the last decade small fringe book publishers catering solely to the militias and violent survivalist far right used to be the only place for it.
Watch too many of them and you’re deeply discouraged.
While all the individuals in the videos appear painfully sincere with the aim being to give advice to help survive the travails said to be coming, all they’re really successful at is showing how idiosyncratic insanity can be mainstreamed as entertainment. They leak intolerance like a fine sweat. Eternal damnation for the lazy, the unprepared, all the outsiders. is a constant current.
“The first wave of death will be those with chronic disease,” she informs. A second wave of death will overtake the more healthy and it will be caused by diseases and lack of sanitation incubated and spread by the weak and sick. I didn’t last long enough to get to any more waves.
In another video the prepper survivors are advised to keep a book of hymns and prayers on hand because music helps one through the hard times. A dulcimer, an instrument from the Appalachian hill country, is recommended. It served the poor in the olden days and will again.
Jerry Boykin, for want of a better description — America’s answer to Otto Skorzeny — is in the news again for being chosen to speak at a West Point prayer breakfast.
Over the course of the war on terror Boykin has routinely been associated with a special version of repellent crackpot extremism.
Here’s a video from a couple years ago, juxtaposed with Sterling Hayden’s Gen. Jack Ripper in Dr. Strangelove.
It speaks for itself.
Here’s Boykin as one of the co-authors of the Islam-o-phobe Team B report which claimed shariah law is sapping and impurifying the precious bodily fluids of American justice.
And here’s a longish bit defending the right to preach against gayness and Muslims while praying for the future of America.
And here he is again with more anti-Muslim shariah-law conspiracy thinking.
“The Muslims would replace our Constitution with shariah … I am very concerned about this … We should not give first amendment protection to people who want to destroy our Constitution and replace it with shariah …” and so on.
Watch closely and you’ll see actual heevahavas. If you’re a longtime reader you know what it means. If not, check the definition. It’s from the old Crypt Newsletter. In this case, the heevahava is not a Pennsylvania Dutch farm hand but an Englishman in that part of the race horse industry devoted to furthering genetics.
The Mitt Romney Blues is the soundtrack and you had it here a couple weeks ago. And if it had been Jon Stewart who made it instead of me, you’d have told everyone you know to stick it in their iKit.
With a cynical little push from Newt Gingrich, the Republican voters who aren’t in the 1 percent are figuring out it’s easy to despise the vulture capitalist symbol-of-the-system who jokes about being unemployed, patronizingly insists corporations are people, likes firing people and hides his investment income in the Cayman Islands and Switzerland.
