A jaundiced look at the world we live in.
…but maybe someone can answer a very unimportant question that has been nagging at me for some time: Why don’t men like Donald Trump and Pat Bauer change their haircuts/toupees? Both have been mocked incessantly. They have to know that people think they look ridiculous. If they really want to be taken seriously, why wouldn’t they ditch the dos?
And yes, the constant rain has turned my brain to mush…..
CommentsI wasn’t one of those people who believed the election of Barack Obama was a sign we’d entered a “post-racial” society. But I also failed to appreciate the extent of racism that still festers in this country. The unremitting attacks on Obama personally–attacks utterly unconnected to any policy disputes and clearly motivated by outrage over his very existence–have shocked me.
Donald Trump’s racially-motivated slurs don’t just reflect his own long-standing bigotry (in the 1970s, the Department of Justice sued him for refusing to rent to African-Americans); they also are tacit recognition that a large percentage of the remaining hard-core GOP base is racist. Periodically, leaked emails and “jokes” from Republican officeholders and party officials confirm our worst suspicions: the Obama family portrayed as monkeys, the White House shown in the middle of a watermelon patch. Pretty disgusting stuff.
As if we needed added confirmation, yesterday the Tulsa World reported that during a debate on a bill to eliminate Affirmative Action in state government, Oklahoma State Senator Sally Kern testified in favor of the bill, saying : “We have a high percentage of blacks in prison, and that’s tragic, but are they in prison just because they are black or because they don’t want to study as hard in school? I’ve taught school and I saw a lot of people of color who didn’t study hard because they said the government would take care of them.”
As appalling as her testimony was, the thought of this woman teaching is arguably more frightening. But of course, she is still teaching, and so are all of the people who pretend that their attacks on the President–their insistence that he is not a “real” citizen, their denial of his academic achievements–are just political differences of opinion. Those of us who enable them by refusing to call these attacks what they are, are also teaching. And the lesson is an ugly one.
What was the refrain from that old song from South Pacific? You’ve got to be taught to hate.
Every morning I wake up to additional evidence that America has lost its collective mind. Just a brief sample from the morning news:
I rest my case.
A verse in an old folk song by the Limelighters’ claimed “All of life’s a circle, sunrise to sunset.” I’m afraid they may have been right.
We do seem to be revisiting the historical era known as The Age of Ideology. Napoleon’s defeat ushered in a thirty-year period of turmoil and unrest, described by historians as a battle between Enlightenment science and secularism on the one hand, and various forms of Nationalism and religion on the other.
The problem with clashing ideologies is that reason and evidence take a back seat to a priori beliefs. People can no longer communicate, because they have different worldviews, different mental paradigms. They literally occupy different realities.
Evidence of such a disconnect is everywhere–in Congress, in the Indiana legislature, on the internet, and in what is left of the news. Politics is no longer concerned with governing in the public interest; it has become wholly a struggle for the power to use government to impose the “right” ideology. Those of us who lived through the Cold War often noted the similarity between communism and religion–both were matters of faith. Ideologies do have a lot more in common with religion that with policy analysis.
Historians also note that ideological passions rise in times of uncertainty and social change, just as nationalism and parochialism rise during financial downturns. So perhaps the current levels of ideological rigidity and bigotry shouldn’t surprise us. On the other hand, understanding how we got here is cold comfort for those of us who find the current environment incompatible with the sort of rational, civilized environment that makes human progress possible.
If all of life’s a circle, I hope this one turns pretty soon.
Donald Trump. Need I say more?
Trump has actually trumped the buffoonery displayed by his birtherism. Today, he is being quoted as saying that President Obama wasn’t smart enough to go to an Ivy League school. This is a none-too-thinly veiled attempt to paint Obama as the beneficiary of affirmative action. (Perhaps he was worried that the racism of his prior attacks had been too subtle?)
The most depressing thing I can say about contemporary America is that it includes a not-insignificant number of people who actually take gasbag self-promoters like The Donald seriously.
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