Friday, April 3, 2009

Quotes Courtesy of Conservatives

Isms No Longer Fizzin'

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed, and hence clamorous to be led to safety, by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary. --Henry L. Mencken

Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear with the cry of grave national emergency. Always there has been some terrible evil to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind the government by furnishing it with the exorbitant sums demanded. Yet in retrospect these disasters seem never quite to have happened, seem never to have been quite real.” --General Douglas MacArthur

A century ago, politicians got elected by warning us of the threat of thespianism and ever lurking heterosexualism. The danger of mopery was also much bruited.
Then when anarcho-syndicalism became the rage and desperate men started throwing bombs at kings and capitalists, our pols scared us with augurs of anarchy. When the Russians made a revolution in 1917, anxiety about anarchism was supplanted by the specter of Soviet socialism. In the thirties leftists warned us about fascism. Since conservative Americans were well-disposed towards this particular ideology, fear of it didn’t really catch on until we went to war with fascists in 1941.
After the war, communism crudesced as the consternation of choice, lasting the next half century. It was an amazing commercial success. Americans scarfed up any product that could even remotely be associated with anti-communism, from missiles that couldn’t fly to foreign puppet armies that couldn’t fight. When communism collapsed of its own brutal incompetence, we were left without what I call a pejorism for a few years.
9/11 added terrorism to our fright folio . It really didn’t make any sense since terrorism was not a country, an ideology or a movement, but merely a tactic as old as history. Since American public discourse has rarely been rational, making war on a trope wasn’t really a problem for us.
Then came the 2008 election in which word-wacky Reps threw the whole putrid pail of pejorisms at Barack Obama. He was, all at once, charged with being a terrorist, Islamist, Marxist, socialist, fascist, communist, and an atheist who had spent too much time in a Christian liberationist church when he wasn’t forging his birth certificate and conspiring with like-minded moperists to bring about the ruin of everything American in the cause of everything foreign and devilish. Not only that, he used a teleprompter and his wife occasionally bared her arms and nearly reignited the American Revolution by coming close to goosing the Queen of England. But hardly anyone was listening any longer.
To the yahoos’ dismay, it seems that isms are like replays of Gilligan’s Island or nostalgia for Kate Smith: they have run their course. Throw around the smear “socialist” and no one but a few Cold War crones have the foggiest. We have long since entered the age of Leno’s Jaywalkers when the ordinary man or woman in the street bubble their lips when asked who Washington, D.C. was named for.
Americans were never really comfortable with isms. Ignorant of ideology, they never really knew what they meant besides something nasty. Even our soldiers gave them up years ago. You notice that they now assign the simple rubric ”bad guys” to anyone anywhere they have been tasked to blow away.
Good Idea. It’s more in keeping with our character if we insult our adversaries as “bad guys," “jerks,” "A-holes" or, as Mencken might have said, “hebetudinous roperipes.”

Wednesday, April 1, 2009

Good News in Hard Times

Massive Demonstrations Sweep Nation
Outdoing the massive manifestations in Europe, tens of millions of ordinary Americans took to the streets today protesting the sinking economy that bails banksters while letting workers drown in debt and desperation.
The depth and discipline of the demonstrations indicated that a huge and highly organized movement of progressive-minded Americans was on the move, demanding jobs, economic justice, a decent health care system, an end to imperial wars, and a political system that reflected the will of a well-informed and civic-minded citizenry.
President Obama took time from the G20 meeting in London to salute the demonstrators back home. He called upon them to keep up pressure on congress to get his sweeping reform program enacted. He pointed out that in FDR’s time during the Great Depression, the president told his labor secretary that if she really wanted rights for workers, she would have to create the political will to make them irresistable so that he had no excuse not to support them.
Though hard times persisted in America, the mass demonstrations were peaceful and optimistic as if people were beginning to understand that with unity and knowledge they had the power to take over their own lives
April Fool’s!