It is, of course, a coincidence that the mild occasional excesses of the US Tea Party occur in the administration of the first black US President. The man caressing the head of the young female protester with his foot is just a good old fashioned conservative Republican. The poster saying 'Use your vote like a rope: Hang 'em high' (referred to near the end) is nothing to do with the honourable old habit of lynching. The political orientation of Barack Obama is sadly somewhere between Stalin, Chavez and Hitler. But then that's what having a National Health system does for you: it turns you into Stalin or, trim the moustache, Hitler. And that is why gun sales are soaring. It's really nothing to do with Obama being black. That is just a coincidence. And didn't he bring the world banking system down? Well, as a Muslim, he would, wouldn't he?
I know this is all too easy. I wish I thought this little post was about nothing.
2 comments:
hopeful signs (literary, too!) from the Stewart/Colbert rally Oct 30
http://rothschilddesign.smugmug.com/Politics/sanity-rally/
I am sure it is not the case that Americans are stupid, Philoctetes, but there are stupid Americans who, in some ways, remind me of the stupid anywhere: the book burners here, the banner burners in the Middle East, the English Defence League, etc.
The elements of stupidity must be fairly universal: strong, unfounded opinion as a self-evident virtue; a cultivated opaqueness; resistance to evidence or argument; the enjoyment of violence of temper; a tendency to shout and to cheer; belief in a golden age that was only just the day before yesterday; supreme confidence in the idea of community ('Hell, don't we all think the same? Anyone doesn't?'); and a fixed idea of the wickedness of Them. I'm sure there are more. Add your own.
Under all this they may be very nice, courteous, friendly and even vaguely innocent. But in all the respects above, they are stupid and proud of it.
Thanks for the link, Dana. Another of the many sides of America. Most of the twentieth century English-language poets I admire have been American. That too says something about America.
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