Fwd: Morford: America as narcoleptic pit bull

[Guest guest]

America as narcoleptic pit bull

 

" Go ahead, try it yourself. Launch a major war. Watch how the flies of

death and rage and religious sanctimony swarm to your bloody hate pile in

abject glee. Watch how every other war hawk/terrorist/dictator with a

major bone to pick looks over at your nasty war and giggles like a

Republican in a gun shop and jumps right in, how your enemies quickly join

together in mutual recoil and take up arms in retaliation, how they all

instigate or enflame their own battles in eager reflection of/deference to

yours, as they feel that side of them that so desperately wants to find

something, someone to hate, to beat down, to feel sanctimonious and

righteous over, emerge like a pair of engorged horns from their head.

 

" And then the real fun begins. Because then this latent hate turns back on

us, right here at home. Then this dank feeling spreads like a disease, the

culture shifts and coagulates and turns black to accommodate the new

cancer, the taint seeps into the water supply, the collective flesh, the

national mind-set. The national temper flares more easily, depression

rates rise, self-medication becomes the national pastime. Laws become

thick with paranoia and dread (the Patriot Act et al.), and everyone with

any sense of history or spiritual love or pacifist leanings walks around

looking like their dog just died.

 

" Sound familiar? At this moment in American history, we are surrounded,

infiltrated, soaked to the bone with warmongers and fear dealers and hate

poppers. The GOP has been positively masterful in cultivating a culture of

intolerance and disgust and Taliban-like fanaticism, instilling a

brilliant kind of poisonous fear into middle 'Merka that equates gays with

terrorists and terrorists with the Middle East and the Middle East with

the Devil and the Devil with liberals and liberals with, well, gays. Isn't

that clever? "

 

Full column at:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2006/02/24/notes022406.DTL & feed\

=rss.mmorford