http://www.balloon-juice.com/2010/11/01/pure-self-indulgent-wankery/
One animating principle of my study of history is that we tend to overestimate the current crisis. I know I'm guilty of it even while being aware of it. We tend to see in the current issues significance that makes all other past crises pale in comparison. Or we tend to try and inflate the current crisis with the only other crises in our history that overshadow the current one: The Revolution and World War II.
The Tea Party numbskulls are running around with their Don't Tread On Me flags and stickers and wearing their tri-corner hats, because...fuck if I know why. Apparently they are the world's first anti-establishment group made up of entrepreneurs and middle management. And when they're not comparing Obama to King George, apparently he's Hitler. I would have gone with Oba-Mao, but that's perhaps too subtle for people who get their political news from Fox.
So we either take a non-crisis (OMG, people will get health care!) and make it as bad as Nazism, or we look at a real crisis and assume that it's so awful that no one has ever faced anything like it before ever a million times infinity.
Obviously September 11th was an awful, catastrophic event. It left a searing memory in the American mind. Last Saturday, I got to see Graydon Parrish's allegorical painting of 9/11.
It's extraordinarily powerful, even disturbing. As the day itself was.
But it was more disturbing what we DID with 9/11. We turned it into the Worst Day Ever. And there have been worse days, sadly. Not for the people of New York and its surrounding communities, but worse days. Cold Harbor was worse. Antietam was worse. D-Day was worse. The Battle of the Somme. Borodino. Cannae.
And Pearl Harbor was pretty awful, too. Pearl Harbor brought us into an existential conflict with ideologies bent on global domination. And so when 9/11 fell into the hands of those who would exploit it, bin-Ladenism became the new Fascism. When really, it's the ideology of a lunatic fringe living in dirt huts and caves in Afghanistan. Al Qaeda controls exactly nothing but the fear of those who would make themselves afraid.
Al Qaeda gave us something to fear. A true crisis that would enable the manchildren to live up to their fathers who had beat Hitler.
Only Al Qaeda gave us something less and something more. It wasn't Hitler. It was a social condition in a part of the world we can't apparently understand. It's drugs. It's poverty. How are the wars on those two things working out?
But the fearmongering brought on by 9/11 has proved impossible to turn off. Now, health care is national socialism. Obama is a muslim. Nancy Pelosi (Nancy Pelosi!?) is the Antichrist.
I think that's largely the point Stewart and Colbert were trying to get across. Yes, Crossfire tried to make us care about Clinton's oral sex proclivities, and when we didn't give a shit, they just ratcheted up the volume.
Then 9/11 gave the media a ratings winner and the fearmongers a ticket to power. And so it goes.
We've been down this road before. The Federalists told you that Jefferson would burn your Bible, while the Republicans said that Adams wanted to be a king. The secessionists said that Lincoln would free your slaves. The plutocrats said that unions would bring in anarchism and communism. The Old Guard said that FDR was a Red. The Birchers and McCarthyites said the Commie infiltrators were everywhere. The segregationists equated equal rights with the rape of white daughters.
Somehow we keep shuffling onwards and generally upwards. We make slow, unsteady progress in face of fear and division.
It's awful. It really is. It's enervating and unpleasant. I don't want to do it anymore. I just want to kick Linda McMahon in the groin and be done with it.
But it's nothing new. And we shall get through it somehow.
Because we always do.
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