“Every
time I try to get out, they pull me back in!”
I now
know how brother Al felt. I was trying
desperately not to write about the incredulous ineptitude of the Republican
Party, its propaganda outlet a.k.a. Fox News, and its standard
bearer, Mitt
Romney. In the span of one week,
Romney has injected himself clumsily and without benefit of any facts, into a
serious, sensitive international crisis, then turned around and insulted half
of all Americans. This is from the rich
guy whose answer to struggling college students is to get a loan from their
parents, who won’t release his tax forms, and who wants deep tax cuts for
himself, while cutting services and benefits for average working people. Astonishing.
I have
now seen two things I never thought I would see in my lifetime: a Black
president; and a presidential candidate who, if elected, would be worse- dare I
say it? - than George W.
Bush. What I find most intriguing is
not Romney’s incompetence-although it really is a wonder to behold- but the
process by which we are faced with watching a man so spectacularly flawed carry
the mantle of his party. What has happened to the party of Lincoln that
they would follow George W. Bush with Sarah
(I can see Russia) Palin as a Vice presidential candidate and now Mitt
Romney and Paul
(it’s true if I say it is) Ryan as his running mate? I think I know.
Ever
since the Republicans became the party of conservatism, it has consisted of two
distinct elements. There was the
conservative intellectual elite as represented by the late William
F, Buckley Jr., George
Will, and William
Krystol, who provided the theoretical structure of the party. Then there were the followers who voted their
emotions, rather than their interests, and who follow people like the
aforementioned Sarah Palin, Triple R (Rabid, Racist, Rush) Limbaugh,
and Michelle
Bachman. It is from this latter
group that the Tea Party was born and the inmates took over the asylum. Thus began the empowerment of the COD
(Culture Of Dumb).
The
Republican primary race was the most astonishing display of the politics of COD
that I have ever witnessed. Former
Governor, John
Huntsman, was run out of the race almost immediately for the unpardonable
sin of making sense and speaking rationally.
The remaining candidates almost fell over themselves trying to make the
most outrageous, nonsensical statements.
Any candidate who had, at any time in the past, said anything that made
sense was forced to retract the offending statement. Newt Gingrich, who became a
master of the nonsensical, was forced to denounce a joint public service
announcement he had made with Nancy Pelosi about global warming. He actually said that acknowledging global
warming was the dumbest thing he had ever done, and couldn’t explain why he did
it. Rick
Santorum came out against education and declared that
smart people would not vote for him! And
who could forget that on the issue of a hypothetical uninsured young man with a
fatal condition, and the audience’s responseas to what to do for him was to let him die! The major media maintained a straight face
while treating Republican mythology as if it were reality.
The
Republicans are faced with an apparently unsolvable conundrum. On the one hand, so much of their success
has been derived from the smoke and mirror tactics employed by the diabolical Karl
Rove, that truly enlightened people will rarely vote for many of them. Tax breaks for the wealthiest and
deregulation of the banking industry-not to mention oil companies and the
incalculable environmental damage they do when not watched closely- are
positions that clearly do not favor most Americans. So, to a certain extent, it is in their best
interest for their constituents to remain uninformed by getting their
“information” from Fox News.
On the
other hand, the COD is unmanageable, uncontainable and uncontrollable. Hence we were provided the spectacle of
Congressman Todd
Akin explaining that in cases of “legitimate” rape (Don’t you just hate it
when the parents of rape aren’t married?) a woman’s body will terminate the
pregnancy on its own.
Given
their hostility toward the African American community (their greatest hero,
Ronald Reagan, categorized Black folks as a “special interest”) it would be
tempting for the Black community to become downright giddy at this onslaught of
COD. Yet COD has strong roots in our
community as well. We see it when our
best and brightest are castigated for “tying to talk white” merely because they
used proper English. There is, however,
one salient distinction in the COD of the Black community and that of the rabid
right. Much of the African American COD has
been imposed from without, by those who have defined us negatively. We can’t say that about the working class
right.
