For serious, I keep watching this video, I can’t stop, it’s like being at the worst party in the world, and people keep saying something’s being done to them:
And NOBODY CAN SAY WHAT. And I know that trying to understand the tea-wads is like trying to get a dog to do a math problem, and that most of the other blogs are making fun of their scooters and shit, but this is what strikes me, the persecuted feeling. The persecution married to absolute confusion about what they’re being persecuted FOR, along with convictions of political impotence and an absolute bedrock sense of futility in life. I mean these people not only do not get it, they’re convinced they can’t get it, and they’re mad they can’t get it, and they think not getting it is the world’s fault and not theirs.
They want to go back to the way the country was. Was when? They can’t say. Was how? They have no clue. They’re just … grrr, basically, everything sucks. They’re mad at stuff. Ask them to name one specific thing and more often than not you come up with this bullshit about how Michelle Obama banned Christmas ornaments or something. I really think at this point I would be perfectly happy if Michelle Obama set fire to the East Room while doing a goat sacrifice so long as it didn’t mean I had to be somehow involved, because why borrow trouble? How does it affect me? How does it affect these tea people? Why do they feel that every breath the Obama family takes is an affront to them? Is it just they need something to do?
What has he ever done to them, besides try to lower their taxes (maybe not so much Glenn Beck’s and Dick Armey’s) and give them health insurance and bring the heroes they venerate on their T-shirts home from the war? I mean, the guy’s about to go make peace in the Middle East, if we’re not all too busy bitching about Alan Simpson to notice, and I’m sure something he does while trying to do that will offend Republicans in some way, but seriously, I am coming around to the idea that the dude cannot get a break and that they’re just pissed off he exists. Like the way the existence of gay people bothers them. Or Muslims. Like the way they get angry when they see two or more black children standing together somewhere, cluttering up their nice white town. And I don’t get why it has to matter to them what other people do at all.
It’s not enough to see something, you have to see it as an assault on you. You have to view the world as collapsing, and yourself helpless to prevent it, and everybody around you as either complicit or fooled, in order to maintain the belief that you had no part in what you see. I know dozens of these dicks and there is nothing they cling to, not religion and not guns, so much as the myth of their own powerlessness. They flee neighborhoods rather than fight for them and they mutter darkly about people speaking Spanish in the grocery store and the indignity, the horror, of having to press 1 for English (is it me or is it much more often pressing a different key for Spanish? Fuck, why am I trying to make sense to these fuckers) is something for which we should offer Purple Hearts. Life is so hard for them. I don’t mean that sarcastically. Life really is hard.
Can someone explain to me what the Muslim community has done since 9/11 to suddenly engender this hostility? The only thing that points in this direction is that we elected a Democratic African American president who these people all think is a closet Muslim.
But let’s unpack this a little bit. Until recently these people had no problems with Muslims in their community. And there hasn’t been a new terrorist attack to inspire new fear and anger. So, that means it’s not about Islam at all. It’s about the African American Democrat.
Now I would be the last one to say that just being a Democrat isn’t enough to make any right winger go nuts. They simply don’t believe that a Democrat can legitimately be president. But their need to turn Obama into a Muslim, despite the purely nonsensical nature of the charge, stems from a need to rationalize their baser motives for hating him. America’s loathed enemy of 9/11 is the only group they feel free to hate openly in the way that fully expresses their feelings. Therefore, Obama became a Muslim.
When quite honestly, they could ignore Muslims and not really be too put out by it all. Seriously, how many people could chuck a rock and hit a mosque from their houses? When have they ever been assaulted by the knowledge of someone different, such that it interferes with their day? So you see someone in the store wearing a veil, just get your chicken nuggets and go home. Why does it have to be an imposition? Some guy drives down my street in a Trans Am blasting Pitbull or similar at 11 p.m., I think, yick, and then the light changes and he’s gone. God Almighty, just get on with your stuff, nobody is doing anything to you just by being around.
I kind of welcome Beck’s transformation into a modern spiritual leader, because if anybody needed some therapy, it’s these people.
