Comparing Obama to Hitler and Al Qaeda, and claiming to be agents of God, protesters in Washington—supported by a coalition of conservative Christian groups, as well as pharmaceutical lobbyists—raise the bar on unreasonable discourse.http://www.religiondispatches.org/archive/1840/unregula... It was more than a little disconcerting to be in the heart of this crowd in DC, listening to people speak in the vernacular of Fox News sound bytes about czarism and socialism and fascism and the paranoid religious rants of the impending Armageddon and the One World Order. And then to realize that these people truly believed, passionately, that every word of what they were saying was true.
There are many reasons for this: the astroturf organizations backed by corporate lobbyists who sponsored and organized the event; Glenn Beck and Fox News and the incessant drum beat of their misinformation campaign.
But while this explains the sources of the deception, it doesn’t fully explain the motivation. It doesn’t explain why protesters can argue, for instance, that their Medicare program is somehow a perfect example of free market forces at work, while universal health care is a communist plot to destroy America. “Just because people are carrying 50,000 different signs down the street, doesn’t mean that each group is separate,” said Frederick Clarkson, author of Eternal Hostility: the Struggle Between Theocracy and Democracy (and contributor to Religion Dispatches).
To address each message as separate is to miss the point, Clarkson said, because the messengers are the same, whether the issue is abortion, Obama’s birth certificate, or the death panels.
And tying these messages together, for the first time in American history, is a single major network, he said.
Joe Bageant, author of Deer Hunting with Jesus, who also writes about class issues from his hometown of Winchester, Virginia, points to the fact that just as the post World War II economy was built on the backs of black Americans, it was also built on the backs of poor working whites.
Bageant theorizes that those same corporations that exploited the labor of those workers are now using their children and grandchildren as foot soldiers to do battle against their own self-interests.
He said Americans no longer have any language to describe their struggling circumstances, because the words to describe their solutions have been demonized.
“They have thoroughly internalized the messages of a predatory economic system managed by the corporations and financial elites who own their jobs and their schools and their media,” Bageant said.
“They can’t say socialism, working masses, elite—can you even imagine trying to say that as a good thing?—universally. So, there’s a frustration. They know something’s wrong, but can’t express it.”
So, they are reduced to sputtering Fox News- and Rush Limbaugh-provided buzz words, he said.
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
Replies to this thread
-
Beckerheads
-
I hope you don't mind, I'm running with that term 
