Reply #24: Ehrlich: Culture war stuff in the hands of an amateur

[Voltaire99]

Sure, it's fair to lay this at the feet of the American right - Repugs, chiefly (but not only Repugs) who spread cultural intolerance like an STD across the body politic.

Ehrlich's just an impressionable amateur (see CPA's informed entry in this thread) who is trying to wield the flaming rhetoric of Coulter, Rush and O'Reilly. She's saying nothing they aren't, albeit more clumsily and boorishly. I'm positive she means it; and in a sense, that makes her somewhat more dangerous than a mere media shaman. Because she belongs to an important food chain, which starts with the professional hystericals like Coulter and passes through leaders down to receptive yokels.

In a larger context, though, we can mark America's position culturally on August 8, 2003, by her outburst. We are a nation seriously in danger from our own extremists. This has long been true, yet never quite so much (in my lifetime, anyway) as now. Something was unleashed after 9/11, and this something - whether you call it rage, self-righteousness, vengeance, hatred - is a poison. It cannot be the foundation for a society. It doesn't work as discourse. Where it leads, inevitably and ferociously, is to destruction. Here and abroad.

Genies released from bottles don't go back in willingly. If we are going to repair our socio-political life, we have to start condemning this kind of violence - this wickedness on display so shamefully in Maryland.