A friend of ours, a fairly typical Yankee liberal, was complaining about the government shutdown which he blamed on Confederate voter suppression and Tea Party activism. It was 1860 all over again and why don't they just secede.
Actually they tried that once....
But we think the MoveOn types are wrong to blame "the South" and its mentalities for the current political stalemate. We are congenitally wired to believe in conspiraciones and will not rest until we find one.
I am quite certain that the dough-heads in the South are incapable of organising the trash in their trailers, much less gerrymandering anything. No. Cherchez le banquier is what i say; and searching i come up with Ahmanson, Coors, Mellon-Scaife and Koch. The same folks who -- strange to say -- funded the schismatic "traditionalists" within the Anglican Communion. Why? They were very frank about it. They wanted to destroy (yes, hack to pieces) "liberal" institutions like the Episcopal Church USA.
Who funds the "Tea Party"? Are those overweight, Cheez-Oh munching, flag-waving knuckle-heads capable of anything beyond finding their way to NASCAR races? It is absurd to talk about "the Tea Party" as if it were an object in itself as opposed to a mere political hologram.
One last example. Who was it who just today said on Pox News that he wanted to "punish" federal employees? None other than Stuart Varney. And where is this fellow from? Macon Georgia? Yazoo City, Mississippi? Nope. London, England. And where did he go to school? London School of Economics. The only worse place he could have gone to was Harvard.
These people are from nowhere. They belong to the country of Capital. They have an agenda known as Destroy the Beast and they simply use the South because it's cheap and easy. But that does not mean that they won't, can't and haven't used California, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and New Hampshire -- reputedly "blue" states which are yeehaw red once one moves an an hour or so away from the the cities or any college town. Nor is there anything particularly "southern" about the Anglican Communion. In fact most of the South is Baptist, not pseudo-Catholic.
The fact is -- as de Tocqueville discussed at great length -- that Anglo-Americans have certain credal and intellectual habits which make them exceptionally prone to certain types of polemical pogey bait. It is a bait made from various flavours which boil down to self-serving, self-satisfied egotism -- what de Tocqueville coined as individualism. This is nothing particularly Southern, it permeates and stains the entire country.
The problem with "sensible" and "mainstream" people who don't believe in conspiracies is that they refuse to look beyond the "obvious" and fall a-sucker for surface appearances... for the political hologram.
In fact,
politics in the USA is so full of holograms fighting holograms that it might as well be described as
Nightmare on the Holodeck.
Will someone please pull the plug?
©Barfo, 2013
