Letters to the Editor
John Mead
Published Letters: 6
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Are you serious?
[Read the article: The crazy uncles in Obama's attic]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]As a straight, white, male, Catholic American baby boomer, but one who actually thinks beyond the claptrap of “reasonable” debate and “civil discourse” in the United States, I find this controversy over things that Reverend Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. has said absolutely appalling. Given the sociopathic invective and straight-faced lies that pass as commentary and analysis in this country, it horrifies me that people could take such issue with a few barbed but essentially well-observed comments that the U.S. is less than the City Upon the Hill it deludes itself that it is, particularly after seven years of the Bush-Cheney administration—and with the professional and social success of reprehensible morons like Limbaugh, Robertson, Falwell, Hannity, Kristol, et al.
The New York Times points out “Mr. Wright’s characterizations of the United States as fundamentally racist and the government as corrupt and murderous;” this is what is at issue? My God! How are these arguable points any longer? Salon’s own snarky jibes at “humorless” Hyde Park liberals driving Volvos are the kind of commentary I have grown to find so excruciatingly tiresome that I have given up hope of anything more insightful from you than I would find in the Times or on NPR (which is ultimately no more than, to paraphrase John Sayles, “Fox News for College Kids”—unspeakably sanctimonious, contentless propaganda and bourgeois consumer drivel).
What in God’s name is wrong with white people? Learn some history! Stop dicking around with iTunes and pay attention. Our country is being run by a criminal organization, an unelected cabal of evil nutcases and amoral sociopaths. The idea that Bernadine Dohrn can be mocked and derided at will while a brain-dead, sadistic frat boy’s gangster friends run the country into the ground is so offensive and absurd as to be beyond comment. Any honest, probing look at violent radicals in our country—Weatherman, John Brown—Nathaniel Bacon, for God’s sake—will reveal a fairly reasonable response to an utterly insane and hideously violent government policy and an apathetic and reactionary population. Bernadine Dohrn and John Brown were both far more rational and intelligent than any ten or twelve administration officials of their time; compare Brown to David Atchison, a senator and senate President Pro Tempore, who openly advocated mass murder (as well as racism, slavery and imperialism), and tell me which one is insane. Compare Dohrn to Henry Kissinger, who is as responsible as any single person could be for every death in Vietnam between 1968 and 1973, and tell me who’s the nutcase, and who deserves to be in prison. If we don’t want any more Dohrns or Browns, then we need to run people like the Bushes, the neo-cons (and their appeasers, like the Clintons and, um, most of the Democratic Party) out of office and keep them out. It’s on us, not some preacher on the South Side who happens not to buy into the nonsense the rest of us seem to accept as fact.
A case in point: Andrew Leonard, who I usually kind of like, writes today in your magazine that “Paul Krugman has been telling us for years that . . . it's high time for government to get back in the business of governing. He might be right.” He MIGHT be right? Leonard continues that “it is tempting to entertain the possibility that the impulse to deregulate and privatize and ‘trust’ markets to be their own best guardian -- that epochal reimagining of government launched by Ronald Reagan -- has finally run its course.” Really? It’s tempting to entertain that possibility? Whether this is mild sarcasm or measured, “balanced” commentary, it is as fatuous as the rubbish Bush has doled out the past few days. The relentless drive on the part of the Republican Party—aided and abetted by the New Democrats—to dismantle New Deal era regulation has taken us right back where we started—into a brutal generational boom-and-bust cycle that had been built into the market for more than a century prior to the Great Depression. No, Mr. Leonard, 2008 is not 1929—it is worse. In 1929 we not only had a viable Left in the United States that could actually counteract the pressure from the kind of rightwing loonies who have had a more or less free hand in this country for almost forty years; we also had an industrial base, a planet full of resources, and an infrastructure to build. Now we are faced with not only global economic collapse, but global environmental collapse as well, which will have far more dire and long-lasting repercussions.
The fact that Jeremiah Wright’s bitter words—hardly a shadow of the kind of diatribes launched regularly by one of the greatest American political speakers of the 19th Century (and close friend of John Brown), Frederick Douglass—are a concern to anyone—that anyone is still willfully myopic enough to disagree with them—is absurd and depressing, and the possibility that this will severely damage Barack Obama and leave us with only the truly awful Hillary Clinton as a possible presidential candidate—is beyond depressing. To me it confirms that the outlook for this country is as truly and as deeply hopeless as it looks.