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marmar

(76,985 posts)
Sun Apr 21, 2013, 05:48 PM Apr 2013

Rick Perlstein: On Our Politics of Fear


from The Nation:


On Our Politics of Fear
Rick Perlstein on April 19, 2013 - 1:05 PM ET


"Does that have something to do with the guy who sent poison to the President?" the guy who owns the cafe where I work asks about the melodrama unfolding this morning in Boston. "No, that was just a crazy guy from Mississippi."

A friend texts, two days ago: "Jesus wtf now explosions in Texas!?"

I write back: "Feels like an accident to me." (What I thought, shamefully, was: "not political. Just an accident." Just an accident!)

We live in interesting times, just like the old Chinese curse warns us again. A terrorist attack in Boston, followed by a state-of-the-art witch hunt: a cellphone picture of two Moroccans near the finish line, posted online, soon plastered on the front page of the New York Post, and suddenly lives are turned upside down for fear of vigilante justice. A Saudi national detained at the hospital, suspicious because he was "running" (running after an explosion: how suspicious), ginned up into a claim on Fox News that "he is now going to be deported on national security grounds," then escalated by professional shrieker Pamela Geller into an obvious cover-up by the Saudi royal family in cahoots with B. Hussein Obama. Ideologues saddle up their hobbyhorses in order to ride; but at that, I am an ideologue, too. I spent much of yesterday lining up my argument for why a white nationalist militia type might want to spray shrapnel into a crowd on Tax Day, that shrapnel of this type is a classic marker of white-supremacist bombcraft, how an FBI obsessed with entrapping Arabs and anarchists ignores the right-wing lunatics in our midst. And, once I hear of the screen grabs of what I hear someone call "regular looking white guys," in baseball caps, no less, I get ready to pull the trigger on the argument...

And when Fox News wins in the end, I deflate. Chechens. Muslims! A Fox personality on my screen tells me one of the suspects linked to some site that had something to do with some Jihadi prophesy about how the Caliphate would unfold, then cautions that this doesn't mean they're Al-Qaeda for sure...

.....(snip).....

A less narcissistic time, perhaps. Not now. Now, we let trauma consume us. Now, our desperate longing to know—to find easy, immediate answers—confines us, makes us frantic, reduces us to our basest cognitive instincts. And ultimately that's all I really have to say today, and all I really have to write: to record a testament that people can reflect on fifty years from now, if they want to know it felt like to live in America the week of April 15, 2013. ...................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.thenation.com/blog/173952/our-politics-fear#



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