After years of war, economic terror, social polarization: 'Pus exploding from a wound.'

[seafan]

John H. Richardson at Esquire observes: 'Ideas can have a body count.'




August 11, 2009

Suddenly it's in the air, crackling like heat lightning on a summer day. Maybe it's the big one — the punishment at last, the prophecy fulfilled, the final battle, the covenant broken, all the sermons and scary movies coming true. The years of war and terror have entered America's bones, the economic crash a confirmation, and a decade of increasing polarization a trigger for the most outrageous thoughts, suddenly speakable:

On the left, it's Naomi Wolf calling President Bush a fascist bent on setting up a "gulag," Amiri Baraka asking "who told 4,000 Israeli workers at the Twin Towers to stay home," Katha Pollit writing the American flag "stands for jingoism and vengeance and war."
On the right, it's Rush Limbaugh joking that we shouldn't kill all the liberals because we need a few to remind us what they stand for, Ann Coulter saying her only regret was that Timothy McVeigh didn't bomb the New York Times building, Sarah Palin accusing Obama of "palling around with terrorists."

Then there's Orly Taitz, queen of the "birthers," who brings outrageous thinking to a whole new level. ..... "I am extremely concerned about Obama specifically because I was born in Soviet Union, so I can tell that he is extremely dangerous. I believe he is the most dangerous thing one can imagine, in that he represents radical communism and radical Islam: He was born and raised in radical Islam, all of his associations are with radical Islam, and he was groomed in the environment of the dirty Chicago mafia. Can there be anything scarier than that?"

At the "birther" booth, Taitz greeted her fans.

.....

A man named Bill Steiner shook her hand eagerly. "I drove 500 miles from Pennsylvania to meet you." Then suddenly he turned and shouted at the crowd. "If you do not believe that the free-enterprise system is the best possible way to raise the standard of living for everyone, then you're not an American." ..... Carl Swennson, a computer store owner from Georgia — addressed the gathering crowd. "All right, everybody! If you are from Kentucky and you would like to be a part of a common-law jury to try and indict the usurper, Barry Soetoro aka Barack Hussein Obama, all you need to do is step forward and we will hold court here today, right now!"

"Speaking truth, brother."

.....

The men were also worried about a ban on assault weapons and microstamps on shell casings and a plot by "the globalists" to cut the world population to one billion people. But here's the odd thing: they seemed very cheerful about it — downright thrilled, even, especially when Koernke launched into a speech about guerrilla warfare and when a heavy-metal band called Poker Face struck up a set of songs with titles like "The Illuminati" and "Revolution" (I am the watchman out on patrol / I see the nation crumbling right out of control).

It's like Dostoevsky said: "A man can take pleasure even in a toothache."

And an aching nation is a fine occasion for a party.

.....

But that night, back at my motel, the TV news was all about a man named Richard Poplawski, a gun collector who had just killed three police officers because he believed that the cops were no longer able to protect society as a result of the economic collapse. Later it came out that he was also a regular visitor to the Stormfront white-power site, where he posted a clip of Glenn Beck raving about the "FEMA camps" that Obama was supposedly building to lock up patriots come the revolution.

This drove home a scary truth: Ideas can have a body count.

.....

But like I said — and this is important to emphasize — all of Taitz's followers seemed like very nice people. Even Taitz had her good side on the rare occasions when she stopped talking for long enough that it could come out. I saw it when she talked about her three sons, or joked about how glad her husband was to get her out of the house. But there was fear and sadness in all of the "birthers," and a sense that things were surely coming to an end. And they were willing to believe anything bad that anybody said about Obama, no matter how or implausible or unfair.

It was pus exploding from a wound.

Part One: When Did Americans Turn into a Bunch of Raving Lunatics?, August 4, 2009