THE DORK ARISES!

Anybody who writes off the Republican Party is turning a blind eye to the self-regenerative power of stupidity. It’s easy to discount a bunch of idiots dancing around a park with tea bags hanging off their hats the same as it was easy to discount Ronald Reagan as a boring, primitive dork; the same as it was easy to laugh off Tom De Lay’s little ceremony of congressional candidates marching four-abreast to sign the Contract With America; or to ridicule George W. Bush’s destructive demolition of logic.

How about Richard Nixon, who was peddled like a low-grade soap product to a brain dead electorate, until he ultimately won and came this close to staging a coup d’état complete with martial law and internment camps for anti-Vietnam radicals (read The White House Watergate Tapes).

The thing to remember is that these campaigns were calibrated to a perfect pitch of imbecility to appeal to morons. But they were not designed by morons. They were designed by very intelligent corporate and dynastic moneyed interests that were motivated to consolidate their power by manipulating the low intelligence of the masses. As H.L. Mencken once observed, “Nobody ever lost money underestimating the intelligence of the American public.”

This tea party concept is the inspiration of Rupert Murdoch of News Corp., who knows a thing or two about low marketing. It has two basic premises: taxes and no representation. Taxes, as we all know, are the tripwire of Republican ideology. They don’t believe that taxes, like death, are inevitable, and they want to abolish them. As far as the bit about no representation, being reduced to a powerless rump party from their previous unassailable position of power has made Republicans feel like a cornered, endangered species.

One of the first pronouncements coming from Homeland Security head Janet Napolitano was an alert about the rising danger of domestic terrorism arising from the activities of right-wing extremists. I’m sure she has been receiving some very alarming intelligence reports. Concurrently, the news broadcasts have been reporting a run on ammunition and automatic weapons from gun shops and gun shows.

Anybody who has ever read “Les Miserables” by Victor Hugo knows that the Paris insurrection of 1830 was not a spontaneous explosion, but was meticulously prepared at the grassroots level by small cells of activists that traded in weapons and intelligence despite the overwhelming presence of army and police brigades in the city. Small groups of dedicated individuals can create chaos, and now more than in the past. As has recently been exposed, the whole power grid is computerized and could easily fall victim to a couple of lunatic hackers.

I don’t mean to be alarmist. But in these tough times there are a lot of trained persons circulating in society who may feel that they are being displaced by a new order of things that is a threat to their understanding of what the natural order of things should be e.g. their own privileged positions. They are being prodded by propaganda organs like Fox News to behave destructively.

President Obama and his advisors, like Rahm Emanuel and Hillary Clinton, have proven their capacity to divide and confuse Republicans, who are anyway not the sharpest tools in the box. They shouldn’t let interests like Murdoch get the jump on them with gimmicks like this tea party nonsense, stupid as it may seem, but should confront it with the same alacrity that they did against Rush Limbaugh.

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Posted on 4/21/2009 ( Permanent Link )
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