My thanks to other Kossacks deciphering the Republican code, including Something the Dog Said, whose story yesterday was "I Want My Nation Back" Where Did This Meme Come From? I usually emphasize the racism and other nastiness of wishing for the white-bread Fifties back, but STDS makes a good point about the recent loss of Republican power, after the delusions of The Permanent Republican Majority.
It's both. And much more. But the Republican loss of power since 2006 isn't enough to explain it. We'll explore options below the fold, and discuss the savage zombie social satire (There's a phrase I could never have predicted I would write) Fido as well.
Disclosure: I wrote the Plot Synopsis for Fido on its Internet Movie Database page. [SPOILERS]
First, who says, "I want my country back"? Tea Partiers, mostly. No secret there.
We know where and when it went viral nationwide in the Tea Parties. An unidentified Birther at a Town Hall in Georgetown, Delaware in the summer of 2009 said it after demanding to know why the government wasn't investigating President Obama's "fake" birth certificate from Hawaii. The clip was replayed endlessly on TV and radio. Here is CNN's coverage, analyzed at Media Matters.
CNN's Martin: Birther's "I want my country back" comment means "How is this black guy all of the sudden running the country?"
But that turns out not to be entirely the case. This predates President Obama.
When, then?
Looking back further, to 2007, we have a rant against the Fed, inflation, spending, and a few of the favorite conspiracy targets,
I want my Country back!
and earlier,
I Want My Country Back
By Frosty Wooldridge, May 22, 2006
Bush and Congress must address this [immigrant] invasion with action, not excuses. No amnesty for illegal aliens who betrayed our sacred U.S. Constitution. No amnesty that will create 193 to 217 million more people added to our country in 20 years via immigration. No amnesty for a president and Congress failing their sacred trust...We can change Bush's nightmare legacy that he's creating for our country--by our actions!
or how about 2004?
i-want-my-country-back.com
It is OBVIOUS to 'good' Americans who live in North County [near San Diego, CA] that the NCT [North County Times] is an 'aider & abettor' of everything Left Wing and deleterious to our country, so we have dropped our subscriptions and fight back against this putrid, anti-American ideology in any way we can.
So, in 2004, I sat down with my HTML writing skills and threw together this rudimentary site, having gleaned the names from actual, hateful, anti-American letters written by these folks and published by the [North County Times] over the previous several months.
Most of our local Socialists espouse the views of Karl Marx or Vladimir Lenin. It was Comrade Lenin who wrote of the lemming masses who would go along with the Communist view as "Useful Idiots". HE coined the phrase! It seems to me that Senor Amorosa and his ilk would find distinction and honor to be so addressed. Lenin would be PROUD of him!
My "I Want My Country Back" web site is MY First Amendment Right -in action. It is my opinion, only. It is my God given, Constitutionally guaranteed RIGHT to say ANYTHING I want, as long as it is not "fire" in a crowded movie theater. If my descriptions of individuals sounds like "childish name calling" it is because space was limited and the description of an individual is on the same level as the drivel in the letters that brought those individuals to my attention.
plus Michelle Malkin, the Minutemen, and so on.
Wait, 2002?
I want my country back
Posted: December 05, 2002
By Harry Browne
Thoughts on the American empire...
We're...told that we must give up some liberty for the sake of security. But that's not true.
For most of our history, Americans enjoyed both liberty and security from foreign threats.
But, as Tim O'Brien has pointed out, while it's possible to have both liberty and security, you can't have an empire as well.
Wait, 2002 from our side?
I'm sure I haven't gotten to the beginning of this. But if you look at the sites I linked to other than that last one, you will see much the same sorts of opinions on each. Real Americans calling out Liberal Socialist Commies, immigrants, and other such scum. And once in a while, Bank of America.
Our Side
Of course, after it went viral, all of this has not gone without notice and pushback. Here are a few angry satirical responses.
YouTube, March 2007: I Want My Country Back song
"I Want My Country Back!"
Huffington Post,
Michael Seitzman
Screenwriter, Director, Producer
Posted: July 24, 2009 12:16 PM
WARNING: N-bombs
Mike Keefe political cartoon, the Denver Post. Well played.
Then there are the angry straight analyses
The Motto of Mad Men
David Sirota, Friday 07 May 2010
"I Want My Country Back", what they really mean
by: colin
Mon Aug 03, 2009 at 03:11 PM CDT
and those who turn the meme around.
I want My Country back from Big Oil
And of course, Bill Maher
New Rule: I want my country forward.
Funnily enough, it isn't just Americans. Here's one from India.
Illustrated Dispatches from Munna on the Run
Tuesday, 26 January 2010
I want my country back
If India was a country and not a market, would we step out of the malls, look around at the crumbling infrastructure and dying rivers and ghettoed greens, and think to ourselves, "Hold on, this isn’t progress!" Today is Republic Day. And I want my country back. I want to be able to say, India is an amazing country. And not try to contain it and define it by a word called ‘market’.
And another, from Pakistan.
I want my country back
Sehar Tariq in The News International:
Today we legislated that a group of criminals would be in charge of governing and dispensing justice in a part of Pakistan according to their own obscurantist views. They have declared that the rulings of their courts will be supreme and no other court in the land can challenge them.
But that's different. Isn't it?
No, no, none of these silly digressions
But enough about us and them. We're here to talk about you. What do you think of our current Congress? Fair Pay, Stimulus, Health Care, DADT, more stimulus...?
Or should I say, Communism, Naziism, and the AntiChrist?
[Late addition] Pat Buchanan worded it differently.
Traditional Americans are losing their nation
Posted: October 20, 2009
Referring to the white working-class voters in the industrial towns decimated by job losses, Obama said: "They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."
Yet, we had seen these folks before.
America was once their country. They sense they are losing it. And they are right.
[Even later] Bachmann Says GOP Has Momentum to Take Back Congress in November
Thursday, May 20, 2010
...the alarm clock has gone off and they keep hitting the snooze button. They don't want to believe that the American people are actually going to have a voice in November and that their radical ways are going to come to an end.
But the American people are saying, let us at the polls. We want to be heard. We want to take our country back. And as a matter of fact, I think that's what Rand Paul said last night after his stunning win in Kentucky.
We are going to take our country back. That's the good news. The American people just need to hold on, keep working for the next six months and we'll do exactly that. And we'll put an end to this Obama agenda.
[Also later] Rand Paul Will "Take Our Country Back" — To The 1950s
By Duane Graham
May 20, 2010
I have a message from the Tea Party. We’ve come to take our government back.
We know how Sarah Palin talks about it—threats.
"Don't retreat. Don't retreat. Just reload," Palin says, her voice rising. "That's what we've got to do folks. That's what we've got to do to take it back—to take our country back."
Then there is the Sarah Palin-Glenn Beck-John Rich-Gretchen Wilson-Dick Morris-Sean Hannity-Laura Ingraham-Karl Rove "Taking Our Country Back" tour.
I guess that makes it unanimous among that end of the punditry. But what about politicians?
Texas GOP Vote
It's Time to Take Our Country Back!
The following is a list of Texas Democrats who betrayed the will of their Texas constituents and sided with President Barack Obama. I urge you to call their offices this week and let them know exactly how you feel about the betrayal of our Texas values.
[Even later addition:] Ken Buck (Republican Senate candidate from Colorado) is just amazing.
We need to return to the liberating principles of our Founding Fathers, as it was for most of this country's history, so it can be, again.
That would be the slavery and Jim Crow 50%+, yes, up into the 1960s? With no votes for women or Native Americans until the 20th century? Anti-miscegenation laws all over the US until 1967? No need to pretend that you aren't racist, nobody to speak of even complaining about sexism and "nativism"?
Why should you vote for me? Because I do not wear high heels.
No attempt to hide it.
Here is Eric Cantor, having a bit of a problem with the audience,
Heritage Crowd Grumbles Angrily When Eric Cantor Says Obama Isn’t "Domestic Enemy"
but recovering handily.
Cantor eventually turned the audience to applause by vowing that Republicans would take the country back from Obama.
But, lo, John Boehner's name leads all the rest. There is no question that he said it most clearly.
They're snuffing out the America that I grew up in.
Born in 1949, grew up in the 1950s and 1960s. He is clearly not pining for the hippy '60s, nor for the LBJ Civil Rights Acts and Voting Rights Act '60s, so '50s it is.
The Theft
Truman had started desegregating the military in 1948, a process that dragged on for many years. (You thought Don't Ask, Don't Tell was bad, did you?) The California Supreme Court had declared the California anti-miscegenation law unconstitutional, but that didn't affect the rest of the country until Loving v. Virginia in 1967 overturned the Pace decision of 1883. Jim Crow was the law throughout the South and the District of Columbia, in accordance with Plessey v. Ferguson, 1896. Gays were firmly in the closet. Advise and Consent didn't raise the issue of teh Gay in politics until 1959 (novel) and 1962 (film directed by Otto Preminger, with Henry Fonda, Charles Laughton, Don Murray, Walter Pidgeon, Peter Lawford, Gene Tierney, Franchot Tone, Lew Ayres, Burgess Meredith, Eddie Hodges, Paul Ford, George Grizzard, Inga Swenson, Betty White).
There are plenty of movies actually from the 1950s that show people's attitudes in passing, and a few, like Carmen Jones, that confront racism head on. However, if you want to get into it fully, I know of nothing better than the zombie satire Fido. I wrote, at IMDB [SPOILERS],
We find ourselves following a little boy, Timmy Robinson (K'Sun Ray), through an alternate version of the white-bread 1950s of big-finned cars, houses with white picket fences, and prejudice, except that instead of Blacks there are zombie servants animated by space radiation, but kept under control with Zomcon zombie collars.
The Cold War ramped up throughout this period, with Loyalty Oaths in the late '40s, and in the '50s McCarthy, Nixon, the Birchers, Sputnik, the totally fake "Missile Gap", and so on. Strom Thurmond had run as a Segregationist Dixiecrat in 1948, and as Trent Lott said much later, "When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we [in Mississippi] voted for him. We’re proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over the years, either." Including losing the country to the kind of people who would elect a N***** President.
In the 1950s Milton Friedman was in the process of converting from a Keynesian New Deal Democrat to the Apostle of Market Fundamentalism. Following F. A. Hayek in The Road to Serfdom, he started to teach that Social Democracy, as in Western Europe, was exactly the same as Soviet Communism. Hence the campaign against Medicare a few years later. Eventually, Friedman gave a veneer of intellectual respectability to the claim that "Deficits don't matter."
There were eight years of Eisenhower and Nixon, who were widely considered to be real Republicans at the time. The John Birch Society claimed that Ike was working for the Russkies, but Bill Buckley was throwing the Birchers out of his magazine, The New Republic, and indeed out of polite society, and establishing an intellectually respectable Republicanism. If you didn't look too closely.
Nowadays, of course, President Ike and stridently anti-Commie VP Dick are Commies for increasing the size of the Federal Government and for such Liberal, country-destroying acts as the Interstate Highway System, the Marshall Plan, the EPA, cutting and running from Vietnam, appeasing China, and Milton Friedman's proposal for a Guaranteed National Income above the poverty line. And Civil Rights, of course. Jackie Robinson worked for Nelson Rockefeller, and endorsed Nixon over Kennedy based on their Civil Rights records, but saw his worst fears realized in 1964.
Early in 1964 I wrote a Speaking Out piece for The Saturday Evening Post. A Barry Goldwater victory would insure that the GOP would be completely the white man's party. What happened at San Francisco when Senator Goldwater became the Republican standard-bearer confirmed my prediction.
I wasn’t altogether caught off guard by the victory of the reactionary forces in the Republican party, but I was appalled by the tactics they used to stifle their liberal opposition. I was a special delegate to the convention through an arrangement made by the Rockefeller office. That convention was one of the most unforgettable and frightening experiences of my life. The hatred I saw was unique to me because it was hatred directed against a white man [LBJ]. It embodied a revulsion for all he stood for, including his enlightened attitude toward black people.
A new breed of Republicans had taken over the GOP. As I watched this steamroller operation in San Francisco, I had a better understanding of how it must have felt to be a Jew in Hitler’s Germany.
The same high-handed methods had been there.
No, Jackie, you can't call us Nazis. You're the Nazi.
Yes, well, the racists took back the Republican Party, and later the country. So how are we doing on taking away their country now?
petehoekstra on Twitter (Pete Hoekstra, (R-MI):
On the way to DC. Vote on more deficit/stimulus spending. Spending is destroying America! Time to stop. I'll vote no.
You see, the problem is that America has too many policemen, too many firemen, too many schoolteachers, too many public buses, too many paved roads with streetlights, just too much! Democrats have a bill to provide funding for keeping most of them. [Later: It passed on Monday, and President Obama signed it on Tuesday.] You can tell that cutting all of these services and firing all of these people is what the Tea Partiers want, because that is what cities and counties are cutting, and Tea Partiers are cheering Pete Hoekstra. Yes! That's the way to do it. More!
Wait, Tea Partiers don't want police protection, fire protection, teachers for their children and grandchildren, roads, and street lights? Um, no. That's not how these things work.
Their services won't get cut, at least not by other Republicans and Tea Partiers in government. It's those horrible nasty poor people and illegal immigrants and monorities and single women with children and all the rest of the sinners and inferiors and the generally undeserving. Who are stealing all of our money, with the help of the elitist Democrat Liberal Commie Nazis, etc. who want to destroy Our Country, the greatest country in the world, the one and only government of Real Americans by Real Americans for Real Americans, and not of, by, or for any of this trash.
So don't give us any of your uppity, impertinent lip about us voting against our own interests, either.