The Party of Fear is afraid. I don't mean this in a schoolyard taunting kind of way; I mean it earnestly. When we see the expected reactions (because many of us did expect them) of weapons stockpiling, rise in hate blogs and white supremacist group memberships, and increase in hate speech and other virulent verbal distortions, we are seeing the expression of real fears.
Not rational fears, mind you. These are fears based on notions that, when held up to the light of reason and liberal-biased reality (and when they don't entirely leave many of us prostrate with laughter and/or shivering with eight years of accumulated schadenfreude) puzzle us: the talk of concentration camps for conservatives, the slide toward a "socialist dictatorship," the shredding of the Constitution. (The irony of this last point is too grim to leave unremarked.)
We can blame talk radio hosts (such as the Great White Wail), corporations, certain Evangelical churches, the TradMed, and a host of well-groomed pundits. (Nor is the phenomenon exclusively racial, despite my title, though this factor is undeniably present and intense.) This
Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, however, did not create its own audience.
After all, the audience is composed of people who believe that abortion causes breast cancer, that president Clinton had Vince Foster killed, that Saddam was the mastermind behind 9/11...and so on. Little surprise to find that these people find it easy to believe that president Obama will institute an atheist, communist Reich; one in which, presumably, all guns will be confiscated, the hammer and sickle will fly over the Capitol, and forcible abortions will be performed on all conservatives.
To us, fevered ideas; to them, imminent threats. How else to explain that one of these aforementioned pundits convinced many (no one knows exactly how many) of his viewers to exchange (at least for a day) automatic weapons, ammo, and camo for spatulas, funny hats, and aprons. They're wearing aprons. The party that responded to the 9/11 crisis with the panacea of "shop!" now perscribes "grill!" as the appropriate response. If nothing else, this is cornered behavior. While aware that a cornered beast is all the more dangerous, permit me my embittered gloating.
It doesn't make up for the worst moments: Times when I my very heart physically--physically--ached and I had to stop reading this blog, times when I was so enraged that I felt that I ought to find a heath to storm out all my fury, times when I was so furious that a symphonic crescendo played in the background to all of my churning thoughts; times when I was so angry that it felt as if the heat from my head was combusting the air for a 1-yard radius. But at least it's something.
Yes, the party of fear, resentment, bigotry, and greed is afraid. And it's about time.