All day Saturday the air was orange. The evergreen landscape of my rural Washington homestead assumed the sepia cast of Southern California I remember from my time on the coast. It evoked the image of a forbidding pall on the horizon, a warship approaching a hidden breakwater as realization hits that we breathe that shit when we're in port. That's the air we use to stay alive. Fuuuu-uck.
Been pissed off all day about that, both as I wonder about the shit that polluters forced me to breathe, and about the inability of the American public to understand the consequences of the shit for which they routinely vote. Fuuuu-uck-too.
We don't get much pollution out here. The particular particulates that killed the sun yesterday are natural, the pall of the Cascade Complex wildfires raging a hundred miles away on the lands of the Confederated Tribes of the Warm Spring Reservation. Nothing much to be pissed off about. But I was. I was off my game all day. And it wasn't until I watched Basic Black: The Lewis Black Story last night on Netflix that it occurred to me that I wasn't pissed, I was scared. Same thing, right?
I'm pissed all the time, these days. For years now, I read the paper and then I want to go punch a unicorn in the face. Anything to get it out. Why? Fuck, goddammit, why! That's my internal monologue, like always. Pissed off and fucking impotent. Shit.
And then, as I'm watching Lewis Black in all these little vignettes that document the life of a guy who's been consistently pissed off since Reagan, a mini-epiphany slapped me upside the head, and something I read a bit ago came back to me. It's not that we're impotent, it's that we're humping the wrong leg. We've got so many things pissing us off, scaring the shit out of us, so many issues on which it really does seem we're losing for not winning, that we maybe didn't notice that every once in a while we score a hit on them as well.
The reaction of platinum plated novelty dog turd and former head of AIG, Harvey Golub, to Warren Buffett's not even remotely controversial op-ed explaining that the word "shared" in shared sacrifice sort of implies that all the pain won't be borne by the poors clued me in. My grandpa used to tell me that you could know what a man was scared of by what pissed him off. Harvey Golub is scared that people might realize that the rich aren't going to wither and die if they have to pay taxes commensurate with their good fortune. Not even close. Harvey doesn't want reg'ler folk in middle America to know that.
This probably isn't coming as a revelation to anyone, but once I realized that the things pissing me off the most had to do with how poorly Americans are at critical thinking, I started seeing it everywhere. Obama loyalists who blast even the mildest criticism of the president are scared that people will pick up on it and it might taint their opinion of him. Public sector workers will most rikki-tik eat your head if you even begin to criticize their pay or benefits because we can't afford to lose what little we have, even as many of us are frustrated with the inefficiency and waste we see all around us.
It works the same with wingnuts, and it very well could be their Achilles heel. For instance...
Tax policy - They're very angry about, "Half of all Americans pay no Federal income tax." Grr! They're afraid that the average American will find out that actually, half of all workers, not half of all Americans, pay no Federal income tax. Because then, the discussion goes from being an insinuation that welfare queens are sucking at the teat to, "why the hell are people working and still not making enough money to, you know, buy food?"
Healthcare - They're angry about, "America has the best healthcare system in the world!" They're afraid that the average American will discover, "Only for the rich." Why? Because Americans overwhelmingly believe that healthcare is a fundamental human right. Put it before them that 45,000 poor people are dying every year from lack of access to healthcare, and the average American says we should definitely do something about that.
Jobs - They're angry that every responsible solution to our unemployment crisis involves raising taxes on the rich because, "Job creators!" They're afraid that middle-income Americans will find out that the only thing that can create jobs is demand, and that requires spending, which requires money, which means either borrowing it or taxing it. Companies don't hire when there's not enough work to justify it, no matter how many tax breaks you throw at them.
These were just a sample, and by no means an exhaustive one. They're representative of the things wingnuts are most incensed about, which makes them low hanging fruit for this diary, but the method works pretty well for just about any of their talking points. Find the thing about which they demonstrate inexplicable ire. Listen for the thing they leave out of their recitation of the facts. Voila! The sum of their fears.