Putschist Town Halls

There are so many parallels between the disruptions and the mechanics of Hitler’s rise to power circa 1923-1933 and the cultural, societal & political rifts of today’s U.S. that my fingers tremble as I type this, my blood boils, I am afraid for us and for our children. Instead of being over and done with, the Bush-Cheney years all too eerily appear to have been just a prelude.

Headless and heedless white panic is expressing itself in every copy of Obama’s face transmogrified to look like The Joker, in every claim of the inauthenticity of his Honolulu birth certificate, in the generalized resuscitation of the “jungle bunny” epithet and abject protestations that it’s not meant derogatorily, in the accusations of racism launched at one of the wisest judges this country’s seen since Sandra Day O’Connor and Ruth Ginsberg. One single non-white makes one single reference to her ethnicity or skin color in a hypothetical sentence and every fat little red neck squeals that he is being discriminated against. Is this a classic case of blaming the victim or are we on the verge of civil war?

Melissa Harris-Lacewell was on Keith Olbermann’s Countdown the other night making sense, as she always does, about the “cultural anger” behind the Brown Shirt tactics being deployed at town hall meetings across the nation. The Nation – Harvey segues – has the clip. She invoked the argument made by Karen Stenner in her book, The Authoritarian Dynamic. That’s why, being even less polite than Melissa and Keith, I’m taking my rhetoric and my choice of terminology a step further and employing “Brown Shirt” as closest approximation from the past for the tactics of these knuckleheads: the tactics are no different than those of the storm troopers who facilitated the rise of Adolf Hitler and whom I mentioned in my letter to editors posted last week.

When we hear hysterical shouts of “I want my country back!” or “I’m afraid of Obama!” or “He’s not American!” yes, we are hearing expressions of anxiety. Maybe we’re even hearing unrehearsed, unscripted translations into spoken language of some people’s deepest fears. Just as “Obama’s an elitist” is code for “He’s an uppity nigger,” “Obama’s a socialist” is code for “Let’s lynch him.” These seemingly innocent cries of white anxiety are as intolerable as they are odious. They may be protected by the 2nd Amendment, but they have their roots in Reconstruction racism. I’m talking about the worst of all the already bad periods of U.S. history, from 1865 (the end of the Civil War) to the Civil Rights Movement a century later. That was when Southern Democrats, the KKK, and various other white supremicists in this country stoked these very fears in crackers. Divide and conquer: that was their strategy. Why? Because if poor whites couldn’t cling to the last resort of blaming blacks for their economic and social misery, then they might begin to think that misery was caused by the real and the only divide: the haves versus the have-nots.

Let me be perfectly clear: we are at a crisis moment in our history. Either we purge once and for all and thoroughly the abscess of white on all others racism or we stand to fall far deeper into the inhumanity prepared in by Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld & Co. As with the enabling of Hitler’s beer hall thugs, the real culprits are the corporate sponsors and the perfectly immoral greedy ones who ally themselves with one or two psychotic hate-mongers.

Or maybe we’re just living one of those “opposite days” that Melissa’s daughter told her about…