In 1995, Toni Morrison published an extremely, extremely insightful article titled, "Racism and Facism" in The Journal of Negro Education. For those of you who are tech savvy and who have access to a college library, please use J-Stor, EbscoHost, or Academic Search Premiere to check this article out. Published more than 10 years ago, this article is scary in its accuracy.
Earliear this week, the NAACP challenged the TEA Party on its overt and covert racism and racist attitudes toward the President. Also, during this same week, I went into Wal-Greens for some oh so delicious salsa chips that they sale, and I heard the song, "Cult of Personality" playing on the loudspeaker. I was horrified by that song. Never, never in my life, even after surviving Reaganomics, have I heard so much disrespect toward the leader of the free world internally.
In response to the charge by Jealous and the NAACP, most TEA Party members claim that they are not racist at all. They simply don't like the socialist policies of Obama and the rest of the Democrats. These people use the rhetoric of fear, throwing around big words like fascism and racism, but absolutely do not know what they are talking about. The beauty of Toni Morrison is that she marries the calling of someone a fascist or a racist with covert racism...
Also, the beauty of Morrison is that she defines fascims for us, something that neither Glenn Beck nor Sarah Palin can do. Here's how Morrison defines it:
"Conservative, moderate, liberal; right, left, hard left, far right;religious, secular, socialist -we must not be blindsided by these Pepsi-Cola, Coca-Cola labels because the genius of fascism is that any political structure can become a suitable home. Facism talks ideology, but it is really just marketing -marketing for power."
Morrison goes on to link Fascism with unconstrained greed and rampant, global capitalism. She defines Fascism as dominance and control of entire populations by deregulation and abusive financial practices. As I reread her article today, the hair on the back of my neck stood on end. As I read, I heard a newscaster say BP lobbied the British government to release a convicted Libyan terrorist with 200+ murders on his hands just so the company could drill oil off the coast of Libya. Another Senator came on immediately after, claiming that continuing to pay unemployed people unemployment benefits makes people lazy.
I must thank the Tea Party for electing Massachusetts Republican Scott Brown since he voted for the Financial Reform Bill and help the President of the United States with another legislative victory, thank you Tea Party.
ReplyDeleteThe problem is this. Tea Party candidates will win a number of these congressional races because local districts are often safely partisan in nature. They can make their wild, unfounded claims, crazy accusations, etc., and win. That means not only are we likely to see an increase in Republican seats in both houses, we're likely to see more antics, more insanity, more stupidity. At the same time they're going to do everything they can to derail Obama's policies which will likely mean high unemployment, a moribund economy, and more compromises on policy positions that make no one happy.
That could literally mean that if the Republicans put up a legitimate candidate in 2012, they could win. Such a result is bad enough, but the likely response for the Democrats is to move further to the "middle" to placate voters. As we've seen over the last decade, the "middle" in American politics is basically on the verge of being an 80s Republican. Increasingly that means we'll have a political landscape of a conservative party and ratfuck insane parties. The former, given it's track record, slowly moving to the right, the latter, given it's track record, loudly screaming "socialism, communism, fascism!!!"
If we continue on this course, privatization will be socialism.