There is an ugliness in the land..... [View all]

[kpete]

The Ugliness and the Unfolding Horrors
by Jaime O'Neill


http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/jaime-oneill/63532/the-ugliness-and-the-unfolding-horrors
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When a right wing talk radio host in Iowa (the heartland), promotes the idea of enslaving Mexican farm workers who are here illegally, and when that notion is not met with condemnation by the entire population, you know the country is settling very deep into the muck, enmiring itself in the worst kind of ugliness, hungering for a police state even while the most vociferous supporters of government intrusion in our lives insist that they was for smaller government.

Meanwhile, our news media seems complicit in spreading the tale as the fascists want it to be told. Meanwhile, the liberals equivocate or remain silent, telling themselves, as they did in Germany, that such madness would surely be self-limiting, that the nation would, sooner or later, see where such hatred and fear mongering can lead. Meanwhile, the right wingers, emboldened, grew ever more extreme, ever more hateful, using their twisted interpretations of religion to justify the most ungodly things imaginable. Meanwhile, the “moderates” were seen rushing ever rightward, their status as people with moderate views distorting the very definition of moderation, pushing the national conversation into a kind of “newspeak” in which war equals peace and justice equals summary executions by out-of-control cops. Meanwhile, the corporatists, the industrialists, the wealthiest few, the shielded, entitled, and most privileged, threw their money and power behind the men who promised to ensure the advantages that had made them so rich and powerful in the first place.

And so, when a demagogue steps forward, a man with an odd way of arranging his hair and a promise to make the homeland great again, the most thuggish elements begin to scream “seig heil,” and ugliness is loosed upon the land.

I think of the first stanza of the William Butler Yeats’ poem, written in the immediate aftermath of World War I, as the seeds of resentment that would sprout Nazism were beginning to grow in Germany.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

And, reading those words nearly a full century after they were written, I think that this is not an old poem I am reading; this is the news.

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/jaime-oneill/63532/the-ugliness-and-the-unfolding-horrors