Sometimes people I am with begin to ruminate on the current strength of the Republican party. These discussions bore me, because the reason the Republican party has grown in the last few decades is obvious.
The bigots abandoned the Democrats.
Both political parties used to be a lot more varied than they are; you had famously corrupt Republicans like McKinley and yet you had Roosevelt and the "goo goos" (Good Government) in the same party; you had the Democratic Tammany Hall machine paired with southern white supremacists but also with the New Dealers.
A lot of the reason for this diversity was regional; in the South, the parties meant one thing, in New York, another, in Ohio, they had still different meanings. So on a national level, both parties stood for all sorts of different things, and had all sorts of different people.
That's shaken out. Since the nineteen-eighties, national media and a dwindling regional consciousness have made people more aware of their national politics and less concerned with their regional politics. Not that regional politics aren't important; but they used to be, aside from the President, effectively all-important. You voted for your congressman not because of what his party stood for at the national level, but because you knew his cousin or because you always went to the party picnic. Because that's who "your folks" voted for, and "your folks" meant locals: friends, neighbors, and kin.
Communications and television have changed that. "Your folks" are now spread across the country. So the parties have become less heterogenous, have standardized on a national consensus. Folks who think other people can use help have gravitated towards the Democrats; folks who think other people should do what they're told and/or be punished have gravitated towards the Republicans. The Southern bigots have joined the provincial midwesterners and become Red states; the coastal educated classes have gone Blue. You don't see Rockefeller Republicans or Dixiecrats any more.
And there are lots more bigoted Southerners than "good government" New Englanders.
Now, I don't think that there are more mean people out there than kind people. We all have both streaks. But the Mighty Wurlitzer has done a fantastic job of getting the mean message to the masses.
I mean, look at this Cindy Sheehan thing. Have you seen the Wurlitzer's reaction to it? The slime has been pumped out as fast and as thick as possible, and whenever one tactic has been revealed as a blatant lie, another one arrives. Right down the well-honed vituperative channel, telling the mean people what to think.
First, it was Sheehan the flip-flopper. She'd supported the president before, they said. That came from the party masters, went through the reactionary websites (the Drudge report: Sheehan "dramatically changed her account"), was parroted on talk radio, reached Fox News (the Party Organ), but stopped before being picked up by the corporate stations because it was a blatant lie. Luckily, there are people whose sole job it is to produce this slime, so they manufactured something new and started right in again.
"She's a crackpot" is of course a cornerstone of theirs, so this time they went with "her family doesn't support her." Once again, from the party masters to the Internet nutjobs to Rush Limbaugh and his ilk and thence to Fox News - and again it stalled out because the only family member they could find who would say anything bad about Mrs. Sheehan was a sister in-law.
They're not going to stop, though. They can't; they have to have the last word on what their devoted masses must think. The whole mental picture has to hang together, to be an unsullied whole of programmed belief. So this morning the news was about Mrs. Sheehan's husband filing for divorce; and that's juicy enough for the corporate media (i.e. the media still concerned with profit rather than their masters' bidding) to pick up.
So watch for them to hammer that. What percentage of Americans get divorced? Yeah. For how many reasons? But this will be a singular indictment of this woman, regardless of what her husband actually says. And Cindy Sheehan will join folks like Michael Moore as one of the slimed, a person of conscience demonized to the point of parody.
(If you look at what the demonizers actually say, mind you, it's enough to turn your stomach... well, unless you've become desensitized to these sorts of things.)
Personally, I think she's a little nutty; it's not like Bush will ever give her answers. He obviously, blatantly doesn't care. He's been in it for his rich buddies, and no one else, since day one. So camping out in order to speak with him is a touch silly.
But then, she lost her son. What that can feel like I never want to know. And she lost him in a stupid war that we only are in because the President and his buddies wanted it.
Her son didn't die for no reason, mind you. He died for the very best of reasons; because he was brave enough to join the U.S. Armed Forces and the U.S. Armed Forces do what they are told, and that's the only reason we have the freedoms we have. He did, however, die in a stupid and mistaken war, needlessly.
And she's brave enough to stand up to the footsoldiers of hate, doubtless knowing the cost. Mrs. Sheehan, I salute your son's courage, and yours.
- Sun Ra