American fear

I wrote a while back about political fear (and flatulence). Take a look, if you will. I like that piece.

Thinking about Barba's piece below and the last line about being afraid.... What is striking about the past twenty years or so of conservative causes is how much they are generated by fear and how much the fear-mongers revel like pigs in the American slop of terror. The Republican Party -- the party of Reagan, Schwarzenegger, the Marlboro Man, Bruce Willis, Charlton Heston, and other tough guys and hideous cackling monsters like Phyllis Schlafly and Ann Coulter -- the party of guns and war and torture and degradation and fuck you poor people -- the party of meta-hypocrisy, of do as I say, of commanding you to obey, of grotesque political purchasing power, of defense contractors' checkbooks, of man's domination over nature, of supposedly heroic figures with hidden sad stories, of taking truth to be a function of power, of the Nietzschean will to power, Machiavellian machinations, Hobbesian brutalities, Platonic mythologies, Straussian elitism, and Sadean pathologies -- that Republican Party makes policies out of their own fears.

These are frightened people. Bullies and cowards. The policies of the past six years are entirely built on fear: of poor people and people of color, of an invasion of the brown hordes, of Arabs in our closets, of men who prefer cock to vagina, of being in public, of the little private secrets US citizens might share over the phone or email, of a womanly sensing of nature and art, of the expansiveness of spirituality, of a God they've falsified, of intellectual thoughts beyond Jesus and Kissinger, of genuine compassion (rather than the ploy), of non-Americans and Americans alike, of losing their economic status, of not reigning the world under their own flaccid beliefs, of someone strange coming to the door or walking past or "looking suspicious," of giving, of their own ability to maintain consistency in their lies and control of the media, of truth itself, of justice, of any goddamn thing that happens to be good on this planet. My God, they're afraid of the French!

This ends up being policy. Check it all. All of it -- from the bombings to torture to walls to spying on citizens to banning gay marriage to treating non-Americans as non-humans. They build as many barriers between themselves and the Other as they can, and US citizens pay billions for it and many pay with their lives, livelihoods, aspirations, and peace. Why, Dick Cheney had his own secret bunker built underneath the Naval Observatory during the past couple of years (I live nearby; I heard the dynamite, as did everyone in the neighborhood). They are afraid. They are paranoid. And we've seen governments in the past similarly frightened and paranoid while holding similarly massive power. The "banality of evil." None of them have ended well for anyone.

Why such fear and fear-mongering? Or, let's turn this around: how can opponents of these people dispel the fears that now drive a cowering American population into unwise wars and domestic policies? We are a country of cowards and bullies. We could be a country of decency.