Unfathomable? (America Is Not So Exceptional, Part One.)

Little kid in a small town
I did my best just to fit in
Broke my heart on the playground, 
When they said I was different
Oh now, now I'm all grown up, and nothing has changed. Yeah, it's still the same
It's a hard life on easy street
Just white painted picket fences far as you can see If you think we live in the land of the free
You should try to be black like me. ~Mickey Guyton, Black Like Me.

When the George Floyd murder and the subsequent protests happened last May, I said that "MLK said that a riot is the language of the unheard. Well, here we have a whole bunch of people desperate to go right on unhearing." I'm kind of tired of being right.

"It still remains deeply unfathomable that this extraordinary country ever elected that buffoon (Trump) as President."

No, actually it's extremely fathomable if you've been paying the least bit of attention for at least the last 30 years or so, and the roots of this mess go back another 30 years and more besides.

Conservatism was once, for the most part, dominated by sober, serious men. Even after Goldwater first started appealing to racism in 1964 (On the advice of his campaign honchos, that is. Barry Goldwater was also an Air Force officer who had led the effort that integrated the Arizona Air National Guard. I'll say it again, it really is the ideology that's just plain terrible.) Republicans were for the most part led by sober, serious men who, from Nixon going forward, occasionally dabbled in racism to get the assholes on board and voting for them. Reagan appealed to this directly during his campaign, but then for the most part didn't govern that way. Bush 41 had Lee Atwater running his disgraceful Willie Horton ad campaign, Bush 43 sunk John McCain's campaign in South Carolina with allegations that John McCain had an illegitimate mixed-race daughter (and this disgraceful, evil bullshit was actually targeted at his real-life adopted daughter, who came from Bangladesh, and South Carolina conservatives were proud of this dirty politics!) but neither of them governed like that. In 2008 when McCain himself did get the nomination, even he had to stand up against the conspiracy theories, hate and racism that came out of the woodwork directed at Barack Obama, 

Which was the specific thing that ran me out of the Republican Party.

And some say that standing up to that damned nut at that town hall meeting cost McCain the election.

How did this unfathomable thing happen, indeed?

I saw this, this morning.

The University of Texas fight song "The Eyes of Texas" dates back to a late 19th and early 20th century university president, William Prather, who had graduated from what is now Washington and Lee University when Robert E. Lee was in charge of it. Lee liked to tell his students "The eyes of the South are upon you." Interesting statement for a guy who tolerated pervasive hooliganism and rape against the local Black community by the then exclusively white and male student body.

Later, William Prather, when he became president of the University of Texas late in life, copied Lee's saying and told his students "The eyes of Texas are upon you." A UT band member and yearbook editor wrote the song at the request of another band member who was also the director of UT's minstrel show (which raised funds for the sports program) to make fun of the university president, who enjoyed the song and liked it so much he directed that it be played at his funeral. Do we see a pattern here yet?

There's a reason they called it the Southern Strategy.

Evidently, there's been some talk about changing the fight song of late, except that the alumni revolted over the issue and plenty of the donors, claiming the usual bullshit about "Heritage" responded with various racist screeds and threats to stop donating to the university.

Racists always appeal to "Heritage." It's that way every fucking time. Facists always appeal to some imagined past greatness as a rationale for present evil deeds.

But Sarah Longwell says it's "Unfathomable " how a buffoonish Republican politician could get elected off of racism.

Ronald Reagan's choice of the Neshoba County Fair as a launch venue for his presidential campaign would like a word, ma'am.

At this point, you have to want to not hear this shit. We're still having the same arguments with the same fucking people, basically.

And until we, as a people, stand up and stop tolerating this bullshit we're not going to hear anything else from these motherfuckers, because it automatically gets a third of America behind them.

And they increasingly don't give a damn about anybody else.

And they'd rather burn down the country, destroy academic freedom, eliminate human rights, kill the franchise, lose their own rights and start a war against their own neighbors than give up on the racism. 

When Republicans started using racism to get votes, they hoped the racists would vote for them, then crawl back under their rocks. Now, 57 years later, racism has basically completely consumed American conservatism in general and the Republican Party in particular.

And they'll drag down everything into the mud with them, including the Cross of Christ, Himself, to support their fundamentally racist cause. They don't care about anything else, like at all.

And they're saying this shit out loud and in public while bowing to literal golden idols of Donald Trump as our media turns it into a circus, because it makes conservatives look crazy (albeit accurately so at this point) and its good for ratings and thus profits. We've all been subjected to a week or so of this disgusting bullshit because of CPAC, and I'm here to tell you Tea Party Joe Walsh...who, of all people, really does seem to understand what's going on here and taken a stand against it...said that he's heard from thousands of Republicans who love the fuck out of this horrifying bullshit.

But it's unfathomable that any of this should happen, Unfathomable, she says!

No, that's not it. It really becomes pretty goddamned fathomable when you start listening to what these fucking people themselves are saying.

But to do that, you have to open your ears and engage your brain a little bit. You cannot continue to be unhearing. The article I linked to says that 60% of White Evangelical "Conservatives" think their idea of America is evaporating so fast they're going to have to use force to try to "save" it.

And if we, as a people, don't start listening and then stand up and do something about it, the day will come when American Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen and Marines are fighting and dying not in Fallujah or Kandahar or Raqqa but in Fairfax and Kingsville and Raleigh-Durham. There will come a time when it's not an electoral issue or a political crisis but an existential, literal fight to the death for everybody in America who won't get on the hate train and bow down before whatever golden idol the fake-Christians and so-called "Conservatives" and the wannabe-Nazis put up and then demand at gunpoint that we all bow down to, if they deem us worthy.

You have to understand, there's lots of people these motherfuckers would just kill.

But it's worse than that, they want the war, so that they can tell the rest of us to submit or die.

Fuck that, and fuck them.

I have to stand with William T. Sherman on this one, if that time comes, we'd best give them all the war they want, and then some.

But if you want to avoid all that bloodshed and death and destruction, you have to start listening now. The unfathomable had best become the understandable real quick.

And you have to love your freedom, your rights, your fellow humans...more than they love their hate. You have to love it all enough to fight for it.

But first you have to understand that it is a fight, and there's reasons it's happening, and that this is not some magical, special process or one time event but a thing that happened because of cause and effect, history and the denial of it, reason and unreason, and you have to know and understand the difference.

And it's not magic, there's nothing unfathomable about it. We're not exceptional or extraordinary, we're the country that built itself from the rest of the world's adventurers, castoffs, fanatics and forgotten people, and in so doing we brought the rest of the world's problems with us, and we made some of them worse.

Ignoring all that stuff isn't going to make it go away. It's only unfathomable if you refuse to think about it.

You have to do something, and the first step is to admit you have a problem.

We're not so exceptional, but we could be.