The Dark Planet

By Dan Hagen

Don’t you find it strange?

American right wingers leap to the defense of a man who, against police instructions, chases an unarmed teenage boy and shoots him dead. They’re indifferent toward, even actively hostile to, poor people whom the federal government had abandoned to the tender mercies of hurricane Katrina.

They endorse torture. They admire flying robot bombs that blast civilian populations.

They indulge themselves in apocalyptic fantasies, the fever dreams of fundamentalist religion, and clearly relish that civilization-wrecking, mass-destructive horror, even playing video games about it.

Guys whose bookshelves are lined with their favorite political screeds, penned by Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly, march into Unitarian churches on a mission to slaughter “liberals.”

Their pundits, politicians and plutocrats “joke” about assassinating the president of the United States. Ha ha ha.

You can sense what’s going on here. Incessantly loud-mouthed though they are, the right wingers are still afraid to say some things out loud, and one of them is what they’re ginning themselves up to do. They’re groping for a handy, all-purpose justification to kill unarmed, innocent people.

We can all feel it out there, even though the American corporate media, marching lockstep to a Republican-set drumbeat, studiously pretends it isn’t there.

It’s like one of those gas giant dark planets, invisible but impressing itself upon us nevertheless with its tremendous gravitational pull, swinging closer.

Better watch the horizon. Watch the skies.