Saturday, January 12, 2013

Cry “Victim!” and Let Slip the Dogs of Class Warfare


By Dan Hagen
Ever notice that the 21st century American conservative movement does psychological projection almost exclusively?
THEY are the ones who whine about their victimhood constantly with their nonexistent "wars on Christmas" and other such bullshit. THEY are the ones who are the economic parasites, with their crony-capitalist, no-bid, no-performance military-industrial complex contracts running into the hundreds of billions. THEY are the ones who make constant false accusations of voter fraud, the felony THEY are quietly committing.
And note the a strange inverse relationship between right-wing fundamentalist Christians' phony screams of victimhood and their deep and sincere desire to knock to their knees those who refuse to bow to them.
"Now would be a good time to think about the term ‘Class Warfare,’” Helen Kromm wrote. “This neat little slogan was chosen as the battle cry of the one percent for more reasons than you might think. Forget that it is a catchy little phrase and certainly a lie. Forget the huge cojones it takes to even utter it. Perhaps the only thing more galling than pillaging an entire people is proclaiming yourself a victim of those same people. The operative word here is 'warfare.' It was important to get this word out there front and center and early in this game."
“The Republican mindset is inherently extreme — extremely aggressive, extremely defensive, extremely emotional,” wrote Jane Smiley. “If you don't exhibit much aggression, they think you are wimping out, and if you do unto them what they have done unto you, they start screaming that they are being unfairly victimized. They are highly reactive and sitting down and reasoning together is not on the program.”
“Their politics never loses, but is always made to lose; it cannot fail, but is always failed,” observed Leonard Pierce. “Reconciling history and current events in this way, where oppression, dictatorship, and the impeding of human rights are exclusively products of liberalism and the political right is both naturally, inevitably victorious and forever persecuted and silenced, is the great project of today’s movement conservative.”
Doug Muder wrote, “Once you grasp the concept of privileged distress, you’ll see it everywhere: the rich feel 'punished' by taxes; whites believe they are the real victims of racism; employers’ religious freedom is threatened when they can’t deny contraception to their employees; English-speakers resent bilingualism — it goes on and on.
"And what is the Tea Party movement other than a counter-revolution? It comes cloaked in religion and fiscal responsibility, but scratch the surface and you’ll find privileged distress: Change has taken something from us and we want it back.”
So pity the poor, dim-bulb Walmart Republican. He believes the people he supports are “good” and “nice” because they wear American Legion hats and carry Bibles. He thinks he's a victim of those awful “liberals” he hears so much about on Fox News — the people who fought slavery and child labor and poorhouses for the elderly and then somehow became, oddly enough, servants of evil. 

Ignorant of the history he claims to be an expert on, he doesn’t know that in England, liberals — being proponents of freedom and equality — were the people who fought for free enterprise. Conservatives fought against it, naturally, in favor of class and privilege.
 He doesn’t know that the wealthy Americans even opposed the installation of the Statue of Liberty. The owners of sweatshops and deadly mines didn’t think “liberty” was an idea that poor people should ever be encouraged to consider.
“As the people of a fading empire, our self-absorbed victim-swoon is only exceeded by our paranoia,” wrote Phil Rockstroh. “We cower from phantoms and rage at realms of invisibles: Within this empire of Paxil, Palin and paranoia, collective fear of all the wrong things has made the US and her people analogous to a car alarm that issues a shrill, electronic warning to an empty parking lot.”
For example, one of right’s foremost professional victims is Sarah Palin. She collected the income for a bestselling book with her name on it that she did not write and may not have even read. She asked to be elected to a state governorship that she threw away when it bored her. She was handed a vice presidential nomination that she refused to prepare for, thereby embarrassing herself and this nation in a spectacular fashion.
Palin has never earned any of the many rewards that have been showered upon her. She is NOT a victim and has NEVER been a victim. Whatever the opposite of a victim is, she's that.
“For decades, middle and laboring class conservatives have been hoarding their resentments against phantom enemies, foreign and domestic, as the time-yellowed, eroded social contract, once, offering a better life for themselves and for their children, has crumbled to dust in their hands,” Rockstroh wrote.  “By the financial machinations of elitist kleptocrats and the Pentagon's multi-billion dollar money pit, they have been endowed with little else but this stash of toxic baubles they store against reality.”
Oddly and ironically enough, in fact, that Walmart Republican finally IS a victim, as his “good” heroes drain his Social Security account with national debt and tax cuts for the rich, plot to erode his wages down to subsistence-level and carefully prepare his grandchildren to invade the next resource-rich country that happens to catch the plutocrat's reptilian eye.
He’s just not smart enough to understand that the plutocratic pals who give him his marching orders are really just a walrus and a carpenter who have always planned to dine not WITH, but ON them.

"It seems a shame," the Walrus said,
"To play them such a trick,
After we've brought them out so far,
And made them trot so quick!"
The Carpenter said nothing but
"The butter's spread too thick!"

"I weep for you," the Walrus said:
"I deeply sympathize."
With sobs and tears he sorted out
Those of the largest size,
Holding his pocket-handkerchief
Before his streaming eyes.
— Lewis Carroll

No comments:

Post a Comment