Vigilante Bingo II ☀
Do you ever tune in to AM talk radio? Hosts paid in millions, with audiences numbers measured in multimillions, who are on the public record with plentiful examples of hate slinging and racist remarks.
Peruse the published books by prominent conservative talkers with incendiary titles? (i.e., “Liberalism is a Mental Disorder”, “Deliver us From Evil: Defeating Terrorism, Despotism and Liberalism”, “Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism”, etc.…)
Have you ever attended a gun show? Do examine some of the literature, banners, posters and T-shirts on display.
Are you old enough to have recollections of past acrimonious political conflicts? Or know the history of civil rights and subsequent conservative embrace of the Southern Strategy?
Why yes, I do occasionally tune into AM radio, though infrequently and probably not in the last year. I have listened enough to know Limbaugh can be a blowhard and Glenn Beck says stuff that makes me cringe, but nothing close to advocating mass killings, as was present in the cartoon on which I commented.
Rush Limbaugh: “I tell people don’t kill all the liberals. Leave enough so we can have two on every campus — living fossils — so we will never forget what these people stood for.”Rope + Tree + ACLU Lawyer = Pinata
But as hate spewing as Rush can demonstrate, he’s a minor leaguer compared to the likes of Michael Savage and other conservative talkers.
I have certainly seen many books with incendiary titles - I listened to Hannity’s Deliver Us From Evil a couple of years back on my commute, along with biographies of Robert Kennedy and Jon Stewart’s America - but I’ve seen those types of titles on the left, too. And I maintain that those titles, and the actual messages of the books, is still a far cry from wanting to lynch “the nigger” over health care.
Show me, please. But not just any far fringe wilding left voice — no, looking for an equivalent to match the leadership that’s almost completely in tow with the ilk of Hannity and Limbaugh. And a comedian writing a book titled “Rush is a big fat idiot” is not the equivalent of a prime time conservative host who regularly equates liberals as “evil”.
Yes, I have been to a gun show. I’ve actually been to a few. When I was little, I tried to get my dad to buy me a sword at one. When I was older, I bought a .410 shotgun at one. I never saw anything there advocating - “metaphorically, of course” - “shoot[ing] Democrats in the face with pistols at point blank range.”
Really? I confess, it’s been a few years (2004-2005?), and maybe it’s due to living in a red state (Arizona), but when I attended such gatherings, there was a plethora of merchandise featuring liberals as targets, or other eliminationist themed banners, bumper stickers, literature, T-shirts, etc.…
I am familiar with the political strife of this country, and others, and I am not suggesting that the present match of name calling is necessarily worse or more invidious than has occurred in the past. I do know that I hear race mentioned much more often by people on the left attacking the right than by people on the right attacking the left. After all, to disagree with the current trend of American politics means that one is fueled by “hate, fear, and ignorance” and that one is obviously southern, racist, and illiterate, no? Moreover, I’m not saying that there aren’t people on the right making dumb, laughable, or even detestable remarks. What I am saying instead is that some of the worst I have seen have come in leftist “caricatures,” and - perhaps a bigger deal - such portrayals are not helping, but hurting, both sides.
When Bush was president, he was often portrayed as some sort of Chimpy McHitler. Now Tea Partiers - or all Republicans - are loony, rabble-rousing, violent extremists out for “Death Panels for Democrats,” pushing violence without really saying it, or militia members intent on de-luciferizing America. This is not helpful, any more than it would be helpful for Republicans to constantly assert that all Democrats are socialists, communists, or Nazis. (But wait, you say, they do! Well, they don’t all say so - most don’t - and, what’s more, it’s unhelpful when they do, and the left tends to dislike it.)
Again, while I acknowledge that there’s nuts of every political stripe about, please refer me to leadership in the opposition party espousing such rhetoric or prominent media voices that such party leaders kowtow to (like the majority of Republicans swearing fealty to Hannity and Limbaugh). This is a false equivalency.
Othering is an easy strategy, whether in war or politics, but while it might help win the battle, it doesn’t help you win the war. (I almost hate to use these metaphors, given the violence aspect of the discussion, but I think you know what I mean.) Just as we decry the othering aspect of war in which the Nazis saw Jews as vermin, or Americans saw Vietnamese as gooks, or Protestants in Northern Ireland saw Catholics as subhuman, or … [I could go on, ad nauseum] we should decry least common denominator depictions in politics.
Since this thread is already Godwin-ed, allow me to ask you to ponder how something like Nazism brewed up. Or why U.S. leaders dehumanized the Japanese and Vietnamese (and to a lesser extent, Germans) during wartime.
Maybe there’s a much bigger racist, hate mongering movement out there that I am missing. I don’t see how cartoons advocating racism and murder, even in jest or in attempts to show how overblown the arguments are, help the situation. Call me crazy, but I tend to think violent propaganda from any political perspective just throws more fuel on the fire, and violent propaganda showing how the other side uses violent propaganda is no less inflammatory.
One final example from the current political schism: illegal immigrants:
We can learn from Buffalo, New York. Now in Buffalo the rat problem in the city was a huge one. Exterminators could not handle the problem. But then in 2001 the city mandated that everyone would have to begin using special anti-rat garbage totes that the rats could not open. With no way to get to the garbage, the rats left Buffalo.
P.S. TO TUMBLR DEVELOPER(S): PLEASE FIX THE RICH TEXT EDITOR. EDITING REBLOGS IS NEEDLESSLY PAINFUL — THE “BLOCKQUOTE” BUTTON DOES NOT FUNCTION PROPERLY AND THE EDITOR IS FORCED INTO “HTML SOURCE” MODE TO PROPERLY FORMAT A POST. FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT IS HALLOWED, PLEASE REPAIR ASAP. IT’S LIKE I’M BACK IN 1999 EDITING RAW HTML IN A NETSCAPE NAVIGATOR TEXTAREA!
