CALLING THEM WHAT THEY ARE

Now, more than ever, I read the Smirking Chimp. You can read all the essays and articles, and sign up for daily email summaries here: http://www.smirkingchimp.com/index.php

After I wrote the prior posts, I came across Joe Bageant's column 'Hung over in the End Times' on the Smirking Chimp site. It's at http://www.smirkingchimp.com/article.php?sid=18653&mode=nested&order=0

It's sub-headline is: "If liberal society is to survive the rise of the Godwacks, we need to start by calling them what they are."

This is one damn terrific article--it's terrific , mostly because it supports my own contentions, but also because he's a terrific writer, and funny too. He grew up in fundamentalism, and understands more than most of us that " ...You cannot talk to these people and you cannot reach them with words or language. Not unless it is Biblical or Koranic or scriptural. Dialogue is impossible even though, publicly at least, they claim to want dialogue. (Take it from me. What they want is to convert you. I've wasted years on that dialogue gig.) Their only language is religious rhetoric and that's damned narrow stuff. Combined with the emotionalism of the born-again consciousness state, it reduces them to incomprehensible psychotics, especially when they feel threatened, which is constantly. Calm psychotics, but delusional and unreachable people nevertheless. ..there can be no dialogue because that which is not born of reason cannot be reasoned with. These people not only do not negotiate, they cannot even hear you."

Later in the article he says, "Don't kid yourself about making peace with these people. And for god's sake don't believe the pundit's horseshit about it being about "values." It is about a minority among us who want to stamp out all the advances made during the Enlightenment -- take us back to Biblical Law, wars and rumors of wars. And it is about a band of dyspeptic, neoconservative money grubbing bastards who knew how to exploit our ancient and destructive legacy, the war making Calvinist fundamentalism brought here by the Scots Irish and still smoldering across the heartland. By now most of you who live where you can buy a copy of the New York Times without special ordering it, or feel free to walk down the street arm in arm with a lover of another race, are starting to wake up. All I can say is that you have worse enemies than you know, and they will still be around next election. If there is one. And they can crush us if they manage to align themselves with the same kind of oppressive bastards they did this time. Which they will. They never cease, proof of which is that what we saw last November was the culmination of twenty years of organizing. What to do about it is still being debated, but to my mind, publicly calling these people what they really are would be a damned good start. "

I'm doing my part.

I'd reprint the whole thing here, but it's better than mine, so I won't.