On fetuses, faggots, ho’s and Others
http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/…
On fetuses, faggots, ho’s and the distance between us
You can bet your ass that not one among the five Supreme Court justices who voted to allow women to die if their late-term pregnancies become too problematic has ever had an abortion, or has any consciousness of anyone who has. You can bet your ass that none of the right-wing assclowns who blame the Virginia Tech students for not being manly enough has ever faced down a crazed man pointing a loaded gun at them. You can bet your ass that
It’s easy to judge others. It’s so easy, in fact, that the Bible itself warns against it:
Judge not, that ye be not judged.
On Tuesday, nearly 200 people were killed in Iraq in acts of violence. Why was this not front-page news? Two hundred people, out of a population of 30 million – that would be like two thousand people in the United States. Why, then, is there not an outpouring of grief here, considering that it is the U.S.’s presence in Iraq that has precipitated such ghastly carnage?
Because those killed are Others. They are Not Like Us. They are therefore Not Human.
What is it about the United States? Maybe there really is something to this idea of American exceptionalism – only we’re exceptional in so many of the wrong ways. It is quite literally unheard of for something like what happened in Blacksburg, or at Columbine, or in Austin, to happen anywhere else on the planet. On. The. PLANET. And this is a big planet, with lots of people. Put 100 monkeys at 100 typewriters, and sooner or later you end up with the collected Shakespeare, or at least the best of e.e. cummings (opposable thumbs or no, simians don’t like the Shift key) – or maybe just Rebuilding America’s Defenses. But put 6 billion people on a temperate orb, and the only place – the only place – you’ll get madmen (and it’s always madmen, or the fancied image of men) killing with guns in numbers greater than you can count on both hands, is the United States of America.
Land of the free. Home of the well-regulated militia.
And what is it about our schools, that they are so often the sites of these abominable anomalies, these American avatars? And then they are committed by the young, the cream of our society? The educated young, no less, with so much opportunity in front of them. What is it? What is it? LIST OF MASS SCHOOL SHOOTINGS http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/…
What is “it”?
I don’t know. But I think part of any answer has to start with the Others.
Almost every society has its Others.
And
Why is it, for example, that so many Americans are such huge football fans? Why are they not instead, for instance, much bigger fans of golf, or of swimming, or track and field? What is it about the team sport of football that appeals to the visceral nature of so many who profess to be champions of the individual, of personal responsibility? What is it that possesses them to literally paint themselves in their team colors and rabidly cheer on people they’ve never met performing a meaningless task that in the universal scheme of things is absurd on its face, and often to pay obscene sums of money to participate in such lunacy?
Tribalism.
Us vs. Them.
Me vs. the Others.
Many Americans – indeed, many humans – must have their “Others.” They feel the need to have another human being, or group of human beings, “Out There” to whom they can direct their anger and frustration, who they can make the focus of their fears, whom they can blame for their problems.
That is how otherwise educated friends of mine can forward e-mails to me telling me how Islam is a religion that as one of its central tenets promotes the killing of non-believers – as opposed to Judaism and Christianity, they say, which do not. They say this with great assurance, self-satisfaction and superiority, demonstrating by sending this e-mail to me that I am not one of those Others, that I can be trusted with this special knowledge and that indeed We Who Are Like Us must disseminate this special knowledge amongst Ourselves in order to protect Ourselves against the invading hordes of those Others, who obviously – since it is a basic tenet of their twisted, alien religion – want to kill all of Us.
Wrong, I write them back. On the contrary, the killing of nonbelievers is specifically ordered in at least two of the 613 Mitzvot of the Halakha, the center of Judaic law. So what? I ask. Have any Jews killed you lately because of those central tenets? How about Muslims? Any Muslims you know killed you lately?
But they, like so many, must have their Others, just as the ancient Jews needed theirs. Those Others provide scapegoats – a Toranic term, from Leviticus – upon which to place blame, when one wishes not to take responsibility for one’s circumstance. They must have those people who cover their heads differently than Themselves, whose worship songs are sung in Arabic instead of Latin English, whose prophet was descended from Abraham’s Other son.
What makes them ____ is not their actions, but Who They Are. They are no longer criminal – which would be a label placed upon one by their actions – but rather, they are Evil – a label placed upon one by their beliefs, by their ethnicity, by their politics. By their Otherness.
It allows the right to paint “liberals” as The Enemy. One no longer need commit a heinous act to be labeled heinous – one need merely to hold beliefs that are repugnant to the labeler.
The ironical difference in this regard between liberals and demifascists (I refuse to sully the label “conservative,” because I believe true conservatives do not feel the need to resort to such sophistry) is that liberals know that, as Jesus said,
by their fruits shall ye know them
and thus liberals judge people by their actions. Demifascists, on the other hand, need only place a label on anOther to “know” everything about them that they “need” to “know.” Individual responsibility? Purely a myth, a myth that has no place in the demifascist’s modus operandi, except as a convenient talking point when they want to escape their responsibilities to the community to which they inescapably belong.
And it might be – it just might be – that Americans are coming back to that understanding of the need for community, and rejecting the isolation that is the inevitable, soul-crushing, reductio ad absurdum of unrelenting separateness. Constantly putting the rest of humanity into the camp of the Others soon leaves one in a camp by oneself, and sooner or later the self-loathing that engendered the separation looks around and realizes it has no other object than itself to loathe. And that is not tolerable.
Ann Coulter has avoided acknowledging that reality for many years, and for so many years she has been a lifeboat for those desperate to cling to any piece of flotsam in a sea of self-contempt. But she is just one of many pieces of moral debris floating like scum at the top of that ocean of self-loathing; there have been and are many, many such hate projectors – literally, mouthpieces with a microphone who take their deeply buried self-hatred and project onto whatever Other is convenient at the time: Negroes, Chinese, Irish, Polish, Communists, hippies, women, homosexuals, Mexicans, liberals, Muslims. Don Imus was another such hate projector; it is not difficult to name a dozen more who have radio or television shows.
http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/…
On fetuses, faggots, ho’s and the distance between us
You can bet your ass that not one among the five Supreme Court justices who voted to allow women to die if their late-term pregnancies become too problematic has ever had an abortion, or has any consciousness of anyone who has. You can bet your ass that none of the right-wing assclowns who blame the Virginia Tech students for not being manly enough has ever faced down a crazed man pointing a loaded gun at them. You can bet your ass that
It’s easy to judge others. It’s so easy, in fact, that the Bible itself warns against it:
Judge not, that ye be not judged.
On Tuesday, nearly 200 people were killed in Iraq in acts of violence. Why was this not front-page news? Two hundred people, out of a population of 30 million – that would be like two thousand people in the United States. Why, then, is there not an outpouring of grief here, considering that it is the U.S.’s presence in Iraq that has precipitated such ghastly carnage?
Because those killed are Others. They are Not Like Us. They are therefore Not Human.
What is it about the United States? Maybe there really is something to this idea of American exceptionalism – only we’re exceptional in so many of the wrong ways. It is quite literally unheard of for something like what happened in Blacksburg, or at Columbine, or in Austin, to happen anywhere else on the planet. On. The. PLANET. And this is a big planet, with lots of people. Put 100 monkeys at 100 typewriters, and sooner or later you end up with the collected Shakespeare, or at least the best of e.e. cummings (opposable thumbs or no, simians don’t like the Shift key) – or maybe just Rebuilding America’s Defenses. But put 6 billion people on a temperate orb, and the only place – the only place – you’ll get madmen (and it’s always madmen, or the fancied image of men) killing with guns in numbers greater than you can count on both hands, is the United States of America.
Land of the free. Home of the well-regulated militia.
And what is it about our schools, that they are so often the sites of these abominable anomalies, these American avatars? And then they are committed by the young, the cream of our society? The educated young, no less, with so much opportunity in front of them. What is it? What is it?
What is “it”?
I don’t know. But I think part of any answer has to start with the Others.
Almost every society has its Others.
And
Why is it, for example, that so many Americans are such huge football fans? Why are they not instead, for instance, much bigger fans of golf, or of swimming, or track and field? What is it about the team sport of football that appeals to the visceral nature of so many who profess to be champions of the individual, of personal responsibility? What is it that possesses them to literally paint themselves in their team colors and rabidly cheer on people they’ve never met performing a meaningless task that in the universal scheme of things is absurd on its face, and often to pay obscene sums of money to participate in such lunacy?
Tribalism.
Us vs. Them.
Me vs. the Others.
Many Americans – indeed, many humans – must have their “Others.” They feel the need to have another human being, or group of human beings, “Out There” to whom they can direct their anger and frustration, who they can make the focus of their fears, whom they can blame for their problems.
That is how otherwise educated friends of mine can forward e-mails to me telling me how Islam is a religion that as one of its central tenets promotes the killing of non-believers – as opposed to Judaism and Christianity, they say, which do not. They say this with great assurance, self-satisfaction and superiority, demonstrating by sending this e-mail to me that I am not one of those Others, that I can be trusted with this special knowledge and that indeed We Who Are Like Us must disseminate this special knowledge amongst Ourselves in order to protect Ourselves against the invading hordes of those Others, who obviously – since it is a basic tenet of their twisted, alien religion – want to kill all of Us.
Wrong, I write them back. On the contrary, the killing of nonbelievers is specifically ordered in at least two of the 613 Mitzvot of the Halakha, the center of Judaic law. So what? I ask. Have any Jews killed you lately because of those central tenets? How about Muslims? Any Muslims you know killed you lately?
But they, like so many, must have their Others, just as the ancient Jews needed theirs. Those Others provide scapegoats – a Toranic term, from Leviticus – upon which to place blame, when one wishes not to take responsibility for one’s circumstance. They must have those people who cover their heads differently than Themselves, whose worship songs are sung in Arabic instead of Latin English, whose prophet was descended from Abraham’s Other son.
What makes them ____ is not their actions, but Who They Are. They are no longer criminal – which would be a label placed upon one by their actions – but rather, they are Evil – a label placed upon one by their beliefs, by their ethnicity, by their politics. By their Otherness.
It allows the right to paint “liberals” as The Enemy. One no longer need commit a heinous act to be labeled heinous – one need merely to hold beliefs that are repugnant to the labeler.
The ironical difference in this regard between liberals and demifascists (I refuse to sully the label “conservative,” because I believe true conservatives do not feel the need to resort to such sophistry) is that liberals know that, as Jesus said,
by their fruits shall ye know them
and thus liberals judge people by their actions. Demifascists, on the other hand, need only place a label on anOther to “know” everything about them that they “need” to “know.” Individual responsibility? Purely a myth, a myth that has no place in the demifascist’s modus operandi, except as a convenient talking point when they want to escape their responsibilities to the community to which they inescapably belong.
And it might be – it just might be – that Americans are coming back to that understanding of the need for community, and rejecting the isolation that is the inevitable, soul-crushing, reductio ad absurdum of unrelenting separateness. Constantly putting the rest of humanity into the camp of the Others soon leaves one in a camp by oneself, and sooner or later the self-loathing that engendered the separation looks around and realizes it has no other object than itself to loathe. And that is not tolerable.
Ann Coulter has avoided acknowledging that reality for many years, and for so many years she has been a lifeboat for those desperate to cling to any piece of flotsam in a sea of self-contempt. But she is just one of many pieces of moral debris floating like scum at the top of that ocean of self-loathing; there have been and are many, many such hate projectors – literally, mouthpieces with a microphone who take their deeply buried self-hatred and project onto whatever Other is convenient at the time: Negroes, Chinese, Irish, Polish, Communists, hippies, women, homosexuals, Mexicans, liberals, Muslims. Don Imus was another such hate projector; it is not difficult to name a dozen more who have radio or television shows.
O’Reilly’s hate speech
http://thinkprogress.org/2007/…
no reporting on right-wing domestic terrorists
http://www.dailykos.com/story/…
holocaust jokes at air force academy
http://www.dailykos.com/story/…
cho comparing himself to jesus christ
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/…
Chacounne’s comment
http://www.dailykos.com/commen…
My husband was a Vietnam vet
and a POW who was tortured by his North Vietnamese captors. He lived with his injuries for over thrity years, from his captivity until his fatal heart attack 22 months ago. His nightmare screams still haunt my sleep.
Let me just say that I COMPLETELY disagree with your stand on these issues. We are all part of the human family, what is done to one is done to all. There is no “other”. Torturers are damaged for the rest of their lives, as are the tortured. If you would not want your family to be disappeared and tortured it is hypocritical to believe others should be disappeared and tortured.
Torture is ALWAYS wrong, no matter who is doing it to whom,
For Dan,
Heather
great comment last year
http://www.dailykos.com/commen…
For the others at diary, look up mass shootings, for two reasons: first, how many of them occurred overseas? Second, how many of them occurred in so-called red states?
Find out when the Koran was written.
Find the two citations and Sam Harris’s book on in the section on Islam where he first refers to them and us and prior to that dismisses the fact that he citations don’t appear in the Koran.
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