Stop Coddling These Extremists

I'm currently still out here on the fringe of the City of Champions, Pittsburgh, PA, and because of circumstances too boring to relate, my Internet access and blogtime have been spotty. But if I had blogged here last week, it would have looked a lot like Frank Rich's column in the NY Times on Sunday, about the atmosphere of hate being exploited and inflated by Rabid Right politicians and media bloviators.

As Rich points out, even a FOX News anchor is warning of the extreme and violent email he is seeing, particularly aimed at President Obama. I would add a few thoughts to Rich's links and commentary:

First, the racism that I call recessive racism is usually repressed because it is societally taboo. But when established, highly paid megaphones legitimize it, it can come out with frenzied force. There is nothing rational about it at that point.

Second, the motivation for enabling violent extremism may seem like something else to those doing it, or the reasons may seem principled, but clearly a great deal of it is about cynical politics, about ego and power and especially it is about money and power. This is especially true for the media mouths who incite it. The commercial culture as well as the political culture has some responsibility to place limits of legitimacy, because the bottom line in society is not corporate profit or personal greed.

The additional temptation is that in this noisy, attention-deficit atmosphere, the extreme and borderline violent commands attention. But other societies have learned to their great sorrow just how dangerous it is to let things get so extreme that the violent unhinged feel justified in behavior they can't understand or control.

When an attempt is made on the President's life, it will be too late to be sorry that this is going on, and that this society enables the enablers, particularly by admiring anything anybody does that results in riches and celebrity.

Whenever there is a hate crime in a given neighborhood or city, the marchers come out to show that the community won't stand for it. I don't know if that's the approach that has to happen on a larger scale, but something has to more effectively communicate the larger society's belief that this hate and violence is unacceptable, repugnant and to be condemned, and those that engage it in, encourage and enable it, are to be condemned and cast outside legitimate societal roles, not given international media forums, huge contracts, or public office. It's time for zero tolerance for media and political incitement of perhaps the most momentous hate crime imaginable.