The Daily Nightmare Babble

When they say history repeats itself, they usually mean not in a good way. There is this tendency--a law some say-- which I have never quite understood but which I acknowledge may well be true, to turn into the opposite. Enemies turn into each other, partly for the good, but also absorbing the evil they once fought against. Or as William Irwin Thompson has it, we become what we hate.

Are our painful centuries of two steps forward, one step back progress, coming to an end? Are we seeing the last dangerous spasm of a dying order, or are we entering a Dark Age? And quickly, right now?

The U.S. has a history of religious and racial intolerance, hatred, mob violence, willful ignorance in high places. Are we doomed to repeat it? Is it because we are ignorant of it, too far in time from the last major eruptions to remember in our bones and skin, what a terrible world they make?

On and after 9/11/2001, this country responded with cohesive strength and with fear, and our leaders chose to cultivate the fear. After manipulating themselves into power in 2001, their Rabid Right is now threatening to try to seize power by force. Do they really mean it? At a certain point it doesn't matter: they can create a firestorm they can't control. It's already feeding on itself.

It's hard to know how strong it really is. The kids at Kos have diverted themselves from attacking each other and even from highlighting Republican hijinks and simple (if Big) lies, to note in a remarkable series of recommended diaries the incidences of anti-Semitism and racism, of threats of violence against the President, of armed insurrection. But they are prone to their own firestorms.

Yet---since the Attorney-General announced a public trial for the alleged main perpetrator of the 9-11 massacres, one would expect this would be greeted with pride in the strength of the American judicial system and rule of law. But instead Rabid Right leaders call for summary execution without trial, and super-patriot O'Reilly shouts "I don't care about the Constitution."

Place these in context of the increasingly extreme and violent Big Lies and it seems clear that the Rabid Right is becoming what it beholds: their own example of Nazi Germany.

Last week, also on Kos, the writer who calls herself Plutonium Page wrote about the surviving navigator of the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the first atomic bomb exploded on a city, on Hiroshima. It was about an obscure newspaper article from New Mexico, which quoted Dutch van Kirk as being alarmed about today's casual public attitudes toward nuclear weapons. "You know, you get all these people that go around saying things like, with Iraq, 'We ought to go and nuke those bastards,' said Van Kirk, a spry 88. "They don't know what they're talking about. They have no idea what a nuclear bomb is."

I thought and felt the same way when all that talk was happening about the Bush plan to nuke the suspected nuclear sites in Iran, and I wrote extensively here and elsewhere about what a nuclear bomb is. Plutonium Page's article got many responses, mostly from readers old enough to remember the thermonuclear threats of the 50s and 60s, the renewed fears of nuclear war in the 80s. Those younger, or with inattentive memories, have less substance to grasp, and so the realities of nuclear weapons--even as far as we knew of them--can't combat the glib assumption that they're just blips on the video screen.

I mention it now because I wonder if part of the problem is that the reality of Nazi Germany, of Fascism in Europe and all that it did and represented, is also too remote in history now. People have no idea of what the reality is of a government brought to power by violence, which rules by fear and fiat. A government that really doesn't care about the Constitution, or trials, or rights.

But we do have artifacts of memory still existing in our main repository of meaning: popular culture. Just as the references to nuclear war that remain most vivid are movies and novels of the Cold War period, there are popular culture artifacts of the late 40s and early 50s especially--before the Red Menace took complete hold of the national soul, and in too many respects we became what we hated--and it's there: the way of life that we fought World War II to ensure. After all, that's basically how those in my generation absorbed the weight of the war that ended just before we were born.

It's there in something as otherwise silly as the first George Reeves appearance as Superman, in a low budget movie which later was folded into the first year of the series. The aliens from under the earth, the Mole Men, were pretty pathetic looking. But Superman's first act was to defend them against mob violence. He stopped one human (American) mob by shouting that they're acting like storm troopers.

Stormtroopers, the Holocaust, were fresh in the national mind. Though embattled, there was a strong strain in popular culture through the 60s that defended truth (as opposed to verifiable lies), justice (defendants had rights) and the American Way. The horror of torture in World War II and Korea led to the U.S. not torturing as an essential element of the national idenity. Our democracy was about ballots, not bullets, and our free press existed to convey and test the information we needed to know in order to come to agreement on how to proceed on our common destiny.

But it seems no generation of youth is ever ready for the reality of war, no matter how many war movies they see or video games they play. It may be that some of those fomenting chaos now are doing so intentionally out of some deluded faith that this is God's will. No doubt others aren't really thinking ahead, they're just inflating the rhetoric to get attention, to get ratings and political power and wealth. But how many others are being swept along for the ride?

It seems alarmist to even consider that armed insurrection could succeed, but the thrust of the Rabid Right rhetoric is aimed at destroying President Obama's ability to govern, and the dog whistle is sounding for some deranged assassin to do what they would swiftly condemn, but what they are overtly encouraging. In either or both cases, the aim is chaos, and then anything is possible.

There's been so much barely veiled rhetoric--to the extent that a former Christian Right leader charges that former compatriots are "trawling for assassins"--that I wonder if the trauma of JFK's assassination is itself too remote in history to resonate. JFK, RFK and Martin Luther King (the most prominent of the murdered black leaders) were all assassinated within a five year span, but the impact of an assassination attempt on this President could well be like all three at once, just for starters.

We are so smitten with the speed and power of our electronic communications that we haven't yet faced the reality it is creating: many sources, none trustworthy, certainly not for everyone. There is so much more noise than signal that we may not notice this until it all stops, until we really need to know what's going on, and we're helpless. It all fosters a disregard for truth that is in itself frightening, and it is already leading to an incredible credulity: people believe things just because their chosen media outlet or authority figure says so. But the noise is deafening, and swamps attention to meaning, or to what the past can still tell us.

Not that I'm a good example. I haven't yet learned from the past not to waste several hours babbling here for no good reason. And these days, the hours gone forever weigh more heavily. But I have babbled on, and there seems to be less point in deleting than posting.