Remarkable how these professional reality-shifters work, but then again, not really. Limbaugh plays on historical fears of black males and their supposed violent tendencies, a long-standing trope in the American psyche that goes down particularly well in the heartland of chattel slavery based on brute force. I think shrinks call it ‘projection’. Does this stuff resonate with anyone not under psychiatric care or nostalgic for cotton plantations?
In any case, it brings up the larger issue of where the furious opposition to providing a basic social service comes from. Could it be simply a permanent hatred of and resistance to any government intervention that might threaten to make us equal?
It’s no accident that education and health spending in the South has always been the lowest per capita in the nation. Why direct state resources toward beneficiaries whose granddaddies were sharecroppers? Better to keep things in private hands and thereby guarantee that only people with money will have what they need. I can attest to the odd fact that poor white folks are among the most enthusiastic endorsers of this foot-blasting world-view.
Perhaps I exaggerate, but there is something about the irrational fury being displayed by people in this debate that just doesn’t make sense otherwise. In fact, they remind me of the screeching-harpy faces in the civil rights museum videos in Memphis and Birmingham, the historical footage of crazed cracker females eager to kick the shit out of the half-dozen black girls who dared to integrate Little Rock High.
Finally, Obama gave us a new narrative, and Congressman Joe Two Diseases reinforced it. Now it’s up to We, the People, to decide which one we endorse.
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