A Soliloquy for Fools: Thoughts on the President's Address & the Fool Who Yelled Out from the Audience

Let me preface everything I have to say today by stating that I believe neither the democrats nor the republicans have posited a tenable argument in the so called health care debate that has captured our attention as of late. Neither side has turned in a laudable performance.

However, at this point, I believe the advantage must go to the democrats simply because the fact of their seeming timidity, disunity, and lack of a coherent message has been largely obfuscated by the shamefully loathsome behavior of the republicans.

In all their pointed malfeasance, I don’t think the Republican Party has been able to win anyone over; they have only managed to stir up the hornets nest of crazies that are convinced of the divinity of their mission. All they have managed to do is to introduce a new level of confusion and anxiety.

However, I believe President Obama’s speech to have been successful in rearranging the playing field. Given a primetime television and cable audience, he was able to outline his plan, albeit not without a few gaps, and debunk some of the lies of the right. Not only that, he was able set a certain tone. He left the door open for bipartisanship, but also apprised those standing in the way that he would move forward without them.

But I believe the most telling moment of the night came when South Carolina Republican Joe Wilson brazenly and all so rudely and disrespectfully yelled out in response to the president’s promise that healthcare coverage would not be extended to illegal aliens, “YOU LIE!”

Oh, but haven’t they gotten beside themselves? Keep in mind that for eight full years, President Bush lied in almost every instance he stood before a microphone. But in all that time, no one yelled out “YOU LIE!”, even when it became plain that his verity was to be questioned.

But this is the sticky part. When Congressman Joe Wilson yelled out “YOU LIE!”, he had to have known it was indeed he who was lying. He had to have known that the various healthcare bill proposals forbade that coverage be extended to illegal aliens. At this point, perhaps, he realized that the nation might be ready to believe the president’s message, and in a last ditch effort, he attempted to insert a bit more misinformation and confusion.

However, his greatest effort may have been his greatest undoing. In his insolent audacity, he revealed his party’s dependence on emotion rather than reason. In violating all established rules of decorum, he revealed the Republican Party’s only message to be a soliloquy for fools in which they are characters on the stage of their own exaggerated efficacy, shouting lines filled with bigotry, with cynicism, with lies and misdirection, and reveling in the applause without realizing only they are clapping.

Confounded by the Lack of Reason: Maybe Everyone Shouldn't Be Allowed to Participate in the Democratic Process

I do believe in Rick Roberts, Sean Hannity, and yes for Michael Savage. They educated me. I was very ignorant. –protester in clip above

Take a look at the above clip. Take a good look. These are your countrymen. These are my countrymen. And nothing that comes out of their mouths is founded in truth; most of what comes out of their mouths doesn’t even make sense. Some of what comes out of their mouths is not even coherent. This is perhaps the absolute craziest thing I’ve ever witnessed. They have no idea what they are talking about, and I have the sneaking suspicion that they don’t either.

I consider myself first and foremost a man of reason. And as Fanon once wrote, nothing confounds a man of reason more than unreason. What we are witnessing is an alarmingly high level of unreason.

I would not be so alarmed and I would not be so dismayed if the arguments challenging healthcare were well thought out, well-reasoned arguments. In fact, I would welcome such arguments because I realize that what would emerge from a well-reasoned debate on the part of all parties involved would be a well thought out, well crafted piece of legislation.

However, when one side does not argue in good faith, when one side argues not from a place of reason, when one side chooses to posit lies and startling allegations instead of reasoned discourse and legitimate objections, then we are all in trouble. We are all in danger. It makes me wonder if everyone should really have access to the democratic process.

One of the most contentious issues the framers of the Constitution debated was that of universal suffrage. A portion of the framers insisted that everyone could not handle suffrage. Everyone could not handle participating in the democratic process.

They argued that those lacking education or a certain level of reason, those who did not own property, those who were beholden to others or owned by others should not be given the right to vote because they would be too easily swayed or influenced by others with dubious aims and the means and intellect to exert undue influence on the process.

Of course the framers position was informed by a worldview that devalued women and people of color, but you have to admit after watching the above video that they may have had a point in some respects. If you are buying the BS the right is selling, perhaps you don’t have the requisite capacity of reason and should be shut out of the democratic process altogether. If you really and truly believe that the president is not an American citizen, if you truly believe we are headed toward Socialism, if you really and truly believe that death squads will decide the fate of our elderly, then perhaps you are too far gone to be of any use to anyone.

In closing, I read an interview today in which a lady expressed hopes that Sarah Palin would return to politics. She cited Palin’s depth of intellect as the chief reason she looked forward to Palin’s reemergence. Anytime you look up to Palin’s intellect… Well, I’ll just leave well enough alone and stop there.

I Woke Up this Morning, and Got Myself a Gun (Pondering My Next Move)

Some time ago I resolved to begin each Monday on a positive note. However, events of this past weekend have pushed me completely in the opposite direction.

The tension out there is getting thick. On Saturday morning, I awoke to find in my local morning paper an article about a local businessman who is absolutely enraged that local authorities will not consent to him hosting a “Leaded Tea Party” over the Labor Day weekend on property owned by his business. [See original post.] Celebrants were to be able to fire weapons on a shooting range he set up on the property.

He has reacted by banning all government personnel from the property and erecting barricades and employing security personnel to enforce the ban. This is a catastrophe waiting to happen.

Perhaps I should not be surprised. In fact, I actually expected this kind of reaction in this area sooner. After all, North Florida is but an extension of South Georgia. But I am cautious, perhaps overly so because I know these people are reacting not out of anger but out of fear. Yet, fear can make people react in ways in which they normally would not react and make decisions they will later regret. And with the hysteria stoked by the lies and propaganda from the right, anything is possible.

However, my wife’s reaction to the whole situation is what really disturbs me.

I am baffled by the whole gun culture. There is a segment of this country’s population who has enjoyed a long running love affair with guns that does not make sense. I have tried to explain it, but I honestly cannot. I have an idea that he has something to do with the power a gun suggests.

Though I have never owned a gun, I am more than capable of using one. When I was in the military, I qualified as an expert on a number of weapons—the M-16, the M-60 machine gun, the grenade launcher, the .45 caliber pistol, and the shotgun. However, I believe guns in the home are more trouble than they are actually worth; stories of catastrophes caused by guns in the home abound. And there is no conclusive proof that the presence of a gun in the home increases the safety of the home’s residence.

And my wife is even more strongly anti-gun than I. She vowed long ago that we would never possess a gun. So, imagine my surprise when on Saturday as we stood in the front yard, and I showed her the article alluded to earlier and casually joked that it might be time we armed ourselves.

She looked warily toward our neighbor’s home, the one outside which an oversize Confederate flag flies, and who drives the pick-up truck replete with anti-Obama and anti-Socialist bumper stickers. And then she looked either way up and down our street perhaps remembering that we were one of very few minorities in the area.

And I think I saw just a hint of fear in her eyes when she said, “I think it is definitely something we should talk about.” Her capitulation to the no gun rule by even considering bringing a gun into our home caught me and my children completely by surprise. It is not an overstatement to say we were unsettled by it.

And I did recognize the look of fear in my children’s eyes as they looked first at each other, and then at my wife, and finally at me. And I did recognize a slight twinge of fear of my own as I considered the possibilities and pondered how I might protect them if worse comes to worse.

Later when my wife and I were alone, I thought of broaching the subject with her again just to see if she was indeed serious, but I thought I would wait a while before mentioning it again.

I did not want the two of us to make such a serious decision out of fear. Because I know that fear can make people react in ways in which they normally would not react and make unwise decisions that they will later regret.

But today I think I will stop and price a few guns on the way home just to be on the safe side.

A History Lesson for the Good White People Participating in the Mobs Protesting Healthcare Reform

During the later years of the 1800’s, poor black and white farmers and farm workers faced a similar plight. They were little more than de facto indentured servants to obscenely rich landowners and commodity brokers. They worked long and hard with little financial reward or gain, and more often than not, found themselves living under the most wretched of conditions and inextricably locked in a cycle of abject, crushing poverty.

Furthermore, in the South, the population was socially separated practically as much by class as by race. Poor southern whites, like their black counterparts, were almost wholly shut out of the political process as well as some public spheres and institutions.

The two organizations representing the disparate groups, The Colored Farmers’ National Alliance and Cooperative Union (CFNACU) on the one hand and The National Farmers’ Alliance (NFA) on the other, sensed the affinity of the two groups and recognized that the two groups were being deliberately kept apart to their own financial detriment and to the gain of the rich landowners and commodity brokers. And soon the two groups began to work together as political allies bound one to the other by economic ties and a common destiny.

Allow me to take the time so that I might give a more in-depth explanation of the significance of this moment. For a brief moment in this nation’s history, poor blacks and poor whites recognized in one another a common circumstance and destiny and pulled together in a spirit of solidarity to improve their lot in life. And for a brief moment, the movement began to gain momentum. For a brief moment, the voiceless and the powerless began to gain a voice and began to exert a new found measure of power.

But then the rich landowners and commodity brokers pulled the leaders of the white group, the NFA, aside. They promised them that if they would just stop the foolishness, the coalition with the black farmers through cooperating with the CFNACU, not only would they pay them a few extra cents, they would also—and this was the deal clincher—recognize them as white people. If I remember correctly, the exact phrase used was “the full exercise of the white man’s prerogative.”

Whiteness was used as a commodity to be traded. And the farmers were only too eager to cash in despite it being against their best interest.

So, the coalition was irretrievably broken, and things returned to normal. Hope for progress was all but lost. And most importantly, the whites returned to the cycle of perpetual, abject, crushing poverty. Their lives did not improve not one bit. But at least they now got to participate in whiteness with all the prerogatives thereof.

Good white people participating in the mobs protesting healthcare reform—this is how they played you then. This is how they are playing you now. Wake up!

Photo credit: www.annewhistonspirn.com

For further reading:

Franklin, John Hope and Alfred A. Moss, Jr. From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans. 7^th ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, Inc, 1994.

Roediger, David R. The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class. London, UK: Verso, 2000.