You can find them in the Congress

8 thoughts on “You can find them in the Congress”

1. http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/2013/10/obama-the-american-people-are-completely-fed-up-with-washington.html

   “Go out there and win an election.”

   Oh, snap!

2. Susan and I watched that live today. He looked and sounded like one fed up dude. How anyone could not see that he is the best president we’ve had for at least fifty years is a mystery to me.

3. Exactly! Obama is almost the perfect person for the job, with one fatal flaw: the opposition is not afraid of him. Though I’m hoping that may change after all this.

4. I disagree. I think they are afraid of him. Look at how he’s been vilified these past five years. I think they’re terrified. He represents the waning of the white man’s rule. They all sensed it was happening–hard to deny that the times, they’ve been a-changin’–but he put a face on the specter of their fears. They are fighting like the cornered rats they are.

5. Mmm, you’re probably right. Maybe what we’re seeing from the far right is simply a lack of respect, which amounts to the same thing in terms of this belligerent behavior and the level of animosity Obama seems to inspire.

   It makes me sad to think of how naive and hopeful we all were–the President included–imagining that he could be the man to pull us all together. I honestly didn’t realize how entrenched the racism still is in this country or how angry those white men really are.

6. I didn’t get it, either. I thought we had come a lot further as a nation. The election of Barack Obama showed how deep some of the divisions still run. That a Congressman from South Carolina would shout, “You liar!” at the President during the State of the Union speech put the finger right on the ugly pulse. That a noisy minority would adamantly claim that Obama is not an American citizen and not a Christian and is in fact a Muslim Socialist or Marxist bent on the destruction of America shows how unhinged some have become over the racial hatred. On a personal note, I lost some old friends, my Texas friends from my youth, when Obama was elected. And some members of my family and I simply cannot communicate. All they want to share with me is their crypto-fascist ignorance of almost every subject. They were not so stupid and hateful until Barack Obama was elected president, but I’ll bet they would have been the same if it had been Hilary Clinton. They’re not just racist. And they’re not all men. But they cherish an illusion of a world which never existed except as an illusion, and has now vanished. They are incapable of understanding how things change over time, and insist that what has happened to this country has been an evil conspiracy perpetrated against them by agents of Satan, in whom they believe as if he were a real person in a real place, rather than the insidious spirit of the adversary which exists within all of us and must be guarded against.

7. The claim that Obama is Muslim makes me angrier than almost anything else they say of him. It implies not only a deep and determined resolve to ignore the man’s entire life history, but also the ugly idea that being Muslim is a slur in itself. That being Muslim is equivalent to being evil and untrustworthy and unAmerican. I am dismayed at how often this slur goes uncontested. People go right on to saying it’s a ridiculous claim against the President–which of course it is–without stopping to point out the prejudice behind it.

   But the thing I hate most is my own changed perception of the American flag. I remember saying the pledge as a child, every morning at the start of school. It always made me proud. But now when I see a flag, I become suspicious that the person waving it means something other than ‘one nation under God.’

8. There was a time in this country when one of the most hateful things that could be said about a person was that they were Catholic. Hard to believe, iddn’t it?

   I don’t know what’s to become of us. The White Anglo-Saxon Protestant majority has seen its power steadily erode over the past 150 years and has reached the point where a minority of its members are willing to destroy the nation because they think they’re saving it. They are addled by fear and bad influences.

   As for the flag, I still think it’s beautiful. I look at it and not its wavers. Seems the more frenetically someone waves the flag, the less they understand what it symbolizes. The issue of the flag and what it symbolizes and how it is to be regarded comes up in the book I’m currently writing. I did some targeted research for one scene and found this in an army field manual: “The flag of the United States represents the living country and is considered a living thing.” (U.S. Army field manual FM 22-5, “Drill and Ceremonies,” Appendix E, “Flags and Colors”.) The living country. A living thing.

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