Again with the little things

Crooks and Liars has video from C-SPAN displaying some of the hate mail the network got for offending the delicate sensibilities of Michael Savage.

It seems that some trade publication called "Talker's Magazine" for some misbegotten reason gave the revealingly-aliased Savage a "Freedom of Speech" award. The jerk didn't even have the class to show up; instead he sent them a DVD of his speech - which, by the way, he now peddles on his website for $22.

Because the speech wasn't delivered live, C-SPAN declined to cover it. Poor widdle Savage was so upset by this that he sent his robo-minions scurrying to express their Master's displeasure. C-SPAN, with a straight face but I'm sure some delight, cited some examples of their communiques on the air.

Okay, but there's still that little thing, the kind of little thing that gets me because it sometimes means more than the big thing, and you are warned in advance that what follows is rather rambling but carries hope the idea gets across: When you watch the linked video, note how many times the emails invoke accusations of "Marxist" or "Leninist" or "communist." I mean, what decade are these people living in? And it's not just there; I've seen the same thing crop up in other places in other circumstances, other accusations of anyone criticizing (or, as in this case, merely not fawning before) their particular bigoted right-wing nutcase bloviator being "communist."

There is a segment of our population that is so desperate for enemies, so desperate for someone, anyone, to play that role, that if necessary and lacking some other tag to immediately hang, they will fall back on the cheapest, hoariest, moldiest labels they can find. It's as if they don't really see "communist" or "terrorist" or "fascist" or any of the other old or new epithets as separate terms but all just synonyms for the catch-all "enemy."

It would be easy to laugh them off, even mock them - and they do richly deserve mockery - but while it's easy to dis them, we can't dismiss them, because they represent a real danger, a danger to civil society, a danger even to a functioning society. They are the hard core of hatred - no, not so much hatred as anger, as rage, as blind fury as a product of frustration at a world that no longer makes sense to them, that they can no longer comprehend, a fury that needs someone to hate, someone to blame, some target, some cause, for their sense of dislocation, a fury tapped and channeled by greedheads like Savage and the rest of his diseased ilk for the benefit of their own bank accounts and who keep upping the ante toward eliminationism as they ride that fury right into their Rolls-Royces and seven- or eight-figure incomes. Scam the rubes, tell them who to fear, tell them who's to blame, and so who to rage at. Tell them it's homosexual activists. It's anti-American protesters. It's terrorists. It's activist judges. Big government. The Thought Police of political correctness. Liberal media. It's whoever is convenient, now including - I should say re-including - "illegal" immigrants and sometimes immigrants, period. They're all "enemy." And it's all "their" fault.

Yes, of course this is nothing entirely new. Yes, of course there has long been the fear of the foreigner, the "outsider," the "other." Yes, people have felt stressed and confused in previous times. Yes, sometimes there were threats that seemed very real and direct, for example World War II, and at other times there were threats that seemed to just hang in the air, like the Cold War aka the Red Menace. And yes, many times those fears, drawn from threats whether real or imagined, have been manipulated to direct concern away from the right targets and toward the wrong ones. But it remains true that we have gone from a people assured that "the only thing we have to fear is, fear itself" to a people assured that about the only thing we don't have to fear is fear and in fact we should be afraid of not being afraid.

Why the change? I suggested a reason about two weeks ago, quoting something I'd written years before:

Just a generation or two ago, we as a people had a certain native, even naïve, confidence that things would get better. Not necessarily any specific, identifiable thing, but, well, you know, things. More recently, that confidence has faded, to be replaced by the fallback position that “things” can get better. Now, even that limited faith has failed us.

Before, our generalized fear and confusion, our disorientation in the world, could be balanced by our individual hope. For many, perhaps most, of us, that seems to no longer be true. And so the fear grows, unalloyed, fed by the Satanic spawn of the death of the Fairness Doctrine, giving rise to the fury that remains a seething undercurrent in our society and our political discourse - indeed, listening to the GOPper presidential debates, with all their pandering to the cheering mobs in favor of torturing "illegal" foreigners there and expelling without mercy "illegal" foreigners here, I wonder how long it will remain an undercurrent, how long it can comfortably and profitably be manipulated by the power-hungry and the greedy, how long it will be before the next Eric Rudolph, the next William Krar, the next Timothy McVeigh, the next, that is, "hero."