I ran for the city council when I was in college. I must have been about 21 or 22. I forget. What I do remember is that the newspaper didn't get a 'candidacy photo' of me. You know: the one with the nice smile, a tie, jacket, and white shirt standing in front of a bland wall. We just didn't manage to make connections, so they pulled from their files a recent photo of me at a townhall meeting with, if I remember correctly, the new governor of Ohio or somebody like that. I had hair down to my shoulders, a somewhat unkempt mustache and long sideburns, a white "Property of Kent State" phys ed t-shirt, and a blue denim button-down shirt worn open over it. I was looking off to the side (at the guy at the meeting, of whom I had just asked a question). Compared to the other neatly groomed candidates, I looked like the hippie-freak that I was. So I lost - but not by nearly as much as I expected. I mean, hundreds of people voted for me.
I also got some 'fan mail'. It came in a crudely hand-addressed envelope and it was mostly printed matter. It was hate mail from a 'John Bircher' who, among other things, made some rude references to me being a dirty Jew of some kind. Naturally, having been raised Lutheran, I was a little surprised. The printed matter included a little slip with a 'peace sign' printed on it and captioned "Footprint of the American Chicken". [I don't care who ya are - that there was funny!] There was other equally hilarious anti-commie and racist stuff meant to frighten me by the sheer weight of its neo-nazi American-ness. I took it all to school and we had a good laugh over it. This was clearly a real fringe element kinda' guy.
Another seriously marginalized nutjob constituency of the time was the Ku Klux Klan. The US Department of Justice, among others, did a pretty good job of dismantling their institutional structure. The leaders got put into prison and the assets all were taken away. Much of the largest KKK organization went bankrupt. They mostly quit blowing up things and burning crosses, although they're not above 'tagging' an occasional minority family's garage.
I bring that up some 40 years later because I see that those nutjobs are still around spreading their hatred and bile. The thing is, they're no longer marginalized. They have found a new haven in the Republican Party and their chief media outlet is Fox News. They're painfully aware that their most open racism isn't generally tolerated, but everything else is, including the completely baseless hatred. I was finally inspired to write about this discovery (I've been thinking about it a lot lately.) after stumbling over some stunningly insensitive and overtly racist remarks posted on a Fox affiliate station's website after Whitney Houston's death. It would have been hard for anyone who's not a pure racist to write those comments, they were so vile and hate-filled. Although the comments were all removed, another blogger preserved some of them here.
These commie-hunter racists and neo-nazis rail on daily about minorities and commies taking over the country and ruining it. It's like having Senator Joe McCarthy back - only worse. It seems they've gained relative legitimacy by calling it 'socialism' and 'Marxism' (because nobody really understands either - only that they're 'bad'), referring to illegal immigrants as an 'invasion', fearing Muslim terrorists around every block, and ultimately demonizing anyone who fails to agree with their world view of a pure white Christian English-speaking nation. Now, they even have a convenient target in the White House. The president gets hit with all of these descriptions. Every last one of them.
Of course, all of this is nonsensical. Muslims aren't socialists and Sharia law isn't Marxism. Obama is a natural born American; he isn't a Marxist; he isn't Muslim; and he isn't about to seize all of the guns in the US by executive order before he leaves office. In fact, Obama's even allowed weapons into national parks where they were previously forbidden, but this hasn't stopped the NRA's shrill daily denouncements. Really, he's done nothing to deserve most of the hatred he's enduring - except be born black and be elected as a Democrat. These two things apparently give license to the commie-huntin' colored-hatin' nutjobs to say anything they want without serious challenge - and with the full support of Fox News. Their charges are both false and inconsistent, but they've gotten the duller constituents of the American electorate to go along with them because, well, you sure don't want to go defendin' somebody who's a Marxist socialist, do ya? How can anybody question that a guy named Hussein is a Muslim? Everybody knows all the Democrats want to take away your guns and make your women get abortions - don't they?
I have many good friends who are longtime Republicans. I don't hate them and I hope they don't hate me. One of the closest is the first guy I ever had a political argument with. It was 1960 and he was a Nixon man. I wavered briefly before deciding I was a Kennedy man. Then we had a snowball fight over it right there by my parents' back porch. After all, we were eight years old - and if I hadn't taken up a contrary position, there would have been no reason to throw snowballs. In all the years since, as we grew and became politically aware and involved, we've never really been very far apart in our views. I'm a little more liberal than he is, but not that much. Conversely (obviously), he's a little more conservative than I am, but not that much. I don't know about him, but I know I used to vote for nearly as many Republicans as Democrats.
Sadly, that's all changed because the Republican Party has been swallowed by its most vocal and most extreme hate-filled elements. These headstrong Christian fundamentalists, racists, misogynists, survivalists, and anti-governmentalists (not all one and the same) have become the overwhelming voice of the Republican Party. That voice demands a Christian dominated nation, closed borders, a legitimization of racist bigotry, control and dominance over women, a 'polite' society based on fear of the armament of others, and indiscriminately slashing taxes and benefits, regardless of the real effects on government services and our society in general. They are completely unwilling to consider any sort of compromise. They also actively hate anyone who doesn't agree with them. It's a simple matter to find websites and pages-long 'Comments' sections where the most incredible hate-filled lies and invective are not only freely offered, but applauded by others who add their own insults. This is both the symptom and the problem.
You know what? If you want to hate me, then I am perfectly willing to hate you back - and I can be better at it. One thing I can do is to help others like me to win the elections that you have convinced yourselves are 'in the bag' because you're too stupid or too stubborn to listen to reason. While I seriously worried that the president wouldn't be reelected, all of you haters were so confident that it couldn't possibly happen that some of your heads literally exploded when it did. Those candidates of yours that did manage to win have put on a show of endless embarrassments - which delights me because I hate you. Unlike you, I try not to gloat nor do I join in self-aggrandizing liberal circle jerks over it, as you do for each perceived misstep by the current administration or anyone in it. In fact, I have actually blocked more of my liberal friends' posts from my facebook newsfeed than I have conservatives'. I'd really prefer not to have to verbally flay all those right-wing dimbulbs and honestly, hate is an activity that drains me emotionally. Ignoring the nutjobs is so much easier than worrying that they will actually elect people who think like them so, for all of my true Republican friends: would you please kick these idiots out and take your party back from them?
