Bradblog/Velvet Revolution Interview with Chris Floyd

[dutchdemocrat]

An Interview With Chris Floyd

Special BRAD BLOG / Velvet Revolution

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But although today the toxic spike is at all-time high, this right-wing tide has been rising for almost 30 years now – and I've been trying to speak out against it for almost that long. I could see it coming, could feel it in the air, way back in the Seventies. I used to watch these TV preachers late at night, back when everyone thought they were a joke -- Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, the whole sick crew. I didn't think they were a joke. I could tell they were introducing a new kind of poison into American society, a new kind of hate and intolerance and blind zealotry, demonizing their opponents, giving no quarter, no compromise, and telling the most outrageous lies and distortions to serve their purposes. I could see they were striking a chord with too many people, they were deliberately stirring up old fears and prejudices that, if left alone, would have eventually died off as any kind of active force in society. But they brought it all back, juiced it back to life like Frankenstein's monster. I saw too that they were harnessing religious fervor to very specific, secular, right-wing political causes. I saw the other side of this two-pronged assault on American democracy start to take hold in those same years too. The Young Americans for Freedom, the fanatical tax-cutters, the slanderers of the poor, the war junkies -- little weedy twerps who got all het up fantasizing about killing Commies and building arsenals of big, throbbing nukes or what have you. This was the beginning of that right-wing conveyor belt that has produced hard-hearted apparatchiks like John Roberts and all the other Grover Norquist clones that infest our government and culture now -- stunted souls, people who hate the very idea of a "common good."

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Then Reagan got elected. Now, I DID think his candidacy was a joke. I'd been reading his newspaper column for years. He was an idiot, a fool, a mean-spirited operator who kept himself deliberately ignorant while pushing the most virulent lies. A fantasist too, who claimed he'd liberated Nazi death camps, when he'd never left Hollywood during World War II. Of course, by the time he reached the White House, his brain was already deteriorating. But he'd been peddling his mental trash for decades before then.

I was glad when he got the Republican nomination. I remember saying, "Now the press will tear him apart." I thought they'd go after his established, indisputable record as a racist, a militarist, a corrupt bagman for corporate interests, a kept man of his sugar daddies, an out-to-lunch incompetent. But of course, the joke was on me – on all of us. The press coddled Reagan like a month-old baby. The last vestiges of reality departed the political process at that point, and it's never come back. I knew then we were on our own; the heroes of Watergate weren't going to save us. The watchdogs turned into sycophants. I remember watching a Reagan press conference. Somebody asked him a tough question about something. Reagan sputtered and fumed – went a bit nuts, actually. He started babbling, "I know who you are. I know who put you up to asking that. I know the people behind all this, they'll get what's coming to them," words to that effect. It was a meltdown, a spasm of weird paranoia. The next week, Time Magazine ran a story on it: "A Touch of Irish Flint," they called it, painting Reagan as a charming, feisty character, larger than life, ready to mix it up with a twinkle in his eye, like John Wayne in The Quiet Man. It was all a lie, it was demonstrably a lie – but nobody questioned it, not the press, not the Establishment, not the Democrats. After that, there was no hope that you could just get on with your life and trust that the "watchdogs" of the nation's institutions wouldn't let things get too far out of hand. You were going to have to be your own watchdog, you were going to have to dig out the truth for yourself – without any institutional backing, without any leverage at all.

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As for Congress, what could you possibly say to them? You could only repeat what the Emperor Tiberius said about the Roman Senate, after watching them spend yet another session bowing and scraping obsequiously before him: "Men fit to be slaves." I suppose, though, you could lower your price for buying them off – a thousand bucks each and a few golf junkets would probably do the trick.

More here

http://www.bradblog.com/archives/00001861.htm

[gumby]

1. Thanks

Up too late, but had to read Floyd.

"They're going to find that the whole country has been turned into the Superdome and they've been left to fend for themselves. It's not going to be pretty."

Heaven help us.