CHICAGOLAND, UNITED STATES
Wednesday, June 22, 2011
Baby, I've been waiting,
I've been waiting night and day.
I didn't see the time,
I waited half my life away...
-- Leonard Cohen
Buried deep inside his tragicomic Grand Guignol expose of Our Lady of the Holy Killbot, Matt Taibbi accomplishes something else: The discovery of America.
Not the pastel flyover-country American cartoon that Beltway professionals blur quickly past as they invoke the fiction of th'murricanpipple a thousand times a day, but the real America.
The real, ugly America.
The America that no longer has any functional understanding of this world. The deeply ignorant, deeply angry, deeply paranoid America that has been swallowed whole by Hate Radio. That remakes its own past, present and future into whatever suits today's batshit Two Minutes Hate Fox Special News Alert.
The America where the minds of millions of our fellow citizens have grown so pudding-soft and devolved from crouching in their spider holes and waiting for the Second Coming of The Imaginary Reaganator to save them from their Imaginary Enemies, that they can now effectively be lead any-damn-where by anybody with a Bible, a conspiracy that flatters their psychosis and a big, cheery, teevee smile.
Taibbi explains in autopsic detail why trying to reason with the Pig People is simply impossible, and, I would argue, why trying to hide inside a snuggle sack of Fake Centrism slung between Michele Bachmann and Barack Obama is insane.
Michele Bachmann's Holy War
...
In her runs for Congress, Bachmann discovered — or perhaps it is more accurate to say we all discovered — that a total absence of legislative accomplishment and a complete inability to tell the truth or even to identify objective reality are no longer hindrances to higher office.
Emboldened by the lack of consequences for her early freakouts, Bachmann's self-mythologizing became more and more overt. In October 2006, she stepped before a packed house at the Living Word Christian Center in Brooklyn Park, Minnesota, and told her life story. All of history's great madmen have had that one gorgeous moment where the cackling hairy hunchback that has been gestating within for years finally comes out and shows itself, strutting up and down the catwalk for the world to see. This was Michele's catwalk moment, a lengthy autobiographical speech in which she claimed "callings" from God had pushed her to every major decision in her life — from studying tax law to running for Congress. She even told the congregation that she and hubby Marcus — who by then had opened a Christian counseling center — had been united not by love but by a unique series of divine visions experienced by three people simultaneously.
Bachmann claimed that back in her college days, she was up one night praying with a female friend of hers when "the Lord gave each one of us the same, exact vision... It was a picture of me, marrying this man, in the valley where his parents have a farm in western Wisconsin." Meanwhile, miles away, Marcus "was repairing a fence on the farm where he worked, and the Lord showed him in a vision that he was supposed to marry me." According to Bachmann, Marcus initially complained to God that he wanted to see the world first, and only later relented.
Snickering readers in New York or Los Angeles might be tempted by all of this to conclude that Bachmann is uniquely crazy. But in fact, such tales by Bachmann work precisely because there are a great many people in America just like Bachmann, people who believe that God tells them what condiments to put on their hamburgers, who can't tell the difference between Soviet Communism and a Stafford loan, but can certainly tell the difference between being mocked and being taken seriously. When you laugh at Michele Bachmann for going on MSNBC and blurting out that the moon is made of red communist cheese, these people don't learn that she is wrong. What they learn is that you're a dick, that they hate you more than ever, and that they're even more determined now to support anyone who promises not to laugh at their own visions and fantasies.
...
Michele Bachmann has found the flaw in the American Death Star.
...
There is an orc army on the move in America.
And they are coming for us.
http://driftglass.blogspot.com/2011/06/waiting-for-miracle.html
© d r i f t g l a s s 2008
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