America's Teachers—Makers, Not Takers

Americans come together to oppose
Gov. Scott Walker and the Koch brothers
 - March 12, Madison, Wisconsin [Photo: Leon]

Make that heroes, teachers are heroes.

Paul Ryan, Scott Walker (and Mitt Romney as well) and the rightwing stand mute as their political glory, flying under the banners of liberty, the NRA, ALEC/Koch brothers/Bradley and the Tea Party, now aim to silently rig our democracy, or be doomed as a political force.

Maybe they're quiet because they know they went a little too far in demonizing those who called for peace and the common good as unAmerican the last 20 years.

Now, check out the BradBlog to see the shooting gallery America has become.

As the LGBTQ Americans fight for rights, the blacks and browns fight for their right to vote, women fight for their rights to choose, and a major political party—the Republican Party and its sick ally, the Tea Party—pile on the hate to their diminishing white majority, to the point of demonizing even teachers, there are consequences.

Of course, James Dobson blames marriage equality, civil rights and a woman's rights to choose as the causes of the massacre of children.

Horrifying acts are the "consequences," in Dobson's world as Americans unwisely stand up for each others' rights.

The GOP continues demonizing the other, while glorifying guns and the Volk common man, the real Americans; so the religious right points to disfavored human beings, less-than human in the eyes of its chosen metaphysical power looking over the 'real America'.

Check this guy out at the 07:09 mark in this linked video from western Pennsylvania extolling the American volk during the 2008 presidential campaign:

"It's the common man. It's the common man. He's (Obama) never lived the life. He's grown up in cities in his own entire life. This is country. This is God's country. He's never seen it. He can't relate with us. We're the back-bone of this country; we hard-working, blue-collar workers that keep this country running. He talks like he know us; he doesn't know us."

Most of these idiots are not organized. The SPLC does keep taps of the ones who are organized. Check out the Google ad above you might see; might read asking the reader if she wishes to secede from the Union, at Liberty.com. [See also G. Pascal Zachary's The Will to Secede in In These Times]

The point here is that by demonizing teachers, demonizing anyone for political purposes, hateful disease-filled minds will act.

We ought to endlessly remind ourselves of the words of Ralph McGill: "It is an old, old story. It is one repeated over and over again in history. When the wolves of hate are loosed on one people, then no one is safe." (Atlanta Constitution, Oct. 13, 1958)

The next time the GOP provides itself as a ready vehicle to relay hate; to inflict its "toxic brand of political fundamentalism -- heartless and historically unprecedented," as Paul Fanlund points out, -- it ought to consider that dividing Americans and stoking hate among people will sow a harvest.

Solidarity, community and free association have always been the better route. Even Ronald Reagan acclaimed the importance of, "... restoring one of the most elemental human rights—the right to belong to a free trade union."

Solidarity, human rights, community and unions—the opposite of paranoid, delusional mad dog minds who must be stopped.

The Volk in the United States

The Volksfront

Dave Umhoefer and Gina Barton's piece in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel (MJS) this morning is paired with a prominent shot of the white supremacists group, Volksfront with which Wade Michael Page made common cause in his mass murder at the Sikh temple in Oak Creek.

The MJS piece offers more insight into what brought this white power man to the most segregated metropolitan region in America, suggesting that it might be "a woman who may have shared his white power beliefs," pictured at left-front in the photo above.

White power and mass murder.

The combination ought to provoke discussion in any sane society asking 'why.' See for example, Judith G. McMullen's piece this morning, We Are All Sikhs.

More interesting than the geographical travels of Wade Michael Page are the societal forces preaching hate and fear, because in the words of Ralph McGill: "When the wolves of hate are loosed on one people, then no one is safe."

A young black man, Darius Simmons, taking out the garbage is killed in Milwaukee, Treyvon Martin in Florida, a Muslim, a Sikh, killings of innocents across the country; whatever they're not real Americans so they can't be that innocent.

Hate and fear are aid and comfort for the likes of Wade Michael Page, self-proclaimed protector of the Volk, the German analogue of real Americans fighting off other "human beings imagined as agents of corruption and incarnations of evil," in the words of the late Norman Cohn in his Cosmos, Chaos and the World to Come: The Ancient Roots of Apocalyptic Faith (1993).

The wolves of hate and fear are loosed by the American White Party, the Republican-Tea Party, daily (as in today) dishing out coded and explicit appeals to the xenophobic racists in the American white working class.

Mitt Romney's campaign is mostly a collection of racial taunts, as Adele M. Stan recently noted.

Is it any wonder that this hate generates a harvest of hate-filled action?

Had only whites voted in 2008, President Obama would have been trounced at the polls, a fact of which the Republican Party strategists are well aware as The White Party seeks to keep away those annoying Americans of color from voting their preference, while speaking directly to whites' racial fears and delusions.

Writes Thomas B. Edsell:

In 2010, the Republican white strategy was boosted by the fact that minority turnout traditionally drops in non-presidential years, perhaps especially so without Obama on the ballot. But the scope of success went far beyond expectations. (NYT, November 21, 2011)

Sure, scum like Wade Michael Page and the Volksfront have been driven underground by the successes of the American civil rights movement.

Not so far as to be beyond reach of the daily rants of the Walker-Romney Republican-Tea Party providing succor to the Volk pathology of many white Americans holding that the human species is composed of distinct races marked by dissimilar character inclinations and behavior patterns.

A false and psychopathologcal racial conception, the volkisch-racist outlook has played a starring role in the crimes of NAZI Germany, the destruction of the Native Americans by the US, though this volkisch conception is "irrational, unscientific and demonstrably nonsensical," as Cohn writes in Warrant for Genocide: The Myth of the Jewish World-Conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (1967).

Today, we have regular mass murders of the anti-volk like the Sikh, the American prison system that is a "leviathan unmatched in human history," and a major political party playing to the delusional, racist view held by Wade Michael Pages, Jared Loughner and other constituents of the American White Party.

While the generations of young Americans provide continuous hope, it is fair and prudent to ask what we will have tomorrow.

One of Four Republicans Think 'Obama Is the Anti-Christ'—Seriously

I guess we should not be surprised by the news.

How do rational-minded conservatives remain silent?

Plenty of conservatives here in Wisconsin; anyone believe this nonsense that our President is the anti-Christ.

Consider Alexandra Pelosi. She has a HBO special, Right America-Feeling Wronged, that interviews many of the folks of today's Republican Party for whom this concern with the anti-Christ is apparent. They ain't so humanistic.

Watching these [all white] people in Pelosi's documentary and the continual news of racism and dominionist religion across the nation, my immediate thoughts are to the German Volk myth, the romanticized idealization of the plain, working-class folks laboring against the anti-Volk in their very midst.

You can see these white, heroic-Obama-hating people in Pelosi's work.

In Germany, the alleged anti-Volk were the Jews.

Today in America, the anti-Volk is composed of the blacks, browns, immigrants, gays, assorted "elites," (down-South the Jews still occupy the anti-Volk status), some incarnation of the Other. [Note: Recommend Norman Cohn's The Pursuit of the Millennium and Warrant for Genocide for historical insights into the deranged mind, crazy myth, and the danger of passive compliance in the face of militarism.]

The American Volk in all their incoherent rage are showing up in the polls and in the politics of the Republicans and Tea Partiers with all their imaginary friends and enemies within.

Here's the news from Blue Texan at FireDogLake:

New Harris Poll Finds Nearly One Fourth of Republicans Believe Obama May Be the Antichrist

No, this isn’t an Onion headline. Yes, it is yet another poll that shows Republicans are out of their fucking minds.

On the heels of health care, a new Harris poll reveals Republican attitudes about Obama: Two-thirds think he’s a socialist, 57 percent a Muslim—and 24 percent say “he may be the Antichrist.”

In fairness, that question was clearly designed to make conservatives look bad. I mean, it’s completely possible that Obama may be the Antichrist. Has anyone thoroughly checked him for the Mark of the Beast? How can really we be sure?

Other findings of the Harris poll, due out tomorrow, include:

67 percent of Republicans (and 40 percent of Americans overall) believe that Obama is a socialist

45 percent of Republicans (25 percent overall) agree with the Birthers in their belief that Obama was “not born in the United States and so is not eligible to be president”

38 percent of Republicans (20 percent overall) say that Obama is “doing many of the things that Hitler did”

I’m surprised that only about half of the polled Goopers are birthers — that feels low to me.

But we shouldn’t be surprised that nearly 40% think he’s the second coming of Adolf Hitler, since elected Republicans and clowns like Glenn Beck and the Pantload make the comparison often.

Nice party you’ve got there, GOP.