Hollow Men

“Americans on the right feel that America has been largely taken away from them and their kind, though they are determined to repossess it…
Richard Hofstadter
Quoted by Paul Krugman



Yes, the Whiteguys' club is unraveling and they’re pitching a hissy fit. Urged on by their demagogues, they are railing against healthcare reform, calling it a socialist plot, as once again they fight for a system that is screwing them to the wall. One wonders how many tea baggers are chained to their dreary jobs for fear of losing their benefits. How many are without coverage and yet are fighting tooth and nail against a bill that would make coverage available to them?

Here is a group whose emotional development stopped at V - J Day. Even if they were born after the war, it’s the same. There is a whole repository of Hollywood films to keep the glory alive for them. The Christians in their ranks have never gotten over the fact that from the 1820s to the 1960s, a male-dominated White Protestant church was the de facto state religion of America. They want it back.

They are men hollowed out by a life that has passed them by. Lost and confused, they are shells easily filled by rabid rightwing pundits who fill their emptiness with a bilious rage. Everything threatens them: liberated women, intelligent women, women who speak their minds, gays, teenagers, critical thinking, revisionist history, postmodernism, art, beauty, compassion, empathy or anything that does not express its patriotism in a spittle-spray of Christian rage.

They cling desperately to their every tax dollar, fearful that a single farthing might be spent on a sick child or an unemployed mother or a struggling student. Yet, they glow with pride as they contemplate the $931 billion that has been spent to date on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. And they treat any suggestion that the money could be better spent as treason.

The Republican Party has degenerated into an asylum in which the mad think themselves sane.

But, by God, the sane will protect their precious tax dollars and make sure they are directed to the twin rat holes in the Middle East as they try desperately to revive a military prowess long since gone flaccid.

Maybe that’s why Viagra is such a bestseller.