The Present-Day Haters

No More Mister Nice Blog does a big, long-winded tangential (and uselessly self-important) excursion into blathering nothingness, to end up here:

The present-day haters have distilled the old hatreds, the ones based on race and sex, and can apply them just as well outside the old categories as within those categories. Bigotry, in other words, evolves in order to adapt.

The guy's prefacing that he disagrees with Frank Rich. Except that he doesn't. So here's a clue: It's not race, or bigotry, or whatever kind of "hate" you're grasping for. I'm a tea partier. I've been deeply active with tea partiers for over a year. Tea partiers aren't talking about race-hatred, etc. Democrat-leftists are. But I'm also a teacher and political scientist. And the phenomena of ceaseless searching for the ghosts of hatred-past reflects a crisis of the current order. And this is a Democratic Party crisis. Think about it, with reference to Doug Powers' unrelenting fisking of Frank Rich, especially here:

Frank Rich and Friends have more in common with what they accuse tea partiers of being than with the civil rights pioneers whose principles they claim to be standing up for—people who endured similar baseless blanket statements, idiotic and ignorant stereotypes, generalizations, false accusations and yes, even sophomoric homophobic slurs.

Some of us, regardless of our color or sexual orientation, aren’t going to watch our country turned into yet another failed socialist utopia on the ash heap of history without saying a word about it — regardless of the color or sexual orientation of those who are trying to do so. If the only “logical” rebuttal Frank Rich has to people concerned for the future of their children is “racism,” then I’m more positive than ever that I’ve chosen the correct side.

As an added bonus, someone's attached one of my links to this message board entry, which includes the most saddening images of racial violence from the early- and mid-20th century ...

But what's also sad is the complete ahistorical frame of the author, who is apparently only willing to engage those who want to extrapolate Klan hatred as an explanation for the mindlessness of contemporary commercial culture. When the discussion went south, the guy lost it:

Unfortunately, this post was not able to exist for much more than 24 hours without exploding into derailing, misogyny, Obama as secret socialist and finally the Illuminati.

If you can look at graphic photographs of human beings who were brutally murdered surrounded by their murders who are gleeful about the murder they committed and were never punished for, and still derail, I think a lot less of you as a person.

If you can look at people who were horribly murdered and your primacy concern is third hand accounts about someone's niceness, I think your priorities are fucked up. The women who encouraged the lynching of young Emmet Till, and whole heartedly stood by their husbands, were nice community involved women, and their community supported lynching a black child for putting money in a white lady's hand, not on the counter.

If you can look at these photos of murdered people and still think it's all ironic, hilarious, and not worth taking seriously, I'm having a hard time seeing how different you are from the people who thought lynchings were the kind events to be commemorated with post cards and souvenirs hacked off the murdered person's body. Postcards and souvenirs aren't serious business after all.

If you want to learn, go the library. I'm not having a god damn teachable moment. Also, if you are a local or someone who chats with me via the internet let me give you a pro tip: All that bullshit right here, is the exact opposite of what I would like to chat about right now. If you want to have an epiphany on this issue, hug it out or talk it out, do it in your own space that is not at all part of my space. Also, don't tell me about it. Seriously.

All this mostly because of a bizarre tweet that's apparently an attack on Lady Gaga's explicit corporate product placement in "Telephone."

It's kind of a stretch, but I guess just mentioning "The Klan" sends progressive race hustlers into a deathly spiral. And, unfortunately, that's the exact opposite of an "effort to adapt." That's entropy.