I think it's time to reread Richard Hofstadter's The Paranoid Style in American Politics, a 1967 book that attempts to explain why our country periodically just goes completely batshit. Hofstadter, a historian at Columbia University, investigated such 18th and 19th Century phenomena as anti-Masonic scares and nationwide Catholic-bashing in an attempt to contextualize the McCarthy era, which was just ending as the book was written.
It seems that 9/11/01, "our national nervous breakdown," as Hunter Thompson calls it, has brought on another paroxysm of the paranoia and hatred that is the dark side of our democratic, freedom-loving society. I mean, we're supposed to hate the French now? And the Germans, with whom we supposedly buried the bayonet 58 years ago? Just because they challenged the aggressors currently running our little show? I say, to heck with that. These countries--our allies--are absolutely right to question our insane rush to war.
Hey, I'm mad about 9/11, too; it makes me all the madder that the men and women in power, weak but pretending to be strong, are trying desperately to change the subject, and settle some old scores. Rumsfeld is a War Loon--the whole crop of them are: Perle, Wolfowitz, Powell, Rice, Bush. These people scare me to death, much more than the Iraqis, who WERE NOT the instigators of the World Trade Center tragedy.
|
I think it's time to reread Richard Hofstadter's The Paranoid Style in American Politics, a 1967 book that attempts to explain why our country periodically just goes completely batshit. Hofstadter, a historian at Columbia University, investigated such 18th and 19th Century phenomena as anti-Masonic scares and nationwide Catholic-bashing in an attempt to contextualize the McCarthy era, which was just ending as the book was written.
It seems that 9/11/01, "our national nervous breakdown," as Hunter Thompson calls it, has brought on another paroxysm of the paranoia and hatred that is the dark side of our democratic, freedom-loving society. I mean, we're supposed to hate the French now? And the Germans, with whom we supposedly buried the bayonet 58 years ago? Just because they challenged the aggressors currently running our little show? I say, to heck with that. These countries--our allies--are absolutely right to question our insane rush to war.
Hey, I'm mad about 9/11, too; it makes me all the madder that the men and women in power, weak but pretending to be strong, are trying desperately to change the subject, and settle some old scores. Rumsfeld is a War Loon--the whole crop of them are: Perle, Wolfowitz, Powell, Rice, Bush. These people scare me to death, much more than the Iraqis, who WERE NOT the instigators of the World Trade Center tragedy.
- tom moody 2-14-2003 6:48 pm