Talk About It

Obama in a radio interview today: "I guarantee you, Joe, we are going to get health care done."

Uh-oh.

As you can see way down below, this makes it personal.

LAND O' GOSHEN:

Will people arm themselves over health insurance profits? It's a good thing there are American Studies departments, because we certainly are worth studying with our unique state of mind.

PHOENIX – About a dozen people carrying guns, including one with a military-style rifle, milled among protesters outside the convention center where President Barack Obama was giving a speech Monday–the latest incident in which protesters have openly displayed firearms near the president. …

"When you start to bring guns to political rallies, it does layer on another level of concern and significance,'' Solop said. "It actually becomes quite scary for many people. It creates a chilling effect in the ability of our society to carry on honest communication.''

Of course they have the right, but that doesn't keep it from being stupid–it's done for a specific effect, and that effect is an even stronger version of shouting people down. It's no stretch to say it's intimidation. I mean, who wants to argue with someone carrying an AR-15? What are the chances someone gets an itchy trigger finger soon? I'm going to go ahead and say "pretty high."

I think it all comes down to a single thing that won't go away. And as someone who is 100% Southern, I feel confident in saying so. The South is its own country. And yes, I know Phoenix, Arizona isn't the South, but the state of mind isn't easily bound, and much of Arizona was part of the Confederacy. As a native of the old Confederacy (I've lived in Texas, north Louisiana, New Orleans, Mississippi and Virginia), I'm glad the anti-slavery Union won that little conflict in the 1860s, but I'm not necessarily typical.

Most cultural battles in the U.S. come back to that same core issue of cultural difference between the South and everybody else. If they want to secede again, perhaps their wingnuts can have the corporatized theocracy they desire. I should be able to obtain a visa to visit my folks. But then again, my folks would probably move…

ADDITIONAL: Here's a fascinating article about the long history of American crazy, from Rick Perlstein at the Washington Post.

An excerpt:

In the early 1950s, Republicans referred to the presidencies of Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman as "20 years of treason" and accused the men who led the fight against fascism of deliberately surrendering the free world to communism. Mainline Protestants published a new translation of the Bible in the 1950s that properly rendered the Greek as connoting a more ambiguous theological status for the Virgin Mary; right-wingers attributed that to, yes, the hand of Soviet agents. And Vice President Richard Nixon claimed that the new Republicans arriving in the White House "found in the files a blueprint for socializing America."

When John F. Kennedy entered the White House, his proposals to anchor America's nuclear defense in intercontinental ballistic missiles — instead of long-range bombers — and form closer ties with Eastern Bloc outliers such as Yugoslavia were taken as evidence that the young president was secretly disarming the United States. Thousands of delegates from 90 cities packed a National Indignation Convention in Dallas, a 1961 version of today's tea parties; a keynote speaker turned to the master of ceremonies after his introduction and remarked as the audience roared: "Tom Anderson here has turned moderate! All he wants to do is impeach [Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl] Warren. I'm for hanging him!"

Before the "black helicopters" of the 1990s, there were right-wingers claiming access to secret documents from the 1920s proving that the entire concept of a "civil rights movement" had been hatched in the Soviet Union; when the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act was introduced, one frequently read in the South that it would "enslave" whites. And back before there were Bolsheviks to blame, paranoids didn't lack for subversives — anti-Catholic conspiracy theorists even had their own powerful political party in the 1840s and '50s.

FROM THE HORSE'S MOUTH:

Man carrying an AR-15 at the Obama rally (and several of his friends) make their position clear, and it's basically "don't impose your democracy on me":

"We will forcefully resist people imposing their will on us through the strength of the majority with a vote."

Well, at least that's clear. I think they can, without fear of exaggeration, be called undemocratic now (fascists? anarchists? Guess we'll see). Let's not forget that we've come to this over preserving our for-profit healthcare system. At what point have we officially gone crazy?

This at least bears consideration: