Blowing Smoke - Michael Wolraich [176]
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An example of hatemongering by the little guy with a mustache in 1942: “We want to fill our culture again with the Christian spirit. We want to burn out all the recent immoral developments in literature, in the theatre, and in the press—in short, we want to burn out the poison of immorality which has entered into our whole life and culture as a result of liberal excess during the past years.” (Norman Hepburn Baynes, The Speeches of Adolf Hitler, 1922-1939, Vol. 1 [New York: Oxford University Press, 1942): 871-872.)
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Rev. Wildmon founded the American Family Association, which owns and operates two hundred radio stations across the country. He gained notoriety for organizing nationwide opposition to Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ. The AFA mailed 500,000 flyers warning that Universal Studios was “a company whose decision-making body is dominated by non-Christians”—in other words, Jewish money. (Aljean Harmetz, “Film on Christ Brings Out Pickets, and Archbishop Predicts Censure,” New York Times, 21 Jul. 1988, http://www.nytimes.com/1988/07/21/movies/film-on-christ-brings-out-pickets-and-archbishop-predicts-censure. html.)
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“Better educated.” After the poll results came out, I overheard a group of liberal New Yorkers at a bar trying to make sense of the fact that so many Tea Party supporters were well educated. One concluded that they were lying. Another argued that the modern American education system had become inadequate. A third propounded his theory that schools these days focused too much on test scores. Apparently, they didn’t read the bit about how 75 percent of Tea Party supporters are older than forty-five and thus received their educations long ago.
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“Irascible Kansan.” Frank calls them “bitter self-made men.” They seem to be some kind of elite unit of angry white males, like navy SEALS. (Thomas Frank, What’s the Matter with Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America, paperback ed., 2005 [New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2004]: 141-148.)
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“Mixing the races that way.” Which raises the question, in what way does he believe in mixing the races? American Indian-Tibetan? They both have a brownish hue and wear colorful traditional costumes, so maybe that’s okay. Or perhaps he means that the races can mix in other ways. They can be bridge partners, for instance.
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“His birth certificate.” It should be noted that according to a New York Times-CBS poll, 20 percent of Americans don’t believe that Obama was born in the United States, and 22 percent aren’t sure. If Obama’s birth certificate is a forgery, we don’t really know what race he is . . . or if his parents were even human.
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Reagan’s “welfare queen” was an exaggerated caricature of Linda Taylor, a Chicago woman who was arrested for having used four aliases to defraud the government of $8,000. Taylor was clearly one of the great scam artists of our time, like Bernie Madoff and Enron’s Jeffrey Skilling. (“‘Welfare Queen’ Becomes Issue in Reagan Campaign,” New York Times, 15 Feb. 1976: 51.)
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“Walker’s Point GOP.” Walker’s Point is the former name of the Bush compound in Kennebunkport, Maine.
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“Intellectual property theft.” Buchanan’s legal threat against Duke was empty. According to intellectual property experts, you can’t trademark racism.
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California’s government-by-proposition, which has rendered the California state government virtually impotent to deal with financial crises or much of anything else, demonstrates that the nation’s founders knew what they were doing when they set up a representative democracy. It seems that the only people less competent to govern than elected officials are the people that elected them.
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“Quotas and welfare might be oppressive.” Tim Fay, a reverse discrimination survivor, has founded a website, Adversity.net, dedicated to the victims of reverse discrimination. According to Fay, quota victims may suffer from posttraumatic stress disorder: