Save The Last Elephant Ear For Me

Peckerwood Nation’s Last Stand

Salvaging something after the general election debacle the fascist Republican armies threw everything that they had left into defending the Georgia Senate seat of one Saxby Chambliss, a man so despicable that he became a party legend for running campaign commercials comparing his opponent, a Vietnam war triple-amputee to Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. While Max Cleland lost both legs and an arm at Khe Sahn, good ole back-slapping Saxby Chambliss was taking five deferments to keep his chickenshit ass out of the action and to begin his career as a credentialed armchair patriot and water carrier for big bidness and the dead enders of the Religious Right. Chambliss decisively won Tuesday’s runoff election against feisty challenge of one Jim Martin making that coveted 60 seat Senate majority (hype as it may be) wet dream now statistically impossible – sort of like the Detroit Lions or Cincinnati Bengals making the NFL playoffs but more on that malodorous crock of malarkey in a little bit.

To hear the talking points of the right-wing extremists and their highly paid propaganda pimps like millionaire thrice divorced drug addict Rush Limbaugh tell it he was the last man to halt the agenda of the “far left” which would supposedly allow the flipping of the country into one of those damned hated European socialist countries, the ones with free education, health care, public transportation systems that are the envy of the world and god forbid, an educated populace. So the GOP threw everything that they had into defending the Chambliss seat, kind of like Stalin marching thousands directly into the meatgrinder of Stalingrad, a sort of cornered animal type of desperation drove the rally of the knuckle-dragging, Confederate flag waving aggrieved lumpen Republicans who were already chafing from having that burr of a ‘darkie’ president rammed up their asses. The Jesus juicers were out in force and there was no fucking way in heaven or hell that they were going to run up the white flag of surrender on this one. They would let John McCain go down in flames but the cracker Saxby was one of theirs, and Sarah Palin (who Saxby praised to high heaven), new darling of the REAL Republicans as well as the hoochie mama who has induced as a record amount of monkey-spanking and meat-yanking mania amongst the angry white dittoheads that has left that haggard, horse-faced, crack whore Ann Coulter in the dust (you have to admit, at least Palin has a set of tits to come on) . Now I personally don’t think that Jesus would approve of such ‘mass-treebatin’, but shitfire Jim Bob, if he dared to show up at either a Klan picnic or a Palin rally (what’s the difference when you really get down to it?) he’d find his meddlesome, long-haired librul ass crucified on a piece of plywood by a nail gun faster than you can say Oh God Sarah baby by the ignoble savages that are our southern brethren and you gotta admit, at least Palin HAS a set of tits to come on.

The rise of Palin as the Führess of the most vicious and bigoted portion of the population, the ones who have been descending on gun shows across the nation since November 5th like so many Black Friday Wal-Mart shoppers is a terrifying thing to behold, especially on the brink of an economic crisis with hyperinflation of the sort unseen in the western world since it took a wheelbarrow full of reichmarks to buy a loaf of bread and the need for scapegoats for the coming suffering. Try as I must to talk myself out of such a wild assed conspiracy theory but the parallels between what is going on in Der Heimat and the rise of Nazi Germany have just too many eerie parallels to be a coincidence, and there is that long history of Nazi-U.S. Corporate and financial collaboration (Prescott Bush was the poster boy) but that is a story for another time. The Republicans are going to go more ideological, become more fanatical and regenerate like the hydra that they are and it’s all going to gestate in the belly of the beast south of the Mason-Dixon line, these people have had their noses bloodied before and in a bit of grudging admiration they don’t forget things like William Tecumseh Sherman’s cutting a bloody swath through Georgia during the Civil War using what could objectively been called terrorist tactics and they are still fighting that goddamned war five or six generations later. The aggrieved psychotics who actually run the party, guys like Georgia based Newt Gingrich are going to be rubbing the sores of discontent raw in the south and given the victory lap and synchronized jacking each other off over the election results by Democrats, progressives and liberals who are now ready to go back to sleep this is a recipe for doom.

But I digress…

The victory of cracker Chambliss in Peckerwood Nation really means nothing in the real scheme of things outside of the extreme right finally getting a tourniquet onto the wound to stop the bleeding and to provide an opportunity to regain momentum for the battle royal against the dark skinned demon Obama and the librul hordes. Not that a 60 seat majority would guarantee jack shit given the history of the jellyfish centrists in the Democratic party, Casper Milquetoast Harry Reid a coward of Neville Chamberlain proportions still runs the place, the receiving line stretched around the rotunda to kiss the ass of Judas Lieberman and the one person who could have provided a backbone and some much needed bellicosity to the ranks, Hillary Rodham-Clinton who should have been installed as majority has slithered like a snake into the Obama cabinet. A win in Minnesota by the unfunny comedian and former Air American personality Al Franken is largely irrelevant and besides, aren’t there already a disproportionate amount of Jews who hold positions of influence within the system? And with the son of a fanatic Zionist terrorist in Rahm Emanuel already acting as the gatekeeper in the Obama White House I just have a very sick feeling that our disgustingly one-sided Middle Eastern policy that contributes to an overwhelming amount of violence is not going to change anytime soon.

These are dark clouds on the horizon, large portions of the liberal base are already chafing at the bit over Obama’s establishment ‘centrist’ appointments and unless there is some serious action to deliver on that promise of change the turnout is going to suffer, support is going to wane and it could be 1994 all over again come November 2010. Our brand spanking new President Elect Obama may have had a crackerjack ground game, a veritable Wehrmacht of local operations and an organized army of online activists that contributed greatly to his near landslide win but in typical establishment fashion the antiwar, pro-Constitution base is already having their backs pissed on and being told that it’s raining. The trickle could become a downpour of biblical proportions that will surely be seized upon by the minions of Limbaugh, LaHaye, Hagee, Robertson, Gingrich and their Alaskan Valkyrie queen. If nothing else, the more overtly fascist elements of the Republican party are experts at destabilizing governments and any perceived betrayal of the left along with the coming depression is going to create opportunity for a resurgence. The most foolish mistake of all would be for jubilant liberals, progressives and their feckless centrist Democratic party champions to ignore what the always profound Chris Hedges refers to as “American fascists” and he isn’t throwing that term around loosely, these people are a huge threat to the republic and as a recent Hedges column over at truthdig describes it we are still in very serious jeopardy of losing it all:

The old assumptions and paradigms about capitalism and free markets are dead. A new, virulent populism, still inchoate, is slowly and painfully rising to take their place. This populism will determine the future of the country. It is as likely to be right-wing as left-wing.

I watched these competing populisms flicker Thursday night at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, D.C., when I moderated a debate between independent presidential candidate Ralph Nader and Constitution Party candidate Chuck Baldwin. The two candidates come from opposite ends of the political spectrum. Nader, in essence, is a democratic socialist in the mold of Eugene Debs or Norman Thomas. Baldwin, a founder and minister at the Crossroad Baptist Church in Pensacola, Fla., is an evangelical, right-wing populist.

Baldwin, like Nader, rails against corporatism and our involvement in foreign wars, wants to repeal NAFTA and denounces the curtailment of civil liberties. But Baldwin goes on to support the abolishment of whole departments of the federal government, such as the Department of Education. He calls for U.S. withdrawal from the United Nations and NATO, the elimination of the Food and Drug Administration, the outlawing of abortion and removing all restrictions on the purchasing of firearms. One of his catchier campaign slogans is: “To help keep your family safe and your country free, go buy a gun.” He wants to seal our borders, deny amnesty and social services to illegal immigrants and end birthright citizenship for the children of illegal immigrants. He calls for dismantling the Federal Reserve and the Internal Revenue Service, overturning the 16th Amendment and the personal income tax, and returning the American monetary system to hard assets: gold and silver.

These candidates, while marginal figures in the current election, express the two forms of populism that will soon find a wide political currency. The anger toward our elites will morph into rage. These new populisms may not be articulated by Nader and Baldwin, but they will be articulated by people like Nader and Baldwin.

The ideological foundations of free-market economics and a consumer society have collapsed. This collapse is hard for us to fathom. We are still in shock and denial. We cling to old structures of meaning and outdated words to describe them. We have yet to realize that all our political science and economic textbooks have become junk. We have yet to formulate a vocabulary to describe our altered reality. We grasp, on a subliminal level, that laissez-faire capitalism is gone, but we have not viewed the corpse, scheduled the funeral and read the last rites.

And…

The left, with a few exceptions, like the Progressive Party in Vermont, has largely thrown in its lot with the Democratic Party. Right-wing populists, as is evidenced by the acrimonious split in the McCain campaign, remain clustered around the fiefdoms of large megachurches that stoke hatred and frightening totalitarian visions of a Christian state. The left has no correlating centers of activism, organization or mass support, especially with the decline of labor unions. If left-wing populists do not rapidly build local organizations, as was done in Vermont, to compete with the right-wing populism of the Christian right, the most dangerous mass movement in American history, they will be easily swept aside. There is not much time left. A Democratic victory in November may signal not a reversal of our fading fortunes but the start of a precipitous slide toward the Christian dystopia peddled by people like Baldwin.

Progressives are playing a dangerous game of mass self-congratulation right now and in that comes an inversion of one of Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’s five stages of grief – DENIAL – and in failing to recognize that the extreme right is not going away, not now, not ever without a very serious (and in measured terms I say dealt with using ‘extreme prejudice) effort to cut out the cancer that is the Republican base, now in apparent remission but in actuality mestasizing to rage anew then we may one day look back on the Bush administration as tempered moderates.

This is the reality of the situation: deep south bible belt whites, mainly poor, increasingly hostile and always Republican have contributed mightily to our current economic and global crisis through their long run of owning a disproportionate amount of political power in America and if they regain it they will be ever more determined to wield it and the next time they will be playing for keeps. They will use it in order to drag the country backwards through time to a dark place in our history that had apparently been buried in the past. They seek to return to the days where the American south was mired in the smothering blackness of a festering, hateful and corrupt parallel universe to the more progressive states above the Mason Dixon Line, trapped like a dinosaur in a tar pit. It was only through the courage of the civil rights movement and federal anti discrimination laws that the roaring beast was able to be semi-tamed to a point where it would be able to interact with decent folk. With the ascendancy of a red state evangelical movement the south is back for blood revenge, thundering a bastardized version of Christianity from pulpits, preaching hatred and bigotry and the end times and drawing the masses of the disenfranchised into ever growing mega churches and mobilizing armies of activists. The southern regressive fervor cunningly infiltrated the United States government itself with their ultimate triumph being the rise of George W. Bush who will now serve as a teaching tool of what NOT to do the next time, say when Sarah Palin is deemed to be ready. This southern fried anti-Americanism will, if not watched very closely once again creep back into power like some malignant strain of alien kudzu.

America is far from out of the swamp of backwoods religion and politics and very soon could be forced to bend over that log, take it up the ass with a double-barreled shotgun pressed to our necks and forced to squeal like a pig like poor old Ned Beatty in that fine cinematic depiction of that paradise of the old south Georgia: Deliverance.