My memory isn't as good as it used to be so maybe that's the problem, but I simply don't remember my country being this ugly when I was younger. Oh sure, there was always lots of ugliness, including the racism, the xenophobia, the crabbed and mean spirited hatred of others that looks particularly bad when it is so common in a country as rich and favored as ours has been.
There have been always been those ugly faces that exemplified the worst we had in our national character, faces like Joe McCarthy's, for instance, or George Wallace's, or John Mitchell's, Nixon's Attorney General. And there have been marketers of malice and mania in the past, too, precursors to Limbaugh, Savage, Beck, and the rest, guys like Joe Pine, or Morton Downey, Jr., who pioneered such ugliness on television, or Father Coughlin back in the '30s, who sold fear, hate, and anti-Semitism on radio.
But the degree and the vehemence of our current ugliness seems to run much deeper and record itself even more darkly on Facebook, on Fox, or in the faces of the Republican men who seek the highest office in the land.
The hordes of yahoos abroad in the land are frightening, and it is, perhaps, no surprise that one of the notable cultural phenomena of the last couple of decades has been the popularity of the zombie apocalypse, that nightmare of walking dead who are menacing everyone else, a metaphor, perhaps, for our fear of what we see everywhere from Wal-Mart to the field of Republican candidates for POTUS.
When the audiences for those people cheer disdain for teachers, applaud the idea of forcing 11-year-old girls to carry the fetus created by a rapist to term, and when they hoot and holler for a rich crook who dodged the draft as he mimics the vigilante killing of an American soldier who was taken prisoner in Afghanistan, we are putting our national ugliness on open display, looking dangerously like the way Germany looked when Hitler was on his rise to power. The ugliness of our people could hardly have gotten uglier than when a young woman on Fox commented on the news of former President Jimmy Carter's cancer, saying "a cancer got cancer," and "boo hoo." Her sentiments were echoed by untold numbers of comments on various right wing websites, spread on Facebook, and shared wherever the uglies shared ugliness. And though comparisons to the Nazis are routinely denounced by commentators on the right and on the left, the parallels seem obvious, and undeniable. Throughout the 1920s, Germany's economy was in the tank. Unhappy reactionary Germans wanted a scape goat, wanted someone who would fuel their anger, someone who could manipulate their fears and focus all of that discontent. They wanted a strong man who would reclaim an imagined former greatness. They hungered for a strong military again, and for aggression to replace what they perceived as the passive acceptance of dictates from other nations they saw as inferior.
Meanwhile, the idea of German "exceptionalism" gained ever greater and more belligerent currency, manifesting itself as a kind of nationalism based on the idea of a "superior race," the Aryan mythology that could be used to impose its will on lesser people.
When a right wing talk radio host in Iowa (the heartland), promotes the idea of enslaving Mexican farm workers who are here illegally, and when that notion is not met with condemnation by the entire population, you know the country is settling very deep into the muck, miring itself in the worst kind of ugliness, hungering for a police state even while the most vociferous supporters of government intrusion in our lives insist that they was for smaller government.
Meanwhile, our news media seems complicit in spreading the tale as the fascists want it to be told. Meanwhile, the liberals equivocate or remain silent, telling themselves, as they did in Germany, that such madness would surely be self-limiting, that the nation would, sooner or later, see where such hatred and fear mongering can lead. Meanwhile, the right wingers, emboldened, grew ever more extreme, ever more hateful, using their twisted interpretations of religion to justify the most ungodly things imaginable. Meanwhile, the "moderates" were seen rushing ever rightward, their status as people with moderate views distorting the very definition of moderation, pushing the national conversation into a kind of "newspeak" in which war equals peace and justice equals summary executions by out-of-control cops. Meanwhile, the corporatists, the industrialists, the wealthiest few, the shielded, entitled, and most privileged, threw their money and power behind the men who promised to ensure the advantages that had made them so rich and powerful in the first place.
And so, when a demagogue steps forward, a man with an odd way of arranging his hair and a promise to make the homeland great again, the most thuggish elements begin to scream "seig heil," and ugliness is loosed upon the land.
I think of the first stanza of the William Butler Yeats' poem, written in the immediate aftermath of World War I, as the seeds of resentment that would sprout Nazism were beginning to grow in Germany.
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
And, reading those words nearly a full century after they were written, I think that this is not an old poem I am reading; this is the news.
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