Ex-Friends and Politics - Democratic Underground

20score

(1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore

Wed Feb-10-10 06:16 PM
Original message

Ex-Friends and Politics

Edited on Wed Feb-10-10 06:59 PM by 20score

So many people that I’ve known for years have changed during the twenty-first century. And not for the better. Some have gone from being nice people with a sense of right and wrong, that included at least a verbal commitment to social justice, to being a pro-torture, anti-science bigot that is willing to trash whatever part of the Constitution that their favorite propagandist tells him or her is now anti-American. And I am fairly certain that my experience, socially, is not unique in this respect.

Most seemed to have lost any ability they used to have to suss out obvious hypocrisy or evident contradictions. Fiscal conservatives that were just fine with tax cuts for the wealthy, wars on credit and corporations with U.S. contracts not paying taxes, which lead to massive deficits, are now fiscal conservatives again. They become especially angry if someone is actually helped with the money being spent. During the pre-Bush era when a conversation about the harsh punishments of the 19th century came up, my friends at the time were indignant at such cruelty. They are now just fine with a man in California being put in prison for life, for the crime of shoplifting. These same people despised Nixon for spying on Americans and were rightly disdainful of the East German Stasi for spying on their citizens. Now their answer to criticism of Bush for by-passing the Constitution and spying on Americans is, “well, if you don’t have anything to hide” or “we have to catch terrorists and we can’t let them know what we’re doing.” (Of course, they are silent about letting bin Laden and the actual perpetrators of the 9-11 terrorist attacks go free.) They were acutely aware of despots using scapegoats to distract people and consolidate their power by misdirecting real anger at easy and unpopular targets. Now they are sure that illegal immigrants crashed the economy and some unnamed liberals spent all our money. After 9/11/2001, a switch was flipped in the heads of some people and thinking clearly was no longer possible. Talking with some of these ex-friends is now akin to talking to those who believe the earth is only 6,000 years old.

Being a propagandist, or a pundit with no scruples, if you will, must be the easiest job in the history of the planet. Being wrong, even to the point of being ludicrous and insultingly moronic - take Freedom Fries for example – is never used as a mark against them. They have taken Edward Bernays’ formula of appealing to emotions instead of intellect and boiled it down to, “say whatever.” The people watching/listening will buy it. And it seems they’re right. One person that I hadn’t spoken to in twenty-five years quotes O’Reilly and Palin to me about how “You don’t understand how real Americans think because you don’t care about the ‘fly over parts’ - that’s real America!” We both live in LA, but that seems to have escaped him.

When one entire political party is devoted to pollution and shrinking the middle class as quickly as possible, when tens of millions of people think being smart is a negative for a president, it’s hard to be optimistic. It also doesn’t help when the “Reality Based” party is losing ground to those that are fighting for the bankers and the energy companies. I’ve seen it happen first hand too often.