I was just re-reading the American Heritage article I linked to in the last post about Truman's dismissal of MacArthur. It's fascinating how the background changes, but the American people remain so much the same. There's a constant feral element to our politics, where fear and fury ripple off and across our discourse like foam runs off the slobbering maw of a rabid cur.
Sixty years ago they were attacking Truman, who ironically really was almost a pure avatar of middle white America.. But he was just a little bit too reasonable and equanimous for the warped jingoistic chauvinist xenophobes who fluoresce and fester like lepric imbecilic bacilli in blossoming teeming excretions in our political culture..
To quote one such sage back in 1951: “Impeach the B who calls himself President!”
See. Nothing's really changed, except that today that B might be replaced by an N.
This passage leapt at me:
Even before the news broke, the American people were upset. “A vast impatience, a turbulent bitterness, a rancor akin to revolt” coursed through the body politic, a contemporary historian observed. Dislike of communism, once a matter of course in America, had boiled into a national frenzy, devouring common prudence, common sense, and common decency. It was a time when school textbooks urged children to report suspicious neighbors to the FBI “in line with American tradition,” a time when an entire city flew into a rage on learning that the geography lesson printed on children’s candy wrappers dared to describe Russia as the “largest country in the world. ” Americans saw conspiracy in every untoward event: abroad, “Kremlin plots to conquer the world”; at home, communist plots to “take over the government. ” In April 1951 a substantial part of the citizenry believed that the secretary of state, Dean Acheson, was a “dupe” of the Kremlin, that the secretary of defense, George C. Marshall, a five-star general, was a “front man” for traitors in government. And now it seemed that a great general, World War II’s most glamorous hero, had been mercilessly broken for daring to call for victory in Korea.
All that we need to do is replace "communist" and "Kremlin" with "Muslim," tweak a few names and other details, and we could crib that entire passage to describe us today.
I mean, we all know how true Muslims want to impose "shariah" on Bubba down in his doublewide in the woods of Tennessee?
I mean, we all know how Obama's a Muslim, and is their tool!
Right.
I've been wondering lately if my family had never gone to Turkey back in 1990, if I had not spent the time I have studying the Middle East and Arabic since, if I had not lived there, if I would be just as imbecilic.
I could very well be. But I've seen too many things, met and loved too many people since, to ever be like that, now.
These coming months I am going to begin posting the work that I created this blog for. I have a series of themes I want to address, but by way of stories from my own life and experience. That's what I will begin putting down here as the winter flows into spring.
This summer I am leaving again. There are a series of things I have to do, shrines, people and places to visit. I am finally going to do what I should have been doing from the beginning, which is document my way as full well and poetic as I can. This will be the forum - initially, anyway - which I'll use to share it all.
One of the things I'll start doing now though, will be to post an apercu quotidien as a way of building momentum. This is my first.
Thoughts, observations, parables. I intend to sort my tales - myself - out for all to read..
With visuals and a few citations.
See where this goes..
On y va. ياللا إمشي
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