Despicable

Despicable

Republican politicians, or at least it’s mostly Republican politicians, have proven beyond any reasonable doubt that they are despicable political actors and deplorable human beings. They are demagogues who pander to the basest instincts of the most ignorant American voters. They wear their lack of knowledge and their bigotry on their lapels as a badge of honor. Shame on them. Shame on all the uninformed and fearful Americans who listen to them. No Syrian refugees in my state, they bray. Keep the Syrians out, they bellow. No Muslims to be admitted to the US, they holler, as though that notion weren’t just illegal but immoral as well. They know nothing of the dynamics of the Middle East. They know nothing about Islam. They know nothing about the lives of decent Muslim people whose homes and livelihoods have been obliterated and from whom all opportunity for a decent life has been taken by murderous zealots who do nothing but terrorize and destroy, often in the name of God and the great Islamic faith. These jackals of the American right have driven our political life into the gutter. They want to respond to the spilling of innocent blood with even more spilling of innocent blood. They live according to the myth of redemptive violence, a myth that leads only to more violence and can never truly solve any problem. Despicable is too kind a word for them. If I didn’t believe deeply in freedom of speech I would want to see them stopped by legal means from spreading their hatred and their lies. That’s what our American political life has come to. Ignoramuses pretending to be patriots. Bigots claiming to care about safety and security. Fools who know nothing about how violence really works—and doesn’t work. Dunces willfully blind to the way their ignorant anti-Arab, anti-Muslim vitriol aids the purveyors of hate that they think they’re opposing. And legions of uninformed Americans so unpracticed in the skills of critical thinking that they can’t see through the lies and the posturing and reject these peddlers of falsehood and hatred for the despicable asses they are.

Our democracy is being corrupted by power hungry idiots who don’t know the truth, don’t care about the truth, and are perfectly happy to corrupt the truth for their own narrow, selfish political ends. Are we going to wake up? Are we going to start to think and not just react? I hope so, but the signs aren’t good. It is hard to underestimate the intelligence not of all American voters but of a lot of them. There are easily enough ignorant and bigoted Americans that these merchants of hatred get more of a hearing than they deserve, they actually deserving none at all. Heaven help us. God help us. Lord knows we need the help.