Until I saw that the link actually went to Fox News, I seriously thought S.Z. was making up the quotations from Glenn Beck here. This was my favorite one:
The other thing this thing is about is incompetence. I mean, how many terrible decisions has this administration made? I mean really — ones that are destroying the country, it’s almost like they’re intentionally trying to destroy it? Oh, did I say that? I better take another swig of root beer.
As it happens, I was out and about yesterday, and at one point I stopped in my local chain bookstore. And when I say “local”, I’m referring to a small town that exemplifies Real Myrrhkah, with all that entails, both positive and negative. So as you can imagine, the display stands up front are overwhelmingly top-heavy with bait for the kind of people who probably only visit a bookstore if Beck or Rush (the reactionary blowhards, not the musicians) have urged them to. There’s more teabag worship there than you’ll find in some quaint English hamlets, is what I’m saying. And while I’ve noticed this hyperbole before, it was especially striking to see, collected in one place, how many books are basically about “How X is DESTROYING AMERICA and Y may be our last chance to save it!”, with X representing something to do with leftism the majority of the time. Check it out for yourself (and that’s just the ones that literally have “destroying America” in the title; many others hum the tune without actually singing the lyrics). It’s a little counterintuitive to me to think that a nation that survived the Civil War and the Great Depression is too feeble to resist the merciless onslaught of the ACLU and secular liberalism, but then again, I’m not exactly the target audience here.
(Update: Okay, forget Beck — this is my new favorite “destroying America” example, from the intellectual giant who brought us “Wang Dang Sweet Poontang”. He even invokes Che himself!)
Continuing with the theme from the last post, it’s equal parts amusing and sad to see a group of people who, by all rights, should be thrilled at how much power and influence they have in this country, living in a delirious fever dream, beset on all sides by the forces of darkness, always one small misstep away from complete ruin. Once again, I say John Calvin should be considered one of the Founding Fathers for the psychological, if not political, influence he’s had on this country.
I do realize that people generally need to feel a sense of psychological balance. After all, don’t you start to feel leery when it seems like too many things are going right for you lately? Don’t you start nervously anticipating the inevitable reversal of fortune, to the point where it adversely affects your ability to enjoy what you have? But this — this is just pathological, to be this terrified of the phantom of radical leftism in a nation where milquetoast liberalism has been in pell-mell retreat for the last few decades, with no hopeful signs of a renewed vibrancy in the foreseeable future. I mean, if we’re truly living in the glorious U.S.S.A., wouldn’t you think that I could get my books from AK Press in less than three or four weeks?