Hate, Incorporated

My political blog this month was going to be entitled "America the Unfixable." Its premise was that our economy, infrastructure, and exploding budgetary deficits could not possibly be corrected with the political system we have now. Congress is beset by self-interest and burdensome procedural rules, and the anti-tax philosophy has so suffused its members that not a one would ever dare suggesting a raise in taxes to actually start paying for the services our population demands. And then there's the execrable Supreme Court decision that allows corporations to control the purse strings of election campaigns.

Okay, I still believe all this to be sadly true, but the recent--and nearly miraculous--passage of the Health Care Reform Act put a slight dent in my thoroughgoing cynicism. Just a dent, though. It was nice to see that progressive legislation can actually be passed, even if takes a couple of generations and the frantic, usually vain efforts of a series of Democratic presidents. The actual provisions of the Health Care bill are not very exciting, though, and only incrementally helpful. It will take further courageous legislation to move us toward, if not single-payer system like Medicare, at least a public option that will really work to whittle down health-insurance costs.

What has amazed--and depressed--me about the entire saga of this bill is the vigorous, dedicated rage with which its rather benign provisions have been attacked. We all know about the propoganda war which the Republicans nearly won, in which loud, ginormous lies were screeched throughout the media and the corporately staged Tea Party rallies so that they nearly became de facto truths. Death Panels! Government takeover of Health! Abortion promotion! Hitler! Stalin! Socialism! Radicalism! These slogans were a lot easier for people to grasp than "Ending preexisting conditions" and "recision" and the poorly named "public options." So the negative gained traction while the positive stood on its own quiet merits. Certainly a recipe for defeat.

What historians will say from a distance, though, is that the fight was never about health care at all, but about the President, and the fact that a black man (well, sort of a black man) was elected, and worse, proved himself brighter by a parsec than all his Republican adversaries. The Republican strategy has always been to defeat the primary facet of Obama's agenda and cut off his political future at the knees. The way to do that was to appeal to the strongest emotions, the linchpin of Republican strategy since the Nixon years. Those emotions, of course, are fear and hate.

For some reason I am reminded of the classic fight in Dickens' "A Tale of Two Cities" between the evil Madame DeFarge and the loyal nursemaid Miss Pross. In their climactic one-on-one, Miss Pross managed to get the best of the vengeful knitter because, as Dickens' wrote, she represented the tenacity of love, which was so much greater than that of hate. Well, okay, but as Oscar Wilde had Miss Prism say forty years later, "That is what Fiction means!"

Because, unfortunately, hatred and fear have played much more of a dominant role in human affairs than love and charity. I don't need to retrace the historical record. How many wars have been fought over love and benignity? So when trying to incite action, the Republicans, through their Tea Party surrogates, knew how to rouse that anger. So we had the horrendous demonstrations in Washington prior to the final vote in which Democrats had to endure racist and homophobic epithets from mindless idiots, and even from a congressman (the mindless idiot from Texas who yelled "Baby Killer" at Bart Stupak).

Well, surprise, it didn't work, at least not in the short run. But there are Republican beneficiaries, and I don't mean those whose paralyzed children can now get health care or whose prescription drug "doughnut holes" are being filled. I mean specifically the media madmen such as Glenn Beck and most especially Rush Limbaugh, the purveyors of ignorance and hatred, whose ratings will only go up because of the emotions they stir.

Rush Limbaugh was apoplectic, as usual, after the Health Bill passage, declaiming against the "pro" voters as "bastards" who need to be destroyed. I would much prefer he follow his own threat and move to Costa Rica, but that's not where he is going to earn his 35 million dollars a year. Thirty-five million dollars a year to foment hatred! I know that Keith Olbermann uses hyperbole when he calls a character like Limbaugh "the worst person in the world," but in this case, Limbaugh might be just that.

The Republicans are both afraid of Limbaugh and in thrall to him because he does so much of their dirty work. Now I'm not so naive to think that Democrats have not resorted to their own demagoguery, particularly on the issue of the Republican's threat to Social Security. But the fibs the Democrats have told are trivial in comparison to the Big Lies which are vomited endlessly by Boehner and Cantor and Beck and Palin and Limbaugh. And the Democrats do not ever lower themselves to the utilization of Hatred as policy.

The heinous tactics of the Republicans in the political pursuit of White House recapture will eventually prove once again that they only know how to look backward, not forward (or ever in a mirror), and they will be left in the dustbin of history.