Saintperle

7/2/13

I hear the names of Kasich, Rick Perry, and the rest ...


When I hear the names of Kasich, Rick Perry, and the rest ... those names and others...
And when I see photos of the smug smiling faces of John Roberts and Antonin Scalia, the dull self-serving stupid faces of Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito -- faces the mind says need a bit of punching or at least a bit of spitting-into -- I think of a comment made by a prominent journalist some years ago.

I think of it when I see how those men are leading the charge of a bunch of towel-snapping butt-buddy gynophobes into passing laws to prevent women from getting birth control, passing laws to require that women's medical procedures traditionally done in doctor's offices (D&C, etc) now must be done in surgical hospital making it virtually impossible that most women will never be able to avail themselves of a constitutionally-guaranteed legal medic procedure (but required by those laws to have a different one, an unnecessary one, for which they will also be required to pay. 

And when I see how they -- in order to prevent these incredibly vicious, proprietary class laws* from being repealed -- are also passing laws to deny the "wrong" people the ability to vote -- preventing access to the American Franchise of the people who they have decided by demographic study applying to gender, race, national origin, educational level, or any of the others varietal aspects that we celebrate in America. In other words, only "the right kind of" white men and the women who agree with them for whatever reason get to vote.

When I hear their names and see their eminently spittable-into faces, I repeat -- I think of the words of a famous Conservative journalist, and think that maybe right now is the time he was speaking of:

"Every normal man must be tempted, at time, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats." H.L. Mencken 

Mencken said a lot of things we would do well to think about these days, although for many years reading him has been dissuaded by the criticism that he was anti-Semitic, normal for his times, although nowhere as virulent as, say, Richard Nixon, Mel Gibson, or pretty much every officer in today's USAirforce holding the rank of Colonel and above.

One of my other favorites of Mencken's observations, when not feeling so bloody-minded, is this one, which has rung true for centuries before him and decades since:

"The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos."**

My test these days, especially in politics, is to recognize "talking points" as vicious malignant slanderous gossip and to totally disregard the possibility of any human worth -- not even that equivalent to a fertilized human egg -- the total lack of human worth of any man or woman who parrots the generally untruthful characterizations that someone else has said, without actually attributing -- as I have here -- without attributing the person who actually said it first, thereby acknowledging that it is not an original thought. (A good example -- anything said by Republicans about the Affordable Care Act or our current president's motives for anything he does.)

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We are divided, in America, into two classes: The Tories on one side, a class of citizens who were raised to believe that the whole of this country was created for their sole benefit, and on the other side, the other 99 per cent of us, the soldier class, the class from which all of you soldiers came. 
USMC Major General Smedley D. Butler to VFW audience, December 1933

** That mirrors the observation made centuries before by John Wilmot, 2d Earl of Rochester (1647-1680), an eminently despicable human being, but one whose powers of observation and wit were rare and historically important. "Any man who calls things by their rightful name will surely be hanged."  (His power of hyperbole was also legendary, the proof of that being that he WASN'T hanged, even though his privileged rank allowed him to see that many other were.

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