Mr. President, When Do We Stop
Running away from who we are?
When do you stop feeding your friends and our values to a pack of mad dogs whose hunger for hate will never be satiated?
What is most affecting for me about this little scene from the "West Wing" is Toby's sense of exhaustion. It isn't merely that the Right gets every one of its "facts" wrong; it is the enervating sense that this is a conversation which everyone has already had hundreds of times.
It resonates so strongly because every Liberal I know has sat where Toby is sitting and knows that no matter how many hundreds of times you correct them, point out their ideology's faults and failures and their leaders' factual mistakes, outright lies and moral hypocrisies -- some small, some large and some genuinely Apocalyptic -- there is absolutely no chance whatsoever that they will ever change their minds or their behavior, or even conceded that your opinion, while different from theirs, might not be part of a vast Rezko/ACORN/Muslim/Commie conspiracy, but an honorable position arrived at by, y'know, reading something other than "Glenn Beck's Common Sense" and thinking something other than what Rush Limbaugh shat into your ear the day before.
None.
When do we publicly stop pretending that the modern Right does not despise this country -- our country -- and can never be appeased and will never be satisfied until everything that we care about and everything this nation should be proud of is buried in an unmarked, mass grave beneath a single, White, Christian Conservative WalMart that stretches from sea to shining sea, and whose Electronics section shows nothing but acre after acre of teevees, all turned to FoxNews -- now just called The News -- featuring an endless loop of President Palin and Vice President Beck ranting and baiting about the next group of sinister, imaginary enemies at which they have decided to point their army of slack-jawed, single-digit-IQ "patriots".
That is the hard truth about what is breaking this nation's back, and your job above all else is to look the American people in the eye and tell us the hard truths that we don't want to hear, and that our media categorically will not discuss for fear of losing market share.
Your job is to lead.
To. Lead. Us.
And if you are not up for that hard job, then what in the world are you doing in our White House?
Running away from who we are?
When do you stop feeding your friends and our values to a pack of mad dogs whose hunger for hate will never be satiated?
What is most affecting for me about this little scene from the "West Wing" is Toby's sense of exhaustion. It isn't merely that the Right gets every one of its "facts" wrong; it is the enervating sense that this is a conversation which everyone has already had hundreds of times.
It resonates so strongly because every Liberal I know has sat where Toby is sitting and knows that no matter how many hundreds of times you correct them, point out their ideology's faults and failures and their leaders' factual mistakes, outright lies and moral hypocrisies -- some small, some large and some genuinely Apocalyptic -- there is absolutely no chance whatsoever that they will ever change their minds or their behavior, or even conceded that your opinion, while different from theirs, might not be part of a vast Rezko/ACORN/Muslim/Commie conspiracy, but an honorable position arrived at by, y'know, reading something other than "Glenn Beck's Common Sense" and thinking something other than what Rush Limbaugh shat into your ear the day before.
None.
When do we publicly stop pretending that the modern Right does not despise this country -- our country -- and can never be appeased and will never be satisfied until everything that we care about and everything this nation should be proud of is buried in an unmarked, mass grave beneath a single, White, Christian Conservative WalMart that stretches from sea to shining sea, and whose Electronics section shows nothing but acre after acre of teevees, all turned to FoxNews -- now just called The News -- featuring an endless loop of President Palin and Vice President Beck ranting and baiting about the next group of sinister, imaginary enemies at which they have decided to point their army of slack-jawed, single-digit-IQ "patriots".
That is the hard truth about what is breaking this nation's back, and your job above all else is to look the American people in the eye and tell us the hard truths that we don't want to hear, and that our media categorically will not discuss for fear of losing market share.
Your job is to lead.
To. Lead. Us.
And if you are not up for that hard job, then what in the world are you doing in our White House?
driftglass
Comments