It would be easy to laugh, but don't...

Thursday is sitting in for Friday again this week, playing all the tunes from the repertoire of the Popular Dude. A four day week comes to a close and a three day weekend awaits.

Veteran's Day holiday is tomorrow, when much of the nation will pretend it gives a rip about our veterans while simultaneously begrudging them the support and medical care so many of our returning soldiers need. Stars and stripes will wave across a hundred retail sales flyers as Americans show their patriotic appreciation at the mall (lower case, as in shopping not National). Someday, I hope, we will honor our veterans, those who return and those who don't, with the things they need rather than one-day-of-the-year gratuitous flag waving.

Speaking of gratuitous flag waving, this week saw yet another episode of that most-painful reality/comedy show, the Republican Presidential Debates. Gail Collins has an insightful and witty piece in the NYT titled, Wait! Don't Tell Me, which pretty well sums up the current state of choice for Republican voters. It would be so easy to laugh at this comedic collection of candidates, to dismiss them all as non-starters, but don't. Because unless something really unexpected happens in the very near future, one of these folks will be nominated as the Republican presidential candidate, and could very easily be our next President.

I remember a bus ride downtown one evening. A colleague and I were heading to an evening Russian language class down in Pioneer Square, Seattle, and he was worried about a particular Republican presidential candidate who clearly wasn't the brightest light on the stage but who seemed to be gaining in popularity. At the time, I dismissed those concerns. "Look, when it really comes time to vote, nobody is really going to elect someone who can't string an intelligent sentence together to be the leader of our nation." Needless to say, his concerns were well placed, I was dead wrong.

I hadn't yet come to terms with the politics of hatred. Unleashed and fanned by political operatives like Karl Rove, Newt Gingrich, and a few other Neocons, this was a brand of politics that stops at nothing to fan the flames of hatred and unrest. The goal isn't to build a party of supporters, but to create an un-party of anti-supporters. It plays on American voter apathy by recognizing that it doesn't take a majority of the electorate to throw an election. If you can stir enough folks up with lies and misinformation, get them good and unreasonably angry at the opposing candidate(s), they will turn out in force to vote for nearly anything that is against. Unless voter turnout is very high, this wave of hatred voting is often enough to swing elections.

The appalling beauty of this strategy is that it is so easy to pull off. It doesn't take critical thinking skills to understand simple one-phrase, emotional appeals. In fact, the more emotional the phrase the less important critical examination becomes to most. That candidate will tear apart your families with their pro-gay agenda, and that candidate wants to kill babies, and that one over there wants your every-last-penny to fund huge Socialist welfare programs for lazy un-working bums. Combined with the kind of effortless reach today's media and social media tools provide, you have a formula that would make Joseph Goebbels weep with envy.

Today's fanned hatred is mostly directed at our current President, and let's be totally honest here: it is racial at its core. We may like to think we have made significant progress in dealing with racism in this country in recent years, but the visceral power of hate-driven politics quickly strips that charade clear and exposes the raw broken skin underneath the costume. Listen to voters who have been fanned into voting against Obama and you will hear intense hatred, all too readily channeled because it was all too already-there. The depth of passion these voices emit is far in excess of any of the issues being debated. Obama is a black man, he is smart, articulate, wealthy, and attractive, and he holds the highest office in our country. For many, that is more than they can accept. They are seething for a reason to get him out of office, and any false-truth will do.

How do we know this? Because Obama's policies, the few he has been able to drive through an intentionally and strategically obstructionist Congress, have made some small positive difference (the scale of the economic disaster he inherited being so large to begin with) in lives of most of the same folks who hate him so passionately. There is a total disconnect between the contrived issues cited as reasons for wanting Obama out of office and the depth of hatred with which those flimsy excuses are spat out.

Let us also recognize that this hatred-driven politics is like unleashed fiendfyre, from the last of the Harry Potter stories (don't pull that face, you know you read it, too!). Terrifying, all-consuming, indiscriminate, and uncontrollable, it destroys everything it can reach. From the Potter story, "...the flames chased them as though they were alive, sentient, intent upon killing them. Now the fire was mutating, forming a gigantic pack of fiery beasts: Flaming serpents, chimaeras, and dragons rose and fell and rose again, and the detritus of centuries on which they were feeding was thrown up in the air into their fanged mouths, tossed high on clawed feet, before being consumed by the inferno." Ask them in Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia, Ireland, Palestine, Israel, and much of Africa what the politics of hatred begets, and you may hear a response that sounds a lot like the above quote.

Ok, we haven't gotten to that point, yet, but we are playing with fire and we delude ourselves if we think we are in any way controlling it. Hatred is the low-hanging fruit of emotion. It is easy enough to use hated, channeled through carefully crafted propaganda, to drive enough voters to the polls to vote for anything-that-isn't-that-guy. The cherry on top of this toxic sunday is that this kind of divisive rhetoric disenfranchises larger blocks of other voters, who will then stay away from the polls and politics. That combination of hatred and apathy could easily result in one of the clowns currently participating in the Republican debates becoming our next President.

It would be easy to laugh at these so-called candidates on stage, forgetting their lines, misquoting history, and making statements that would get them laughed out of a high school classroom. One might even be willing to laugh off (with nagging discomfort) the fact that the largely self-selecting audience for these shows applauds when it should cringe and boos when it should applaud. We would do so, however, at our peril. One of these folks could very easily be our next president, and just look around at the sheer scale of the consequences from the last time that happened.

On a delightfully different note, today's short commute soundtrack was very diverse and rich:

- Ludovico Einaudi: Divenire
- David Ford: Train
- Gary McFarland & G : Mizrab
- Sam Baker: Slots
- Ron Carter: Es Woll Uns Gott Genadig Sein