The Sleep of Reason Amid Wild Dogs and Gin (Joe Bageant revisited.)

[chill_wind]

"I tell you, America is goddamned weird and getting weirder."

- Joe Bageant

*****************************************************************************************************************

Like a million of you, I've been onboard for Obama from the first day and have a GREAT feeling for Obama's chances. He's going to be opening up shop in my small city sometime this month a few blocks from my house and I plan join up and BE THERE.

Meanwhile, apart from the untamed feral dog metaphor, which is perhaps appropriate as ever this morning, I thought of even more clips of this writing by Joe Bageant.
He wrote it in January of 2005.

It got me to remembering just how much it's not enough (IMHO) to reiterate the famous "Are we better off than we were four years ago?" and to assume stating the obvious will somehow do the job THIS TIME around. Maybe it will. It certainly SHOULD. But going by just that one metric alone, McCain shouldn't even have one stinkin rank and file supporter. ...

Stating the obvious about the creeping fascism of the rad right has not worked all that well the last eight years. Maybe we should ask ourselves "Do we have any fewer Shaggies than we did four years ago?" Do we? I'll go with Bageant. I'm staying firmly out of the The Politics of The Comfort Zone.

So no. No kid gloves for Sarah Palin. We still live in the same country full of RRR crazies and slack-jawed Jerry Springer idiots who turned out four years ago.

She's bared her fangs and says she's tough, so GoBama. GoBiden. Go DU.--Go get her . We can't let this be anything BUT a landslide this time and that takes all_the_tools we have. It's not like they haven't freely handed us the hammer.

Keep digging. Keep posting. Keep pushing back at the media. Any alternative outcome for this country is just too ugly and grim to even think about.

The Sleep of Reason Amid Wild Dogs and Gin
The Politics of the Comfort Zone
By JOE BAGEANT

The hardest thing for garden variety American liberals to grasp is what a truly politicized and hateful place much of America has become---one long mean ditch ruled by feral dogs where the standards of civility no longer apply. The second hardest thing for liberals is to admit that they are comfortably insulated in the middle class and are not going to take any risks in the battle for America's soul not as long as they are still living on a good street, sending their kids to Montessori and getting their slice of the American quiche. Call it the politics of the comfort zone.

Ever on the lookout for free food and brand name booze, I slipped over into the comfort zone on New Year's Day, 2005 to a lovely literary party of urbanites who'd flown in from upper East Coast. They all seem to have country places down here in the Shenandoah Valley these days. So as I minced over fresh salmon with a chic liberal book editor, she said: "I am coming to understand how Karl Rove drove so many of the American people to vote for Bush during the election." (pronouncing "people" in that way of overeducated urban liberals everywhere, indicating that she did not consider herself one of them .) And I am thinking: "JESUS CHRIST LADY, IT'S NOT AS IF IT WERE A LONG DRIVE!"

more... lest we forget:

http://www.counterpunch.org/bageant01082005.html

[chill_wind]

1. What have we learned from the last eight years?

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=132&topic_id=6904908&mesg_id=6928499