krebscycle

Every  society  has  a conservative elite that generally acts  to defend order and privilege. But when that elite becomes too fearful  or  too proud, like our American conservative elite, it forgets the fragility of social order and presumes to hire the Devil as  a  servant.  The same insanity and hubris that caused Rwandan businessmen to arm the Interahamwe and caused German  financiers to give money to the SA crusade against communism is driving our business elites to wink at the Militias and  End-Times  maniacs, donate  to the neo-confederates, and otherwise open the floodgates under the delusion that the boiling waves will obey.  The  Devil always  comes when called – but he is not so obliging about going away.

Every society has a surfeit of  angry,  bitter,  frustrated  men, brimming  with grievances – real or not. In a functioning society some combination of upward mobility, suppression, social welfare, and  recruitment functions  to  impose  control.   In  a  broken society, the angry men are encouraged to to march in the streets waving machetes or screaming “kill the fags” and  to poison the airwaves with attacks on respect for authority and learning. Somehow the owners of  the  Washington  Post  think that  Ann  Coulter’s  call for the military to target journalists can’t touch them, and Ken Starr’s public pissing on the  rule  of law  won’t have any implications for their rights and privileges. Somehow Ken Mehlman thinks that the anger he has so expertly  exploited  among  NASCAR  dads and marginal suburbanites won’t ever spill into Georgetown. Somehow the boards of directors at  Disneyand and  Viacom  think that teaching children to worship at the Altar of Conan the Barbarian and financing the know-nothing wing of the Republican party can’t blowback on their executive suites and exurban palaces. Somehow the nitwits at the  Hoover Institute  believe that Rush and O’Reiley and the Turner’s diary fan-club  are all anxious to distinguish between good and bad professors.  And at  the heights of government where they dismiss “quaint” notions, nobody reflects on the fates of Nicolai Yezhov and Leon Trotsky.

The fools draw their pentagrams and  light  their  candles,  they chant and sing hoping to bring the Devil into the world and they think, in their madness and folly that  they  will  bind him  to their  will.  They  dance into the abyss – and drag the rest of us with them.

Originally published

Tue Feb 15, 2005 at 08:45:56 AM PST

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/2/15/92708/-Conservatives-call-the-Devil