The Triumph of Doublespeak: Better Red than Dead?

'Building Red America,' by Thomas B. Edsall No. This is not a book written by a hopelessly delusional member of the American Communist Party. It is about those "red" states, i.e., Republican states, and their prospects for the future. How very smug. Readers of this blog may recall that in my posting on September 11th, I wrote of the Republicans having "grabbed the red flag." The brand of conservative "intellectual" whose hatred of communism was--to put it mildly it appears--visceral, just cannot find enough ways to celebrate its humiliating collapse. What a triumph to have rescued a color from their nefarious hands! The trillions of dollars spent on armaments, propaganda and covert operations might have made of the U.S. the Athens on the hill it pretends to be, rather than a land in which, by the government's own estimates, 30 million of its citizens live in abject poverty. President Eisenhower's warning about these guys fell essentially on deaf ears. Those ears have remained deaf to the ongoing social cost of right wing social engineering. Perhaps a little bit of the world we have created got through during the Katrina debacle ("We're Americans, too!") but by the time New Orleans is covered with theme parks, Americans will have resumed their typical amnesia. In spite of all the reasons one could cite for not celebrating the end of soviet style bureaucracy too loudly, these guys see this as one of those rare historical moments when one must seize the day and take every possible inch of territory while they can. This is a counter-revolution suffused with the kind of fevered zeal that led to the burning of monasteries, the melting down of holy artifacts--and three hundred years of the kind of sectarian violence that these same guys now disingenuously ascribe to Islamic fundamentalists. So, conservative America, enjoy your freshly reacquired color. A lot of Amercians would now truly rather be dead than red.