Wojtek
On Sat, Jan 22, 2011 at 9:20 PM, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
> http://exiledonline.com/we-the-spiteful/
>
> The answer came to me just I was just finishing my book Going Postal.
> Researching and writing that book was a real mind-fuck: spending all those
> isolated months sloshing through Middle American malice. I realized
> something obvious when I pulled back from all that research and looked at
> the Kerry-Bush race: malice and spite are as American as baseball and apple
> pie. But it’s never admitted into our romantic, naïve, sentimental
> understanding of who Americans really are, and what their lives are really
> like.
>
> If the left wants to understand American voters, it needs to once and for
> all stop sentimentalizing them as inherently decent, well-meaning people
> being duped by a tiny cabal of evil oligarchs—because the awful truth is
> that they’re mean, spiteful jerks being duped by a tiny cabal of evil
> oligarchs. The left’s naïve, sentimental, middle-class view of “the people”
> blinds them to all of the malice and spite that is a major premise of Middle
> American life. It’s the same middle-class sentimentality that allowed the
> left to be duped into projecting candidate Obama into the great progressive
> messiah, despite the fact that Obama’s record offered little evidence
> besides skin pigment to support that hope.
>
> ...
>
> [back to 2004]
>
> This is America, not Denmark. In this country, tens of millions of people
> choose to watch FoxNews not simply because Americans are credulous idiots or
> at the behest of some right-wing corporate cabal, but because average
> Americans respect viciousness. They are attracted to viciousness for a lot
> of reasons. In part, it reminds them of their bosses, whom they secretly
> adore. Americans hate themselves for the way they behave in public, always
> smiling and nodding their heads with accompanyingreally?s and uh-huhs to
> show that they’re listening to the other person, never having the guts to
> say what they really feel. So they vicariously scream and bully others into
> submission through right-wing surrogate-brutes. Spending time watching Sean
> Hannity is enough for your average American white male to feel less cowardly
> than he really is.
>
> The left won’t accept this awful truth about the American soul, a beast
> that they believe they can fix “if only the people knew the Truth.”
>
> But what if the Truth is that Americans don’t want to know the Truth? What
> if Americans consciously choose lies over truth when given the chance–and
> not even very interesting lies, but rather the blandest, dumbest and meanest
> lies? What if Americans are not a likeable people?...
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