Sometimes this country seems like an absurdist drama is playing out before our eyes. Tea party rallies with slogans of hate and prejudice; concealed weapons among the crowds; placards reading “Bury Obamacare along with Kennedy” hoisted aloft. Presidential debates where one can hear cheers for hundreds of state executions; hurrahs for letting an uninsured man die on a gurney; boos for a U.S. soldier in Afghanistan who is gay. It’s an endless list, macabre and bizarre; images laced with terror paraded over and over again in videos; signs held high in some vacuous rage against an African-American president. The toothless mouths of far right-wing evangelicals agape with venomous spit, gang tattoos splattering their bodies from their red necks down to their arms and legs.
And let’s not forget about that Russian academic of a few years ago, who predicted that the United States would implode out of a general economic collapse due to the self-feeding greed of its corporations; out of perverse malaise; out of its arrogance. Could it be that we are tumbling down a Spenglerian path, because of what we have become as a nation? Because those toothless mouths of the evangelicals, their bodies wrapped in the Holy Spirit of the Righteous, spew their disgust for life in such a virulent manner, that their garble has become babel.
It would be a reckless and, indeed, pernicious act to allow the heartless and insane jabberwocky of the most baseless of the base of the far right wing to hold sway over any aspect of American life. We have had a small taste of such an act. Hate. Suspicion. Lies. Hypocrisy. The undermining of the 40,000 or so years that homo sapiens have walked the Earth as an evolved species, more “humane” than the troglodytes they left behind.