Forgive the Internet Speak: But This!!!

This!!, with a dash of no shit Sherlock.

"A common meme on the left is that racism is driving the hatred of Obama. I think the root is deeper and scarier: it is shadow projection.

Our ego wants to believe we are wonderful, and so cannot tolerate evidence to the Obama-joker contrary. Consider America. As good as we are, we have a dark side and our actions often have dark consequences. We are large and cast a large shadow. If we were a more mature people we would simply own our dark side, integrate it into part of our self knowledge, and act accordingly. However American mythology says that we are the good country, and to maintain that the pure version of that belief, we are willfully ignorant of our faults. In the minds of many “patriotic” Americans, we have no dark side. Unwilling to own our dark side, we project our shadow onto others.

The Cold War gave us a long period as “the good country” as the Soviet Union gave us a steady (and objectively evil) force onto which we could project our shadow. After the fall of communism we finally found Saddam Hussein to play that role, which clouded our perceptions of the real Saddam (and again, he was objectively evil). Since the Iraq war we’ve looked for a new target onto which to project our shadow. Perennial candidates China, North Korea, and Iran don’t quite suit our needs, and “the terrorists” finally wore thin. I have wondered who our next victim would be. Now we know."

Poster on "The Daily Dish, 09/14/09:

When I was very small my very conservative father told me that he though my grandmother's Thanksgiving dinner was the best in the world because it was my grandmother's and that my mother's breakfast was the best in the world because it was my mother's, and furthermore this is what it meant to love something. He is on record then in his belief that to love a person or thing is necessarily to consider her or it to be the best in all things. The thought of love and pride being independent of each other is inconceivable. (Remember the flap over Mdm. Obama's 'proud of my country for the first time' comment.) Rather it is love and scrutiny that can not possibly exist in the same mind. (Just try to forget the mountain of 'why do you hate America' crap after 9/11)

In the absence of a quasi-divine monarch on which to project everything we like about ourselves we have instead deified the lifestyle of the White small-towners and suburbanites who have historically been our ruling class. Consider now what social conditions pose the biggest threat to the regal myth of "Real America"...
1. Inequities in education,income, and health care caused largely by historical racial oppression.
2. Wasted resources and environmental degradation caused by suburban sprawl,

... and you go a long way towards explaining why American hostility towards liberals is so intense. The Right's hatred of 'big government', its often paranoid suspicion of state-directed reform, is based largely on the fact that to acknowledge that the state has a legitimate role to play in society is to acknowledge that society is human, requires conscious direction, does not maintain equilibrium by itself as does an atomic clock.

* Of course, there is one famous exception to the right's belief that government has no legitimate role to play in society. It is perfectly eager to use the State as a totem of patriarchal authority. This is why many right-wingers who proclaim the fiercest hatred of 'big government' will tolerate no criticism of military of police power, which are indisputably the twin engines of tyranny for any state that chooses to be tyrannical.

If you wonder how reasonably intelligent people can believe patent nonsense; such as Al Gore leading the entire scientific world in a Marxo/environmental scam, it is for the same reason that reasonably intelligent people pray to a sadomasochistic zombie. They do not consider their obligation to American society to be based on voluntary agreement to a social contract. America, and the White middle-class rural/suburban lifestyle that is supposedly the essence of America, is a thing beyond scrutiny, it is a thing they must believe in. Their worthiness as persons, as well as yours and mine, is utterly dependent on adhering to this belief through all storms.