The Illness: Conservative Media

One can listen and watch only so long before there is an innate human trigger-response  that pulls one away: the need to vomit. Yet, this built-in reflex seems to be missing or somehow malfunctioning in certain Americans. Apparently they have lost that stimulus-response mechanism and can tolerate the babble and blather endlessly with seemingly no physical effects.

Charles Blow, columnist for the NYT penned an OpEd yesterday curiously titled, Pitchforks and Pistols. His opening paragraph:

Lately I’ve been consuming as much conservative media as possible (interspersed with shots of Pepto-Bismol) to get a better sense of the mind and mood of the right. My read: They’re apocalyptic. They feel isolated, angry, betrayed and besieged. And some of their “leaders” seem to be trying to mold them into militias.

Further into the article, Blow quotes Chuck Norris- yes THAT Chuck Norris:

“How much more will Americans take? When will enough be enough? And, when that time comes, will our leaders finally listen or will history need to record a second American Revolution?”

Many of my posts here on this blog over the past 8 years contained nearly the same thought. The Patriot Act, torture, Guantanamo, the preemptive War on Iraq, Abu Ghraib, warrantless wiretapping, spying on peace groups caused me to wonder where the democracy of our Founding Fathers had gone. I, too, called for a second American Revolution.

I wonder what stoked Norris's fire? After all, Bush, Cheney, Gonzales and Rumsfeld are all gone.

Blow reminds us that 'strong language can poison weak minds, as it did in the case of Timothy McVeigh. (We sometimes forget that not all dangerous men are trained by Al Qaeda.)'

Blow states this ominous fact in his conclusion: According to the F.B.I., there have been 1.2 million more requests for background checks of potential gun buyers from November to February than there were in the same four months last year.

Pitchforks and Pistols, he titled his piece. I think I got it just now. The recent rash of madmen gunning down a dozen or more fellow citizens does raise an eyebrow or two- on those who have been paying attention.