Violent Rhetoric

It started while the election was still going on, with Sarah Palin accusing Obama of "palling around with terrorists." The "if you're not with us you're with the terrorists" stuff had been going on for years, though, so accusing people who disagree with you of treason is everyday stuff now, I guess.

But the wingers' lost cause of an election has made them even angrier than they were before, and the rhetoric has grown noticeably more violent lately. At a political discussion group I sometimes frequent (and which shall remain nameless here), the rhetoric coming from the right has gotten truly scary the past few days.

One guy snarled that "the libs here wouldn't know reality if they had it shoved up their anus," and added a few choice words about reality taking on the dimensions of fence posts. Another, just this morning said the leftists "on this site" wouldn't know reality "if it smacked them upside the head with a two-by-four."

Not only am I unamused by this kind of overt rage and hostility, I take it very seriously, as a threat. When a group of people with so little capacity for introspection as contemporary American reactionaries begins to hold their political adversaries responsible for their seething anger, I know something bad is going to happen. Very bad, very frightening, and ending in situations in which people are required to defend themselves.

It would be too much to expect that people whose perceptions are crippled by emotional dysfunction accept their diminished power and the changes in American society represented by Obama's election (among other things) and gracefully agree to disagree. I'm reminded of quotes I've seen from Mein Kampf in which Hitler, ten years before coming to power, said the Jews who had betrayed and continued to betray Germany should be "held under gas."

The thought is the father of the deed, and it would be a mistake to take violent language lightly.