Over The Top

I had just turned 50 and was standing in the checkout line at some store. Among the items they were trying to give a last-minute impulse push were a few greeting cards.

One of the cards seemed targeted particularly to me. It was a birthday card. It said that once you were over the hill you started picking up speed.

I think that in the arena of our public discourse we are definitely over the top and tearing down the hill at a breakneck speed.

The rhetoric to which we are constantly exposed is certainly not deserving of being called considered. It is to the point that real debating, even real arguing is no longer possible.

I just noticed where Sarah Palin is now claiming that Obama is “bringing us back . . . to days before the Civil War” when racial discrimination was prevalent. When racial discrimination was prevalent? Does she mean that it hasn’t been prevalent since the Civil War? I guess she is guilty of a special, twisted, negative hyperbole. Whatever, her claim can hardly be considered to be connected with whatever Obama has done, the present reality or actual history.

Rick Santorum’s latest claim is that, “Obamacare is, in fact, the death knell for freedom.” Really? My first thought is, ‘Does he really think that what everyone is calling health care reform is really health care reform?’ Were the changes embodied in the Affordable Care Act significant enough to effect our freedom? Is our freedom that weak? Is it that tenuous? If so, we are in deep shit from factors and forces far more powerful and pervasive than Obama’s tinkering with health care insurance.

Are there any facts involved in Rick’s claim? First, there has been no health care reform. The insurance companies were required to enroll a couple’s offspring up to the age of 26. There goes our freedom. They were not permitted to deny someone for a preexisting condition. Well, I guess that kills the insurance companies’ freedom.

The companies were required to offer affordable policies to those not part of a group. People were required to purchase insurance. They were denied the freedom to force the taxpayer to pay their medical bills. Those too poor to purchase a policy were forced to allow the government to help them pay for it.

Those items cover 30 million of the uninsured. The other 17 million are unaffected. At least 17 million escaped “the death knell for freedom.”

Rick also claims defeating Obama makes the 2012 election the most important “maybe in the history of this country.” Is that true? Do you agree? The elections of 1860 and 1932 are the first that come to mind. Given a little time for reflection, it would seem to to be an important election only if one of the alternatives wins.

Obama is a communist, a socialist, a fascist, Hitler, a Kenyan, a radical, a _______ (fill in the blank). It’s possible he is a socialist. He hired all those people from Wall Street to run the economy. They are devotees of corporate socialism. I’ll have to research the others. At least those investigators Trump hired should be back from Hawaii soon.

Trying to list all of the lies and hyperbole would get me in Dutch with my Internet host. Thankfully, Rick and Sarah provided their screeds on just one day.

The point is that when one side debases the issues with lies and hyperbole the other party must resort to the same tactics or keep quiet. There can be no debate. There can be no argument.

It eliminates any possibility of discourse. It eliminates compromise. It eliminates democracy. It severely damages society. Those doing this are destructive of everything this country was intended to represent. They call themselves patriots. They call themselves Christian. They are neither. Those words are meant as camouflage.

These people may have one or more reasons for their use of these tactics. Their reason may be ego, or power, or celebrity, or to change the world to match their little delusions. The most dangerous are the ones that believe their own vile claims.

We are certainly going downhill at an ever increasing speed. It is, or is quickly becoming, beyond our control. That way lies disaster. Is there nothing we can do? Perhaps those altruists at the pharmaceutical corporations will develop one of their miracle drugs for us. Could they actually develop the Soma that Aldous Huxley wrote of?