It's the Fear, Stupid: How (& Why) McStain Can Win

What the left misunderestimates (my one enduring, favorite Bushism)is how deeply scarred (and scared) Mid-Dull Murka was and still is by the events of IX/XI.

Susan Faludi makes an interesting and important point in her most recent book, “The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America.” It is that ours is a nation literally FOUNDED on fear, and consequent inadequacy rooted in the inability of our fore-fathers to actually do what their history and mythology proclaimed was their PRIMARY responsibility: "Protecting" their women and children from injury, and providing for their sustenance.

Unfortunately, it was damn near impossible to do in colonial America, for about the first 300 years, or so. There arose from this contradiction a huge space for cognitive dissonance. Their mythologies were making promises the realities could not sustain. A LOT of 'em perished, many more were injured, thousands of children and women were captured, 'property' (which of course was one of the problems) was 'wantonly' destroyed, settlements were ravaged. Yet they were the chosen, building their 'cities on the hill.' This was not something the Murkin psyche took very well, and the myth of exceptionalism is probably something of a national psycho-social over-corrective/compensation to the manifest failures the earliest settlers endured, at the hands of "indians" who, if one followed out the logic through time, were very much the first 'insurgents.'

Anyway, Murkins are deeply and inherently (perhaps endemically) fearful folk in consequence. The events and the rhetoric of the last 7 years have ratcheted up this deep, consuming fear/inadequacy thing so that (seemingly) the only things that will appease or assuage it is to seek out new insurgenciess to quell (that is, brown people to murder).

McStain sez yesterday the only person qualified to be Preznit is the person who knows that brown-skinned terrists are hte greatest danger to Murkins, Murkinism, and all those eternal verities that are Murka. He's gonna run on that, and I believe he can--will--win with it.