You go into some of these small
towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs
have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell
through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each
successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna
regenerate and they have not.
Was it any wonder then, that a whole passel of back-woods wretches,
possessed for decades by bellicose and fiscally irresponsible demons both Bushian
and Clintonian, should wind up such a benighted lot of “working-class
lunch-pail folks” bitterly “cling[ing] to guns or religion or antipathy to
people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment . . . as a way to
explain their frustrations,” and needing an Obamic exorcism? None at all.
But there was a little piece of heaven hovering like a pakalolo-scented
brume over fields of bleached-out Danville, OH fescue and Pontiac G8s rusting
on blocks in the front yards of laid-off Monessen, PA steel workers—and that
was Mr. Obama’s promise to
close tax loopholes, roll back, you
know, the tax cuts for the top 1 percent. Obama’s gonna give tax breaks to
middle-class folks and we’re gonna provide health care for every American.
And just so for “Muslims around the world,” as well, whose
“tension has been fed by colonialism
that denied rights and opportunities to many Muslims, and a Cold War in which
Muslim-majority countries were too often treated as proxies without regard to
their own aspirations. Moreover, the sweeping change brought by modernity and
globalization led many Muslims to view the West as hostile to the traditions of
Islam.”
The traditions of
Islam may seem to some of those above-mentioned uncivilized rednecks whose
votes Mr. Obama was courting back then to consist mainly of a Boschian hell of savagery
and brutality in which “enemy” children are exploded on buses, women are used as
human shields and children as human mine-sweepers, mothers, wives, sisters, and
daughters are maimed by genital mutilation, tortured by pre-pubescent marriage,
and destroyed by honor killings, and little boys are turned into sexual slaves
and turned out as whores. If so, he would like them to know those traditions have been woefully
misunderstood.
Even now, as the
alienation of anti-Western Islamism explodes in violence and murder around the
globe, the “othering” of The Other, to use the odious academic
parlance, remains a concern of Mr. Obama’s, and keeps his language careful and Ban
Ki Moony. “Since our
founding, the United States has been a nation that respects all faiths.
We reject all efforts to denigrate the religious beliefs of others,” he says with impeccable banality, then turns inanity to slag: “But there is absolutely no
justification to this type of senseless violence. None. The world
must stand together to unequivocally reject these brutal acts.”
No more Punahou
chooming
over the Dust Belt/Rust Belt for him—he’s president of the Unites States, and he’s progressed: No longer a man condescending to be unsurprised
by the gun-clinging, Bible-thumping skepticism of unemployed Americans, now he’s a “leader”—only one of many—of a world that can stand together, a man unafraid to express a little sympathy for the rocket-slinging,
Koran-pulsing distrust of rioting Muslims, a man urging “all leaders ‘to speak out forcefully against violence
and extremism’ and join the U.S. in confronting the root causes of the rage
across the Muslim world.”
Fair enough: There’s no future in slandering the prophet of
Islam. But what of his latter-day representatives here on earth, whose mission
it is to malign, insult, slander—and incite against—the Jews, “descendants
of apes and pigs,” and as many as possible, before the Mahdi shows up
and/or they ascend to meet their seventy-two virgins or olives or grapes or whatever it is they are going to meet in Heaven? I suppose there’s a future in that.
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