1 Boring Old Man

I was mentioning Patrick Buchanan‘s 1990 Culture Wars speech [Elephant? Fox? symptoms…]. Well he’s still at it – Traditional Americans are losing their nation. It goes along with the theme of my posts Elephant? Fox? symptoms…, Obama’s existence…, Jesus loves the little children…, we all worry…, and anything that come out of Glenn Beck‘s mouth. It’s all the same stuff. Some person or group [Obama, the Democrats, the Liberals, the Progressives, the Secular Saboteurs, the Homosexuals, 1boringoldman] is specifically and deviously motivated to destroy us [America, American Culture, Christianity, White America, moral people] using a variety of doctrines [Communism, Secularism, Atheism, Fascism, Socialism, Racism, Islam].

Traditional Americans are losing their nation
WorldNetDaily Commentary
by Patrick J. Buchanan
October 20, 2009

… the alienation and radicalization of white America began long before Obama arrived. He acknowledged as much when he explained Middle Pennsylvanians to puzzled progressives in that closed-door meeting in San Francisco. Referring to the white working-class voters in the industrial towns decimated by job losses, Obama said: "They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."

Yet, we had seen these folks before. They were Perotistas in 1992, opposed NAFTA in 1993 and blocked the Bush-Kennedy McCain amnesty in 2007. In their lifetimes, they have seen their Christian faith purged from schools their taxes paid for, and mocked in movies and on TV. They have seen their factories shuttered in the thousands and their jobs outsourced in the millions to Mexico and China. They have seen trillions of tax dollars go for Great Society programs, but have seen no Great Society, only rising crime, illegitimacy, drug use and dropout rates.

They watch on cable TV as illegal aliens walk into their country, are rewarded with free educations and health care and take jobs at lower pay than American families can live on – then carry Mexican flags in American cities and demand U.S. citizenship. They see Wall Street banks bailed out as they sweat their next paycheck, then read that bank profits are soaring, and the big bonuses for the brilliant bankers are back. Neither they nor their kids ever benefited from affirmative action, unlike Barack and Michelle Obama.

They see a government in Washington that cannot balance its books, win our wars or protect our borders. The government shovels out trillions to Fortune 500 corporations and banks to rescue the country from a crisis created by the government and Fortune 500 corporations and banks.

America was once their country. They sense they are losing it. And they are right.

While he’s riding the current Republican Talking Point ["it’s not racism"], he’s speaking from the point of view of white working class Americans without hurling accusations of motive at the opponents. That’s laudable, at least relatively laudable in a climate where wild paranoid blaming is rampant. But he doesn’t go back far enough. He doesn’t mention driving the American Indians from their lands. He doesn’t include these folks fighting and dying in the Civil War to preserve slavery of African Americans. He doesn’t mention the 100 years of forced Segregation in the South. He doesn’t acknowledge the prejudice against european immigrants in the industrial north that left some deep scars on my own family.

The problems he lists are certainly problems, but they don’t have much to do with his topic. Immigrants don’t run the Banks or Wall Street. Christianity is not the State Religion of America [and in case he hasn’t noticed, the Mexican Immigrants he’s talking about are among the most uniformly Christian people in the world]. And he might check on the "only rising crime, illegitimacy, drug use and dropout rates." He’d be surprised at how those statistics actually play out. He might take a peek at the faces of Wall Street that just did us in. They are lily white.