I'm Baaaaack

After a week of sun, rain, relaxation and plenty of driving, it's back to the grind. For a good part of the week I was not at all tuned into the news, so I'm still in catch up mode. And though I can't resist including a link to Bob Novak's Meltdown, I want to talk about a couple of things that struck me at the beginning and end of my trip.

When you're driving through the U.S., the radio dial is a wasteland of hateful venom. As I've mentioned before, there's a lot anger on the airwaves and most of it is directed at liberals who are not in power. Out of morbid curiosity, I flipped around from station to station on the AM dial and heard voices who sounded different but who were using the same rhetoric. The usual schtick - liberals hate America, the ACLU is a terrorist organization, yada, yada, yada. If you listen to this for a little bit, you can't help but wonder how this kind of radio is so successful. It's the same message over and over again, day after day, and in a mean-spirited way. Okay, I'll admit that some of it was actually amusing, and I can imagine that people of that political bent would find that programming entertaining and a release for their frustrations. But what is it that is causing them to be frustrated? Considering that the country is run by Republicans, slagging the Democrats and liberals seems like a monumental waste of energy. Thomas Frank wrote about the lingering backlash against 60's counterculture that helped shape the modern conservative movement, but there aren't too many tie-dyed hippies out on the streets these days. On top of that, many things about the current Republican leadership should be a huge turn-off to traditional conservatives, yet the so-called "dittoheads" continue to trumpet their fearless leader and figuratively lynch anyone who suggests that he is less than perfect. It was toward the end of my trip that I saw the connection.

On my last night in New Jersey, watching TV to try to forget about my sunburn from the beach, I saw Easy Rider for the first time. I wasn't quite sure what to expect, but I wasn't disappointed. There's a lot I can say about that movie, but I'm not a film critic and that isn't the point of my mentioning it. I bring it up because after my initial reaction of it as a representation of the time in which it was made, I had a sort of epiphany. It suddenly occured to me that Easy Rider was an (unknownigly) prescient allegory for our own time. Recall that in the film, the "straightlaced" people in each town the bikers passed were intolerant and violent toward anyone with hair or clothes they didn't like, and local authorities turned a blind eye to such intolerance and violence. The violence portrayed was obviously an exaggeration in all but extreme cases, but it's safe to say that just being "different" was seen as a crime in many parts of the country. Jack Nicholson's character explained that what they really feared was expression of freedom.

Oh yeah, they're gonna talk to you, and talk to you, and talk to you about individual freedom, but they see a free individual, it's gonna scare 'em.

Fast forward to today. Think about the war in Iraq. How many times have you heard people representing the Right say, "our troops are fighting to protect our freedoms," but then brand those who exercise their freedom of dissent as "anti-American"? Recall that a White House press secretary once took it upon himself to advise that, "People should be careful what they say." Dissent is equated with treason. The President himself doesn't tolerate anybody but yes-men around him. It is now ideas and speech that are under attack rather than long hair and leather jackets. Instead of homogeneous look and dress, it is homogeneous thought that a significant segment of the Right would like to enforce. Ironically, the Nicholson character was regarded as a friend by the cops who regularly busted him for his drunkenness and loathed anybody anti-establishment. I guess back then it wasn't yet considered treasonous to be a lawyer working for the ACLU. But the connection to Thomas Frank and the 60's "backlash" became more clear. I'm being simplistic about this now, because religious factors play a key role too, but I'll leave that for another post. (It's also kind of ironic that most bikers today are Righties. Then again, the Fonda and Hopper characters didn't seem like idealogues of any kind, and actually sold their own souls, causing Fonda's crisis of conscience. Wait, I forgot that I wasn't going to talk about the movie...)

Personally, I don't share the same kind of fatalism that was expressed in Easy Rider. I don't think society as a whole is intolerant to truth, even if the loudest and most powerful segments are. Recent poll numbers indicate that people are starting to see through the smoke and mirrors and propaganda machines. The internet is a wonderful thing.