This much we know: America needs its demons. We need our enemies, our menacing and dark-eyed nemesis, that foreign and terrifying thing we do not understand and against which we must rally and wail, push and pule, fight and destroy.
Communists. Arabs. The Japanese. Blacks. Native Americans. Hippies. Gays. "Gooks." Immigrants. Chinamen. The poor. Women. Teenagers. Vegans. Science. What's the problem with this nation? What's really eating at our soul and threatening our honest love of an angry God, apple pie and giant homoerotic firearms? It ain't us. It's them. They're trying to mess with our heads, steal our freedom, impregnate our virgins, poison the water supply. Damn them to hell, and where's my shotgun?
The sentiment has since grown in fits and farts and boozy burps, fanned by Rush Limbaugh's moron Dittoheads, Glenn Beck's gullible simpletons, and of course, the Tea Party, perhaps the first significant political movement entirely dependent on our failing educational system to survive (my em). Truly, the Tea Party might just be the dumbest gaggle of humans ever to rally around a nonsensical, as-yet-unstated worldview no one can quite spell out. Because they have no clue what the hell it is.
Wait, did I say this enemy-invention thing was an American tradition? Far from it. Demonization of the Other as a means to boorish, violent nationalism is universal to nearly all cultures, all nations worldwide. We are, you can say, a planet of self-righteous, petulant tribes, claiming this or that strip of dirt, crying that God chose us as his most favorite, flinging feces at each other like deranged monkeys, signifying nothing. Ain't it grand?
Yeah, just fuckin' peachy.
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