MRC’s Dan Gainor passed on a nominee for wacky-weed blog of the weekend. Salon.com posted an article Saturday titled “White America says ‘Let the Fire Burn’: What the Philadelphia firebombing of 1985 can tell us about the culture of white rage that led to the shutdown.”
For the young people, in 1985, a radical-left black group called MOVE had repeated bouts of violence with police. After refusing an order to vacate their property, the police fire-bombed the house, killing 11. Despite Philadelphia having a black mayor at the time, Andrew O’Hehir thinks this is a metaphor for Unhinged White Conservatism:
That wrenching story of hope and hatred from 28 years ago hit me especially hard in this year of white rage and white derangement, the year of George Zimmerman and Paula Deen and a government shutdown engineered entirely by a small group of congressmen who represent a lily-white, neo-Confederate nation within a nation. Half a century of evil and insidious racial politicking has brought us to this point of right-wing wish-fulfillment apocalypse, along with the profoundly racist congressional gerrymander of 2010 and the creeping fear among many white Americans that the country they thought they understood – thought they owned — has been yanked out from under their feet...
the government shutdown strikes me as a long-delayed sequel to Pickett’s Charge, a self-appointed and doomed crusade on behalf of White America, flipping the multicultural usurpers the double-handed bird as it burns down the house. It would almost be noble, if it weren’t evil and pathetic and damaging.
But what if conservatives don’t think their belief in limited government is racist? Captain Toke at Salon knows best: “So nearly all conservatives will continue to insist that there is no racism implicated in the politics of the shutdown, because they’re so steeped in it they can’t even see it.”
Earlier O'Hehir: Detroit Is Bankrupt Because Racists Like Sean Hannity Hate Motown Music
