December 18th, 1962. Mr. Magoo Turns into Scrooge.

If you’ve never seen it, it’s a surprisingly sophisticated version of “A Christmas Carol,” turned into a musical and set as a play-within-a-play.

December 18th, 1966. Boris Karloff puts his stamp on the Grinch.

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x3iht2g

Louis Wishes You the Best of the Season

Get Into the Swing of the Season with Bobby Helms

Put ‘Em Together for Brenda Lee, Who’s Number 1 Again!

Only Right We Include The Pogues in Our Christmas Music Countdown

Peace, Shawn. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NrAwK9juhhY

Racism is Priming America for the Death of Democracy

My original plan for this post was to write up some thoughts on the Democrats’ victories in the November 7^th elections and how pundits and politicians keep consistently underestimating the power of reproductive rights as an issue, mainly because they only think “abortion” and remain completely blind to all the elements involved, elements that run from personal freedom to economics.  Moreover, they have convinced themselves that women, in particular, will get over it.

They’re monumentally wrong, there, but I’m going to leave it at that, because, in the wake of November 7^th’s voting, the Rs have ripped off any remaining masks as to their intentions.  They are determined to establish a right-wing, one-party rule in this country, and they see 2024 as the moment they cash in decades of work and investment towards that goal.

This is about more than getting even for 2020, or rolling back the Sixties, or even dismantling anything that remains of the New Deal.  This is an all-out, fangs-and-claws, blowtorch-and-brass-knuckles attack on the very idea of America as a representative democracy.

And a disturbing number of Americans support it.

Let’s start with the individual I commonly refer to as The Angry Inch.  After years of soft-touch mainstream reporting on his often-disjointed, routinely race-baiting, and increasingly violent harangues at public events, his remarks on the stump and in a couple of interviews got some unaccustomed attention, however brief its span.

Given a platform on Univision, he repeated his now-familiar threat of setting the Justice Department loose like a pack of rabid dogs on his critics, opponents, and those he feels betrayed him.

Talking with a right-wing outlet called The National Pulse, he said undocumented immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.”

Then his Veterans’ Day speech in New Hampshire really brought some people up short:

“We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical left thugs that live like vermin with the confines of our country . . . the threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous, and grave than the threat from within . . . “

And just this past weekend, he twinned his usual bellowing about vote fraud with a healthy dollop of racial emnity, urging his followers to monitor voting in cities like Atlanta, Detroit, and Philadelphia, because “Black communities can’t be trusted when it comes to counting votes; that’s just common sense.”

More than a few observers noted that his language at these venues came straight out of Adolph Hitler’s playbook, to which The Inch’s campaign spokeshack, Steven Cheung, replied that anyone making that connection will find “ . . . their entire existence will be crushed when President Trump returns to the White House.”

The Inch’s penchant for making violent threats has generally been treated with a shrug from the media.  Big deal; he does that all the time, is the attitude.  A few weeks before that New Hampshire speech, the Washington Post’s Paul Fahri wrote about this, citing political scientist Brian Klaas, who, borrowing from Hannah Arendt, called it “the banality of crazy.” News outlets tend to downplay words they hear over and over again.  Even a death threat against the nation’s highest-ranking military leader did not sufficiently impress them.  I mean, it’s not like he had a dog that bit a Secret Service agent, right?

Keep in mind, however, that the media is not the intended audience for The Inch’s snarling bluster.  It’s intended to keep his followers inflamed and motivated to vote.  The media is the conduit, not the end consumer.

For a moment, there, some of us wondered if journalists had finally reached the breaking point, that the word would go out to every Middlesex village and farm about magnitude of the threat we face.  It didn’t turn out that way.  The Inch’s statements were briefly subject to some furrowed-brow reporting and then disappeared down the memory hole.

Now, a lot of well-deserved criticism has been directed at our Fourth Estate for its embrace of The Inch and its willful refusal to document the threat he and the right in general—more on that in a moment—pose to our country.  I’ve thrown in my two cents in this regard occasionally.

More prominent among the critics are practitioners like Margaret Sullivan, a journalist I greatly admire who recently was named head of the Craig Newmark Center for Journalism Ethics and Security at Columbia University’s J school.  She has made the role of journalism in protecting democracy—and its repeating failure to play that role—a particular focus of her work in recent years.  Writing a few weeks ago in The Guardian, Ms. Sullivan argued, “It’s the media’s responsibility to grab American voters by the lapels” and make them see the disaster that is entirely possible to unfold over the next year.

By and large, the media has treated such criticism with the same attitude as a man who brushes off a fly from the sleeve of his jacket.  For an institution that enjoys a specific constitutional protection, it evidences little or no interest in protecting the legal and political framework on which that protection is based.  Get right down to it, we cannot depend on them to ride to our rescue.

Moreover, there are millions of Americans who, if they had their lapels shaken, would not recoil in horror at the prospect of a right-wing dictatorship overthrowing democracy.  They would cheer.

With The Inch’s remarks in-mind, I was sorting through the recent American Values Survey, a polling report released in October by the Public Religion Research Institute and the Brookings Institution.  There are clear signs in the data in this report that the right’s decades-long strategy of division, primarily grounded in race-baiting, has succeeded.

Starting at the top, where most of the news coverage of the Survey’s results was focused, a majority of respondents thought the country is headed in the wrong direction and that things were better in the past.  The latter statement plays right into one element of authoritarian message strategy: convince people life was better back before.  It’s the image “Make America Great Again” conjures up.

Seventy-five percent of respondents agreed with the statement that “the future of American democracy is at stake in the 2024 election.”  On the surface, that might be encouraging if you look at it as Americans realizing the gravity of the choice they’ll make next year, which would give people like Ms. Sullivan some hope.  But more than half of the Survey’s respondents said re-electing The Inch or Joe Biden poses a threat.

Less hopeful is the finding that 38 percent of all respondents agreed with the statement that “Because things have gotten so far off track in this country, we need a leader who is willing to break some rules if that’s what it takes to set things right.”  Probably to no one’s surprise, support among Republicans was 10 points higher.

Then we get to some pretty sobering stuff: nearly one fourth of respondents agreed that “Because things have gotten so far off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence to save the country.”  For Republicans, the figure was 33 percent.

Looking at relationship of people’s attitudes and their willingness to embrace political violence, the Survey found that 39 percent of respondents who agreed with the statement that “God intended America to be a new promised land for European Christians” were ready to throw down.

Digging a bit deeper still, respondents were given a choice of preferring a presidential candidate who can (a) manage the economy or (b) preserve and protect American culture and the American way of life.  This is an important piece to think about, as it goes straight to one of the main pillars of the authoritarian message: national identity.

Fifty-seven percent of Democrats and 53 percent of independents chose managing the economy as their preference.

Fifty-eight percent of Republicans went with (b).

So, Republicans believe the future is at-stake, that preserving national identity is critical, that a leader willing to ignore the rules is a needed, and—at least among a plurality—violence is warranted.

Taking it down to the next level, the Survey included questions about what voters consider to be critical issues.  Both parties cited the state of the economy, specifically in terms of the cost of housing and everyday expenses.  But while Democrats went on to name climate change, guns, and access to health care as critical, for Republicans, the list included what children learn in public schools, crime, and immigration.

All three of those concerns—like the Republican strategy overall—are, I submit, grounded in racism, which is fundamental to the right wing’s concept of national identity and its desire to preserve “American culture;” since that phrase, to them, means “white people.”

Taking each of these in turn, on education, the right, under the guise of “parents’ rights,” has worked overtime to make our public schools cultural free-fire zones.  Over the last two years, following the manufactured uproar over a previously obscure area of study known as Critical Race Theory, public school history courses have been revamped in several states to blot out the experiences of Black Americans.  In literature courses, books falling outside the white-centric circle have been pulled from classrooms and libraries.  Diversity education has been shut down.  In some places, teachers are forbidden by law from discussing any subject or point-of-view that might make white students uncomfortable.

Crime has long been an effective Republican talking point, and it’s just as long been obvious what they’re playing to is white people’s fear of Black people.

The debate over immigration is centered around the likewise-pulled-out-of-thin-air “crisis” of poor brown Hispanic people pouring across the Rio Grande, bringing crime and disease with them.

These attitudes did not spring up overnight; they are the product of decades of planning, funding, organizing, and messaging.

Sixty years ago, the Republican party, seeing the backlash against the Civil Rights movement, decided to make race-baiting a fundamental part of their electoral strategy.  The party of Lincoln did a 180, and that decision paid substantial dividends, being important to electing five Republican presidents and any number of other officeholders.

Studies have shown that concern about American “culture” drive a significant part of fears around immigration, which The Inch made a centerpiece of his 2016 campaign, and which resonate still.  Republican lawmakers regularly go to social media to shout, “Secure our border!” even there’s no evidence I’ve seen, at least, that the unwashed brown criminal masses they describe actually exist.

Numerous studies like this one, from 2013, have found that while concerns about immigrants supposedly stealing jobs or the fact they’re breaking the law by their presence bothers people, there is a consistent thread of racial animus running through the subject.  As the study linked above pointed out: “Evidence about the rule of economic concerns in opposition to immigration . . . has been inconsistent.  On the other hand, symbolic attitudes, such as group identities, turn up as powerful in study after study.”

Race-baiting messages have brought together cohorts that might otherwise have little in common, from oligarchs to Evangelicals, in a way that is unlike other issues.  With that as a rallying point, each cohort stands to gain, whether it’s cutting taxes, regulation and social spending or establishing a white theocracy.

In short, racism is the poisoned tip of the spear the right plans to drive into democracy’s heart. 

Later,

The Anonymous 4 Perform “The Holly and The Ivy” as our Christmas Music Countdown Continues

Starting This Year’s Christmas Music Countdown with the Unforgettable Eartha Kitt

Happy Thanksgiving! Love, Peace, Hope, & Humor

Back in my disc jockey days, I used to like working at the station on Thanksgiving afternoon, so I could play this for my listeners: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WaKIX6oaSLs