Sunday, May 07, 2006
Choreographed Insanity
As choreographed sociopolitical drama, the right-wing hyperbole around immigration often reverberates between the industry-funded conservative think tanks, their handmaidens in Congress, and their spear carriers on the street, or in this case, on the border. When we encountered this phenomenon in the early 1990s around Indian treaties and environmental protection, the professional hatemongers--hired by industry to organize and incite blue collar vigilantes to assault public officials and community activists--subsequently created a white collar corollary that claimed to be responding to a grassroots call for curtailing sane and humane public policy.
The white collar bigots--some of whom had initially catalyzed the spear carriers into threatening their political opponents--then claimed to be calming the rowdies, and went on to reap the political and economic gains from the scapegoating and intimidation the delinquents unwittingly carried out on their behalf. Meanwhile, the GOP--like now--stamped both the contrived grievances and violent behavior with its seal of approval.
The entire affair was a sort of good cop/bad cop scenario, that used a wittingly clueless media to amplify and obfuscate their fraudulent theatrics. Thus by following the bogus storyline from start to finish, even liberals frequently repeated the false claims as though they were true, which effectively removed any possibility of public support for anyone opposing either the media deception or vigilante harassment of good faith participants.
The white collar bigots--some of whom had initially catalyzed the spear carriers into threatening their political opponents--then claimed to be calming the rowdies, and went on to reap the political and economic gains from the scapegoating and intimidation the delinquents unwittingly carried out on their behalf. Meanwhile, the GOP--like now--stamped both the contrived grievances and violent behavior with its seal of approval.
The entire affair was a sort of good cop/bad cop scenario, that used a wittingly clueless media to amplify and obfuscate their fraudulent theatrics. Thus by following the bogus storyline from start to finish, even liberals frequently repeated the false claims as though they were true, which effectively removed any possibility of public support for anyone opposing either the media deception or vigilante harassment of good faith participants.
