Let me be as direct and hard-hitting as I can about this, because we are seeing a destructive and dangerous rash of hatred coming out of the lower-functioning end of the far right since Barack Obama has become president.
There is no rational explanation related to policy positions or political philosophy for the vile and vicious tenor of the attacks by what’s left of the right wing in this country. This is way beyond debate or heated discourse. This is becoming violently moronic and desperately out of control. Now that every thinking conservative has either outright declared support for President Obama, or at the least, decried the current Orwellian screeds of Dick Cheney and the regressive crop of prehistoric primates like Sarah “Wilma Flintstone” Palin as beyond the pale, only a bestial group of paranoid, hate-mongers remains.
But what is fueling their terror and hatred really? Since this is clearly not about politics, and it certainly isn’t about “love of country” or patriotism, what is it about?
Folks, here I go again - it’s about love and sex, and sexual identity.
Over a hundred years ago, Freud postulated that the root cause of paranoia in men was extreme “homosexual anxiety.” So fearful are some men about the feminine side of their emotional/sexual life, so tortured are they by their identifications with their mothers, rather than their fathers, that these men adopt a hyper-masculine (macho) persona to disguise the deeper tendencies which they fear would destroy their fragile egos and gutted sense of self (The childrearing causes of this dysfunction are a discussion for another day.). The terror in response to their own “softer” feelings in this extreme male personality is inevitably projected outwards, so any other men who show signs of the feminine – cooperativeness instead of competitiveness, receptiveness instead of aggressiveness, openness and communicativeness, instead of bullishness and power-grabbing control – threaten to upset the house of cards of their own sexual identity. Other men who are comfortable with both their masculine and feminine sides, like Barack Obama, must, therefore, be destroyed at all costs.
Okay. And what about the women? Well, just take a look at the nearly psychotic Republican congresswoman, Michelle Bachman, who called all liberals traitors, or the already psychotic Ann Coulter, who called John Edwards a “fagot” during the campaign last year. With bone-hard features on their chiseled faces, and blazing, penetrating eyes, these women have thoroughly eradicated their feminine sides. It has long been understood that while the women of the far right are so opposed to abortion and birth control, women like Bachman, Coulter and Sarah Palin, they are not in practice “pro-life.” In fact, these hyper-masculine women are as gleeful about executions and war (and killing doctors who respect a woman’s right to choose) as any of the craven neo-con men. These women, overly identified with their fathers, and in deep conflict about it, are in the same paranoid quandary as their homophobic male counterparts. (Oh, and why doesn't anyone find it surprising anymore when yet another right wing politician or religious fundamentalist is discovered having closeted gay sex?)
But this is not about being gay. This is about sexuality. And love. And sex. Real sex. Loving, soul-quenching, gut-wrenching, bliss-inducing sex (Not sex as conquest or sex for ego inflation.) As I’ve said and written many times before, nobody who is having mind-blowing orgasms with someone they love ever feels inspired to go out and kill someone or throw toxic waste into a river or steal someone’s life savings... or call another person a traitor or a fagot. Only sexually dysfunctional, homophobic, emotionally distorted rage-aholics do those things.
This is a potentially wondrous time we are living in. The shift in consciousness that Barack Obama represents can be a real pendulum swing towards a cooperative, inclusive, open society, the kind once envisioned by the founders of our country.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident...”
Remember?
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