A resident of Murfeesboro, TN talks to TPM about how things have changed. I hope this isn’t typical of what’s going on in the country:
Sbenaty expressed shock over the atmosphere in a town he’s lived in for 30 years. For most of that time, he said, the community has been extremely supportive and welcoming. Even after Sept. 11, 2001, he said, neighbors came up to him and said, “Please do not feel scared. We know your religion has nothing to do with this.”
“It’s a wide shift, and a shock,” he told TPM. “It’s just mind-boggling.”
freelancer
Sbenaty sounds furrin’. I’m agin it.
ETA: One of the ‘bags at Glenn Beck’s revival actually said the exact words of the Onion’s current top story, without a shred of irony. The Onion can’t keep up with these people.
http://thegreatamericandesert.com/2010/08/30/fck-the-fcking-tea-party/
J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford
Aren’t Dunlap and Jackie from Murfreesboro?
scarshapedstar
So can we get some Marshals or Guardsmen to protect the site already? Let’s see how brave these crackers really are.
Mumphrey
I hope it isn’t, as well, but I don’t have much hope that my hope is well-founded…
DougJ
@J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford:
So are Those Darlins.
MattF
No, that’s a libel on mean values. it’s demagogues deliberately leading the ignorant and credulous into bigotry.
comrade scott's agenda of rage
No, it’s the direct result of a well-oiled, right wing propaganda machine. Certain right-wing movements in Europe that shall go nameless because I don’t wanna get all Godwin this early would be very proud of their spiritual descendants.
rumpole
There’s a part in Gladwell’s the tipping point when he talks about suicides in the Philippines involving young men. It never happened, ’till stories about it got circulated and then it became a more “acceptable” way to deal with adolescent angst. While the rate still stayed pretty small, the increase in the rate itself was substantial.
Translate to now: constant stream of hateful speech plus violence = real danger to minorities. Arson/stabbing stories in the media begin to pop up. It becomes OK in certain mindsets. Even if that’s a minority of people, there’s more than you would think that would tolerate that violence.
It scares the daylights out of me.
djork
I lived in the Boro for awhile. It’s a relatively tolerant college town. However, get a few miles outside of it and you are in Tennessee hill country. I remember driving aimlessly in the countryside one day and coming upon a stop sign with a “Support your local militia” sticker stuck on it. This was during the height of the Communist Chinese / UN takeover under Clinton, for what it’s worth.
GregB
I wonder how Prince AlWaleed is going to feel when the lynchings of Muslims and the bombings of mosques start in earnest?
Is he going to think Fox News was a good investment?
ajr22
It’s ok, David Brooks let us know things are pretty good for the Iraqi’s.
“iving standards are also improving. According to the Brookings Institution’s Iraq Index, the authoritative compendium of data on this subject, 833,000 Iraqis had phones before the invasion. Now more than 1.3 million have landlines and some 20 million have cellphones.”
“In the most recent Gallup poll, 69 percent of Iraqis rated their personal finances positively, up from 36 percent in March 2007. Baghdad residents say the markets are vibrant again, with new electronics, clothing and even liquor stores.”
“Iraq ranks fourth in the Middle East on the Index of Political Freedom from The Economist’s Intelligence Unit — behind Israel, Lebanon and Morocco, but ahead of Jordan, Egypt, Qatar and Tunisia.”
“Such a move may rob him of a campaign talking point. But it will safeguard an American accomplishment that has been too hard won.”
We may be burning their places of worship here, but look how much good we did for them there. Overall we won Iraq, and they should just say thank you and be on their way. This entire adventure has been such a success, I for one am shocked more countries are not asking us to help them “nation build.”
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@freelancer: I clicked on the link. Chris Dowd just needs to shut the hell up.
El Cid
We’ve gone pretty quickly from feeling like we’re in a period like the Great Depression to a period like the post-WW1 rise of the popular fascist & nativist movements. You know, promising to restore honor et al, refound the nation, so on and so forth…
Cat Lady
I luv ya DougJ, but remember when you said that there’s no way Martha Coakley could lose? How’d that work out?
EconWatcher
I saw over on Sully’s blog that Orrin Hatch stood up for rights of the Cordoba Project, and pointed out that it’s several blocks from Ground Zero. That’s something, I guess.
It’s been said before, but this is W’s big chance to show some worth as a human being, on just about the only issue he got right during his presidency. I was always careful to give him credit on this one point, that he definitely tamped down the anit-Muslim hate after 9/11. Looks like I can’t give him credit any more on that one, either.
Martin
@comrade scott’s agenda of rage: I think that’s a bit overstating it. We’ve seen these movements before and they all arise under similar conditions, sometimes without a nefarious villain (though you can generally count on someone to capitalize on the situation).
The American Dream is a lottery. Anyone can win it. Some people win automatically, like Paris Hilton, others have to work to win it, like Obama. But working hard is no guarantee that you’ll win. You can be a model American, go to college, work hard, and wind up with a pretty shitty outcome. We’ve been promised by everyone, Republican, Democrat, business, educators, that the odds of winning are higher than they really are. Some oversell it more than others (Republicans), but everyone oversells it.
When conditions are just right, it seems as though the odds of winning really are what we perceive them to be, and during those times everyone drops their guard and believes that there’s room enough for everybody to be a winner. But when reality sets back in, we realize that the odds of winning aren’t nearly as good as we believed. We don’t want to go back and blame those that lied to us, because, well, that’s everybody – all of those TV commercials, our friends, our President, our 5th grade teacher, everyone who said that if you just work hard you’ll succeed. So if it’s not playing out, it makes much more sense to look at whose chances at the dream improved from when things were good to when things were bad, and determine that their increased chance at success has come at your expense. Because, well, that’s true, but only because their chance at success was always way lower than yours. Men had much better odds than women before suffrage and equal rights movement. Whites had much better odds than non-whites prior to civil rights. Straights still have better odds than gays – just ask Dan Choi.
Every society goes through this cycle, and yeah, some asshole like Glenn Beck will seize on it for personal gain, but it’d happen anyway. It’s a hard thing to push against and remain popular, though. Eventually, we’ll end up on the right side of it, but in the near term we’re going to go backwards for a bit. I’m just not sure how the Democrats can make their case here. There’s just no good way to tell the American public that their dreams of prosperity were pretty much always bullshit, that most of them were going to end up in this spot no matter what they did, but at least we have a safety net to keep you from being truly destitute. Not exactly a great way to get people to the polls in November.
evinfuilt
@GregB:
Why would he think otherwise. He’s a Muslim leader for the same reason we have all these Christian Leaders in America. Its a place a power, plus its not like its his Muslim followers in trouble, they’re safe in Saudi Arabia under his families control.
Kryptik
@EconWatcher:
Kinda sad that we need to turn to folks like Orrin Hatch for sanity on this issue, when so many Dems act so goddamn craven on it.
And Doug…all I have to say is that you should probably brace yourself for your faith in American humanity to be broken, at least significantly more than it already is.
El Cid
@ajr22: The moment I heard a BBC interview with a London investment house’s Eric Le Blan pushing for backing for investing into Iraq as a fantastic new market, I knew Brooksie et al wouldn’t be far behind.
I’d be willing to bet money that Brooks has talked to, sat on a panel with, or attended a speech by Le Blan.
catclub
@EconWatcher:
There are two things to give him credit for.
That was one.
The other was keeping Dick Cheney from bombing Iran when he sooo wanted to. It turned Cheney off of Shrub.
Shrub was the sane one at the white house!
ppcli
There is a certain vignette that comes to me whenever I see the Republicans do this kind of thing, as they do every election cycle. It was after Phil Gramm had left the Democratic party for the Republicans, and staked out a hard – right position in the GOP presidential primaries. (Mind you, I expect it would seem almost blue-dog Democrat if we revisited it today. I don’t have the energy.) Then in some primary (Louisiana, I think) nameless flyers started showing up under car windshields pushing the “Phil Gramm says he’s a patriot, but he divorced an American woman to marry outside his race.”
Which illustrates what I’ll call the Mean Value Theorem [sorry!]:
Don’t kid yourself that you are *directing* this hatred. You’re unleashing it, and fanning its flames, and you may even profit from it, but it has a will and a hunger all its own. It will consume what it wants, not what you want it to.
Svensker
@EconWatcher:
Too late. He declined comment.
ppcli
@catclub:
That’s not all. I might add that W should get credit for not ending his presidency with an orgy of appalling politically motivated pardons, as Reagan, Bush Sr. and Clinton all did.
wobbly
Check out the Democrat and Chronicle, DougJ:
“Five Holley teens arrested after incident at Orleans County mosque….”
It’s happening pretty close to us, right here in River City.
someguy
Murfreesboro has an illustrious history of lynchings. So this is pretty much in keeping with what I’d expect in a winger-dominated state.
catclub
@ppcli:
“That’s not all. I might add that W should get credit for not ending his presidency with an orgy of appalling politically motivated pardons, as Reagan, Bush Sr. and Clinton all did. ”
Agreed, but I suspected his own self-regard and an inability
to imagine the suffering of others had a lot to do with that.
Brachiator
@DougJ:
Damned good thread title. I get the math reference. Is there a song title embedded as well?
Garrigus Carraig
Do we really have to give credit to Orrin Hatch & the C-Plus-Augustus on the few occasions they aren’t completely craven? Just because the Know Nothing party has lowered their bar, do we have to lower ours? Sheesh.
I say screw ’em. We’d all be better off if they’d never been born.
Sly
@ppcli:
Bush wasn’t really big clemency in his previous job, you know. And Reagan and Bush I got all the big Republican crooks. Bush II basically got credit for not pardoning Libby, though he did commute his sentence.
But Bush did pardon around 190 people during his presidency, and about 30 before he left office. Some of them were likely politically motivated, as quite a few were Republican donors who were convicted of campaign fraud. They never got much press because most of them committed crimes that were not punishable by jail time.
Xecky Gilchrist
@ppcli: W should get credit for not ending his presidency with an orgy of appalling politically motivated pardons
Indeed.
I was gobsmacked that he didn’t, and still think that the enormity of the pile of pardons to be signed put him off of it, not any kind of noble purpose (but srsly think he avoided pardons out of spite for Cheney et al, no proof but a hunch.)
Plus, he signed the “do not call list” law, at a time when telemarketers were driving me bugfuck. So while I wouldn’t want to repeat his presidency or anything else that (or more) crazy, it wasn’t a total loss.
wobbly
In case I did not make myself clear, five teenagers in Holley, New York, were arrested today for:
“…driving near the World Sufi Foundation Mosque on Fuller Road in Carlton last night, allegedly beeping car horns and yelling obscenities during an 11 p.m. religious service at the mosque. Hess said the incident was the second disturbance in less than a week outside the mosque…”
Holley, New York, is quite close to where I and DougJ live, which is Rochester, New York.
DougJ hopes this s*%t is “isn’t typical of what’s going on in the country…”
It is.
Right here in River City, or a couple of counties away.
Linda Featheringill
@EconWatcher:
Cool!
Orrin Hatch was one of the outgoing Senators that I contacted with a heart-felt plea to stand up for religious freedom. Maybe my effort had a positive effect. Obviously, it didn’t hurt.
DougJ
@Brachiator:
No, just math.
DougJ
@wobbly:
That sucks. I hate that this is happening.
sparky
@Martin: well-put, though i’d be inclined to simplify it a bit and just say that it’s the handiest “other” who is left holding the target for resentment. (edit: in other words, not ressentiment but just plain old resentment.)
‘muricans missed out on fascism in the 1930s, but not by much. now, they may get to find out how it works from the inside, depending on what parts of the Empire break first.
Benito
I hope that every American, regardless of where he lives, will stop and examine his conscience about this and other related incidents. This Nation was founded by men of many nations and backgrounds. It was founded on the principle that all men are created equal, and that the rights of every man are diminished when the rights of one man are threatened. All of us ought to have the right to be treated as he would wish to be treated, as one would wish his children to be treated, but this is not the case.
I know those opposing the NY Community Center continue to say that that the majority supports them, but as history has taught us the majority is not always right. Would women or non-whites have the vote if we listen to the majority of the day, would the non-whites have equal rights (and equal access to churches, housing, restaurants, hotels, retail stores, schools, colleges and yes water fountains) if we listen to the majority of the day? We all know the answer, a resounding, NO!
Today we are committed to a worldwide struggle to promote and protect the rights of all who wish to be free. In a time of domestic crisis men of good will and generosity should be able to unite regardless of party or politics and do what is right, not what is just popular with the majority. Some men comprehend discrimination by never have experiencing it in their lives, but the majority will only understand after it happens to them.