I keep thinking about what that sensibly unaffiliated Down Easterner in the Senate, Angus King, said on “60 Minutes” the other night, about how those who raged at the Capitol have to be listened to, that they aren’t going away.
I don’t know, though. Out-Hatfielding any McCoy, the dude in the Camp Auschwitz sweatshirt exemplifies what ostracism is for. If big-tent Republicanism stretches in the direction away from him, where does that leave us?
(Not to condescend, I should say here that my own background is very much “early American hillbilly,” as my father used to say only half in jest.)
“You’re a hick,” Broderick Crawford bellows at the crowd as a populist politician based on Huey Long in “All the King’s Men,” the 1949 movie, “and nobody ever helped a hick but a hick himself!”
Probably so, and I wish the agitation were about simple economic nationalism, fueled by the great betrayal that was Nafta and in response to the bill of goods we’ve all been sold about how anything that might benefit the average working stiff will surely destroy the economy.
It’s about something more sinister, of course, and so I’ll just add quickly that while it might be uncomfortable to bring up Germany in the context of resurgent neo-Nazis, it’s too bad that nation can’t be modeled for a different reason, the way it protects its manufacturing base and workers’ rights while remaining the economic powerhouse of Europe. It can happen here.
Otherwise, protesters, is the goal really an America made free for loony conspiracies, AR-15s, and whites only?
A friend sent me a link to a CNN article about the outrage of Jack Kirby’s son at the sight of Captain America symbolism being paraded through the breached Capitol. They know not what they do: The creation of the former Jacob Kurtzberg of the Lower East Side was an anti-fascist through and through, perhaps the most famous image associated with him (co-credit to Joe Simon) showing Cap socking Hitler on the jaw.
But there’s some common ground there, no? In the pop culture that makes this country great? Like rock ’n’ roll’s potent mix of Black American blues and the rhythms and twang of Jerry Lee Lewis and Carl Perkins out of those hills and hollers?
In other words, can’t we all get along?