From Glenn Greenwald via Twitter, a tweet for the ages. Worse than you could imagine. Keka's Blog at Salon:
I saw it. But I couldn’t believe it.Click through for Keka's writing and seriously grotesque images. Amazing that stuff this bad is still with us.
There I was, in a fast food drive through, behind a man whose back window decal, in small white letters, sent me a message that sent a chill down my spine—just as he’d hoped it would, no doubt. It said:
THIS COUNTRY WAS BUILT BY WHITE MEN WITH GUNS
Keka describes herself as "a former reporter for both the Chicago Sun Times and Arizona Daily Star, published author and optioned screenwriter who spent 8 years on the Hopi reservation as wife of a Hopi artist, and over 20 years as a teacher and administrator." An accomplished woman. I presume the car decal was in Arizona — a state known far more for wealthy snowbirds than backwoods types.
I do want to add one comment. One of the generation-arching discussions from about 1965 until now is "hate speech." The phase "politically correct" — thrown around so carelessly today — actually has a meaning. It refers to the desire to ban hate speech, especially racist speech (images, incitements and pseudo-science), from university campuses.
In other words, "politically correct" means The things I'm forced to say because they won't let me talk like a racist. This is what the Right is defending when they oppose "political correctness." At the level of the masses, this is what freedom means to them. (At the level of Money, freedom means the right to move capital across borders for any purpose, whether the masses are hurt or not.)
And since Reagan, the Right has fought against being "PC". It's entirely possible that in the not-young generations, racism is as bad as it was in the 40s and 50s, but it's been tamped down by social restriction, even when those restrictions have been resisted. It's not gone, just unexposed. (There are stories about Palin, for example, making comments about Obama's defeat of Hillary, overheard by waitstaff at dinners, that are rather raw; and also rather unverifiable.)
So perhaps what we're seeing in these images is not just outliers and corner-cases, but as Keka suggests, something that's always been there, re-emerging now because it once more has permission to stick its ugly head into the light. And not to put too fine a point on it — this is what the Billionaires' Coup is funding.
Food for thought.
GP
