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Carl Strock THE VIEW FROM HERE
Carl Strock can be reached at 395-3085 or by e-mail at carlstrock@dailygazette.com.
Anger didn’t just start with GOP rallies

    It’s not just the well publicized vitriol at recent Republican rallies. It goes deeper than that.
    So much anger in this great land of ours, some of it focused but much of it diffuse. People call or write to unload it, sometimes at me directly for what I have written, especially when I poke fun at Sarah Palin, but often in apparent expectation of agreement.
    As Gazette therapist ex officio, I do the best I can, but it’s a hard assignment. Why are they so angry?
    I know, times have changed, so I should be sympathetic.
    After all, we are the greatest country in the history of the world, as everyone knows, but why the devil can’t we get our way?
    Why, to take just one example, can’t we kick butt in Iraq and Afghanistan at the same time? We fought a mighty war in Europe and in the Pacific at the same time, kicking butt in both of them in less time than we have already been tied up in Iraq, but now we can’t afford to divert troops from one desert wasteland to another?
    Why couldn’t we impose our will on the little Third World country of Vietnam, if you want to go back that far, but finally had to flee with our tail between our legs?
    Why are we in debt to China? Does the greatest nation in the history of the world have to borrow money from a country that only recently rose above starvation?
    How come half the goods we buy at the mall are made in China and the other half in places like Malaysia and Honduras? What happened to made-in-America?
    How come we can’t block impoverished Mexicans and Central Americans from flooding into our country to do low-wage work? Are we a sovereign nation or aren’t we?
    There are so many things that don’t seem right for the greatest country in the history of the world.
    And then there’s the maddening internal stuff: homosexuals getting married, environmentalists ragging on us for our SUVs, kids not being allowed to pray in school, doctors doing abortions.
    I wouldn’t be surprised if the anger, or the frustration, at least partly explains the rise of apocalyptic Christianity in these past couple of decades. It’s a phenomenon not unknown to anthropologists who study Amazon tribespeople. As a tribe declines in the midst of an incomprehensible world, the members turn more and more to myths of an ancestral golden age and expectations of a cataclysmic end, much like our Christian brethren with their preaching about the Last Days, as foretold in the Book of Revelation, and the Rapture, in which believers will be swept up to heaven.
    Why, a series of novels based on the Rapture, called “Left Behind,” has sold 65 million copies in the past 10 years, making it possibly the best-selling series of all time despite (or because of) being childishly written. The church where Sarah Palin grew up teaches just such primitive mythology, and the preacher there declared, with Sarah standing by his side, that he expects hundreds of thousands of people to pour into Alaska during the Last Days.
    That’s what people do when their country or their culture goes into decline and they’re at a loss to understand. Or at least it’s one of the things they do. They adopt an apocalyptic worldview, but they also get angry. Good and boiling angry, which is what I see a lot.
    All these people who don’t just have certain opinions, which I might or might not agree with, but people who are raging mad about it.
    They don’t just mistrust Barack Obama, as I’m inclined to mistrust him myself, they loathe and despise him as the anti-Christ. They don’t just have misgivings about abor- tion, as I do also, they call it murder. They don’t just give President Bush the benefit of the doubt on Iraq, which I think would already be foolish enough, they furiously insist that he in no way, shape or form deceived us.
    The Republican Party long ago hitched its wagon to the wave of cultural anger, but the angry people have not been mollified. With their own man in the White House these past eight years, they are as mad as ever, maybe even madder. The world still refuses to shape up.
    Whose fault is it? It’s got to be somebody’s fault.
    Well, we know: It’s the liberals! It’s the “mainstream media”! It’s the gays and lesbians! It’s the lousy snooty elites!
    Rush Limbaugh says so. Bill O’Reilly says so. Television evangelists say so. The prophets (or pied pipers) of our time.
    That’s what I get at my end of the telephone, ladies and gentlemen. And it’s what callers sputter to me sometimes when they are so frustrated with me they can’t think of anything else: “You’re a liberal!”
    I know there are also angry and frustrated liberals who see corporate perfidy under every rock. And I know there are angry and frustrated black people, like the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, who nurture racial grievance as a way of life.
    But this right-wing anger that I observe and that the country has been observing in the Republican campaign seems to me more widespread by far.
    Of course it has a class aspect also, which is something else that Sarah Palin embodies, besides the apocalyptic aspect. It’s us regular beer-drinkin’, snowmobilin’, flagwavin’, gun-shootin’, g-droppin’ folks against the snooty elites with their smart-alecky Ivy League educations and their law review editorships. Joe Sixpack, dadgummit.
    Nixon played on it, Reagan played on it, both Bushes played on it.
    Sarah Palin is the current heroine of it — the hockey mom who knows how to field-dress a moose even if she can’t think of any Supreme Court decisions off the top of her head.
    And they’re extremely patriotic, these angry people, if you have noticed, but it’s not a joyous patriotism at all. It’s belligerent: “USA! USA!” they chant, as if challenging someone to a fight. Even as the country slides downhill, or especially as the country slides downhill, they insist, “There’s only one!”
    I’ve seen some of my fellow elitists commenting on the anger as if it were new, just arising in McCain-Palin rallies, and I don’t think it is. I think it’s been building for 30 or 40 years and defines a large part of the population, if you count all the apocalyptic evangelicals, all the abortion absolutists, all those who scoff at global warming, all those who defend Bush’s invasion of Iraq, all the belligerent flag-wavers.
    I doubt if the movement is going away, whoever wins the election, but if Obama wins, I expect it will get worse. Then the angry ones will really have a focus: a pal of terrorists in the White House!

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I doubt if the movement is going away, whoever wins the election, but if Obama wins, I expect it will get worse.

I hope I'm wrong, but I expect it will get worse also.

This anqer has little to do with Obama and ALOT to do with the Power,,,,be it democrat or republican......no one party is to blame for the freakin' mess
we are in......it is the ripple of a qeneration and it's choices and teachinqs......there is nothinq new under the sun.......if we think this is only party based
we are in the dark......everythinq shall pass, the next qeneration will pick up the ball and punt----then off we qo aqain.......