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Right wing seems to have lock on irrational rhetoric

11:40 PM Tuesday, April 20, 2010

The level of craziness that has been whipped up over the last year or so is now the dominant posture of America’s conservative wing.

Not that the left has always been sane — the 1960s are witness to that — but recently the right has hands-down cornered irrational exuberance.

A by-product is the rise of militias to fight off some danger perceived in the minds of talk radio personalities and handed off to their foot soldiers tramping about in the woods in their fatigues and guns.

Locally, there is a website for something called the Constitutional Militia of Clark County, which is a bit of a mystery. The site’s only point of contact with its creator is an e-mail address which doesn’t work.

The page does mention that the militia “is proud to announce the adoption of our new official anthem: ‘I’d Rather Die Than Be Your Slave’ by Pokerface, a political rock band from Allentown, PA.”

(Sample verse: It didn’t matter who shot first that day /

They killed my brothers, they laid dead by me — I’m covered in their blood /We hit them hard we made them pay that day / We hung the traitors from the highest trees — No mercy from me)

Leaving aside the questionable use of the word “laid,” this song is clearly off the planet in terms of lyrics you’d like floating around in the head of someone with access to weapons.

Much more accessible is the Unorganized Militia of Champaign County.

Michael Craft of the Champaign group is quite open and insistent that his militia is nothing like the Hutaree, the armed Michigan-Ohio group rounded up on allegations that they wanted to kill police and then start a war.

Craft, in a recent News-Sun story, said his group is defensive, not offensive.

The group is simply preparing for, oh, the possible collapse of American society.

Craft promises, “We support law enforcement; we’re not out to overthrow anybody.”

I’ll take them at their word, but I’d feel better if they’d just admit they like to play with guns rather than align themselves against some fantasy Armageddon.

Last week area tea partiers gathered on the downtown plaza.

Among the talks was an overwrought speech by a man wielding a chain as a prop and proclaiming taxes as a new form of slavery.

His message:

“I believe taxes create the chains of bondage just like they take away our freedom and make us dependent on the government, just like the slaves of the 19th century were to their masters.”

He gets my award for the poorest use of American history in defense of a political idea. A trip to a 19th century plantation would show him there’s a world of difference between between slavery and U.S. government programs — good or bad. The speaker’s frame of reference might explain the nearly all-white makeup of tea parties.

But I get the message. People are upset. If democracy doesn’t go your way, the proper reaction is not to dive into the deep end of the polemics pool or encourage people to oil up their guns and stock up on beef jerky.

America will do just fine if we just talk to one another about our differences and reach compromises.

This week marks the 15th anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing that took the lives of 168 people, a monument to the irrational mood that comes over our country sometimes.

Let’s turn down the volume.

Contact Tom Hawkins, editorial page editor of the Springfield News-Sun, at 328-0343 or thawkins@coxohio.com.

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