Donald Trump, Captain of the Titanic
Donald Trump is the captain of the new "GOP Titanic." The ship took years of hate and division to build. Years of hate and fear mongers like Morton Downey, Jr., Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity and Ann Coulter preaching against government, minorities, women, gays, labor unions and just about any change, and using various conspiracy theories to scare Americans, usually white Americans, into supporting an ever more reactionary agenda and the reactionary politicians who pushed it. If you think such propaganda doesn't work, Joseph Goebbels would not have had such a prominent position in the Nazi regime. Rush Limbaugh, "seemingly" somewhat diminished in the number of listeners in the last year or two, was so powerful a force within the Republican Party, that any Republican officeholders who dared criticize him, spent the next day groveling at his feet to regain favor. Of course, another monumental moment in the march of reactionaries into the lives of many Americans came when long time conservative Republican operative, Roger Ailes, was given his own personal fiefdom with the creation of "Fox News" on cable television. It became a "conservative media paradise," where Republicans and leaders of conservative causes ran for cover, as it was anything but, "fair and balanced." (NBC then chose to make cable station "MSNBC" the anti-Fox News outlet; thus liberal/progressive.)
While the ship was built, the escalating harshness and stridency of the hate preachers continued with barely a peep from the Reagans, the Bushes, or the Mitt Romneys and Bill Welds of the world. Some of these same folks got into a panic when Donald Trump began moving like a juggernaut toward the Republican nomination for president. Some panicked so much, they tried to derail Trump with Ted Cruz, a true fire-breathing fascist, who lacks only the armband and a raised right arm salute. Trump prevailed by a large margin. The so called "Republican establishment," those who previously tolerated this crap for so long, and who did not speak out, not even to save their own honor, have further removed the mantle of "the party of Lincoln" from the Republican Party, a party now based upon racism, bigotry, extreme nationalism, militia groups and conspiracy theories. When basically good people fail to speak out, this is how fascists take hold. I've written here before, that once you let fascists in, you can only get them back out with great difficulty and pain. The GOP regulars are passengers on board the Titanic, and they bought their tickets long ago, on an installment plan, just paying the final balance about the first of the year. There is an immense iceberg unseen in the distance and there are not enough lifeboats for all the GOP passengers.
WORD HISTORY:
Sink-This word goes back to Indo European "sengw," which had the notion of "to go beneath water." This gave its Old Germanic offspring "sinkwanan," with the same meaning. This gave Old English (Anglo-Saxon) "sincan," which meant, "to sink, something to go below water." It also gave Old English, "besencan," which meant, "to sink something, to cause something to sink." The latter then became "sinken," before the modern form. The other form died out, or evolved, in part, into "sench," which kept the meaing, "to sink something, in the sense, cause it to sink." It has since died out, with both meanings now used only in "sink." The noun for a basin; as in, "the kitchen sink," originally developed from the verb in the 1400s, and it came from the idea of a hollow area of ground where water collected; the term then transferred to the man made objects "sunk" into a cabinet. Common throughout the other Germanic languages (verb forms): German has "sinken" (to sink) and "versenken" (to sink something, to scuttle), Low German Saxon "sinken," West Frisian "sinke" (to sink), Dutch "zinken" (to sink), Danish and Norwegian "synke" (to sink), Icelandic "sökka" (to sink, but it lost the "n" over time) and Swedish "sjunka" (to sink) and "sänka" (to lower, to cause to sink or lower).
While the ship was built, the escalating harshness and stridency of the hate preachers continued with barely a peep from the Reagans, the Bushes, or the Mitt Romneys and Bill Welds of the world. Some of these same folks got into a panic when Donald Trump began moving like a juggernaut toward the Republican nomination for president. Some panicked so much, they tried to derail Trump with Ted Cruz, a true fire-breathing fascist, who lacks only the armband and a raised right arm salute. Trump prevailed by a large margin. The so called "Republican establishment," those who previously tolerated this crap for so long, and who did not speak out, not even to save their own honor, have further removed the mantle of "the party of Lincoln" from the Republican Party, a party now based upon racism, bigotry, extreme nationalism, militia groups and conspiracy theories. When basically good people fail to speak out, this is how fascists take hold. I've written here before, that once you let fascists in, you can only get them back out with great difficulty and pain. The GOP regulars are passengers on board the Titanic, and they bought their tickets long ago, on an installment plan, just paying the final balance about the first of the year. There is an immense iceberg unseen in the distance and there are not enough lifeboats for all the GOP passengers.
WORD HISTORY:
Sink-This word goes back to Indo European "sengw," which had the notion of "to go beneath water." This gave its Old Germanic offspring "sinkwanan," with the same meaning. This gave Old English (Anglo-Saxon) "sincan," which meant, "to sink, something to go below water." It also gave Old English, "besencan," which meant, "to sink something, to cause something to sink." The latter then became "sinken," before the modern form. The other form died out, or evolved, in part, into "sench," which kept the meaing, "to sink something, in the sense, cause it to sink." It has since died out, with both meanings now used only in "sink." The noun for a basin; as in, "the kitchen sink," originally developed from the verb in the 1400s, and it came from the idea of a hollow area of ground where water collected; the term then transferred to the man made objects "sunk" into a cabinet. Common throughout the other Germanic languages (verb forms): German has "sinken" (to sink) and "versenken" (to sink something, to scuttle), Low German Saxon "sinken," West Frisian "sinke" (to sink), Dutch "zinken" (to sink), Danish and Norwegian "synke" (to sink), Icelandic "sökka" (to sink, but it lost the "n" over time) and Swedish "sjunka" (to sink) and "sänka" (to lower, to cause to sink or lower).
Labels: bigotry, Donald Trump, English, etymology, Fascism, Germanic languages, racism, Republicans, right wingers, Roger Ailes, Rush Limbaugh, Titanic
posted by Randy at 10:31 AM
1 Comments:
Racism is the American sin ― not merely a character flaw, but a stain on the soul that cannot be cleansed by time and repentance the way other failures can. Thieves, liars, homophobes, even perhaps, rapists, can be redeemed in the public eye, but the racist must be exiled from moral and political life. As Greg Howard writes in The New York Times Magazine, by the late 1960s, “calling people racist was no longer a matter of evaluating their opinions; it was an accusation of being irrevocably warped at the very core.”
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