Cigar
11-28-2012, 08:22 AM
This doesn’t mean it’s going to be easy. This doesn’t mean it’s going to be smooth or fun or make any sort of cohesive sense. Not by a long shot. And not for a long, long time.
But across the board and down the line, the take on Obama’s astonishing, historic re-election is the same: America is more wildly, unexpectedly diverse than ever, and those diverse voices – Latino, gay, black, immigrant, female, et al – somehow coalesced into a potent, vociferous, albeit hotly unstable coalition to vote more powerfully and more passionately than any time in our short history, mostly because they never really existed as a functioning coalition in our short history, until now.
This is what the Republican punditry and even many old-timer Dems are coming to terms with: America is no longer a nifty, sepia-toned melting pot kept anodyne and marginal by the rich, starchy bleach of the white ruling class.
http://www.thepoliticalcarnival.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/gopoldwhite-300x300.jpg
Is it not the most astonishing thing? The country is not getting any whiter, older white bigoted people are helpfully dying off, and we now have a messy and nearly incomprehensible Catherine wheel of assorted nonwhite minorities (and women) all spinning, dancing and surging into the limelight – not to mention the cross-breeds, the already mixed, the racially unidentifiable who are, say, a quarter black, a quarter Chinese, a quarter Indian, a third polyamorous and a tenth Cuban kinky hipster lesbian schoolteacher, with a no-religious-affiliation kicker. Sweet.
This is your new American majority, each and every one of whom terrifies the old guard, the rich white guys, Ted Nugent (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/08/ted-nugent-on-obama-election-twitter-rant-economic-spiritual-suicide_n_2094490.html), Bill O’Reilly, and the way it used to be. And this is why the Republican party threw every repulsive weapon it had at Obama to try and avert the inevitable; deep down, they sensed their own imminent obsolescence, even if they didn’t quite believe it was possible.
And oh, they tried everything. Racism. Birtherism. Sexism. Abortion, birth control, “legitimate rape” and irresponsible “sluts.” Religious intolerance, homophobia, xenophobia, Socialism, Communism, Nazis, Kenya, monkeys, Big Bird, gun rights, tax laws, welfare, elitism, oil shortages, health care reform that would secretly herd up and kill the elderly. Just for starters.
Nothing worked. Check that: It all worked. Just not as well as it used to. As one distraught fundamentalist Christian activist said, “It wasn’t that our message didn’t get out. We got the message out. But our message was rejected.”
http://blog.sfgate.com/morford/2012/11/13/old-white-guys/
But across the board and down the line, the take on Obama’s astonishing, historic re-election is the same: America is more wildly, unexpectedly diverse than ever, and those diverse voices – Latino, gay, black, immigrant, female, et al – somehow coalesced into a potent, vociferous, albeit hotly unstable coalition to vote more powerfully and more passionately than any time in our short history, mostly because they never really existed as a functioning coalition in our short history, until now.
This is what the Republican punditry and even many old-timer Dems are coming to terms with: America is no longer a nifty, sepia-toned melting pot kept anodyne and marginal by the rich, starchy bleach of the white ruling class.
http://www.thepoliticalcarnival.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/gopoldwhite-300x300.jpg
Is it not the most astonishing thing? The country is not getting any whiter, older white bigoted people are helpfully dying off, and we now have a messy and nearly incomprehensible Catherine wheel of assorted nonwhite minorities (and women) all spinning, dancing and surging into the limelight – not to mention the cross-breeds, the already mixed, the racially unidentifiable who are, say, a quarter black, a quarter Chinese, a quarter Indian, a third polyamorous and a tenth Cuban kinky hipster lesbian schoolteacher, with a no-religious-affiliation kicker. Sweet.
This is your new American majority, each and every one of whom terrifies the old guard, the rich white guys, Ted Nugent (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/08/ted-nugent-on-obama-election-twitter-rant-economic-spiritual-suicide_n_2094490.html), Bill O’Reilly, and the way it used to be. And this is why the Republican party threw every repulsive weapon it had at Obama to try and avert the inevitable; deep down, they sensed their own imminent obsolescence, even if they didn’t quite believe it was possible.
And oh, they tried everything. Racism. Birtherism. Sexism. Abortion, birth control, “legitimate rape” and irresponsible “sluts.” Religious intolerance, homophobia, xenophobia, Socialism, Communism, Nazis, Kenya, monkeys, Big Bird, gun rights, tax laws, welfare, elitism, oil shortages, health care reform that would secretly herd up and kill the elderly. Just for starters.
Nothing worked. Check that: It all worked. Just not as well as it used to. As one distraught fundamentalist Christian activist said, “It wasn’t that our message didn’t get out. We got the message out. But our message was rejected.”
http://blog.sfgate.com/morford/2012/11/13/old-white-guys/