It is tempting to laugh at the image of Sarah Palin, arms thrown back ala Slim Pickens (or the frontwards cowgirl) as she prepares to detonate atomic bombs over an American landscape. Kubrick, was after all, the master of farce. And Frank Rich is most certainly in on the joke. 

Except no one's laughing. 

Not me, at least. 

SARAH PALIN and Al Sharpton don’t ordinarily have much in common, but they achieved a rare harmonic convergence at Michael Jackson’s memorial service. When Sharpton told the singer’s children it was their daddy’s adversaries, not their daddy, who were “strange,” he was channeling the pugnacious argument the Alaska governor had made the week before. There was nothing strange about her decision to quit in midterm, Palin told America. What’s strange — or “insane,” in her lingo — are the critics who dare question her erratic behavior on the national stage.

Sharpton’s bashing of Jackson’s naysayers received the biggest ovation of the entire show. Palin’s combative resignation soliloquy, though much mocked by prognosticators of all political persuasions, has an equally vociferous and more powerful constituency. In the aftermath of her decision to drop out and cash in, Palin’s standing in the G.O.P. actually rose in the USA Today/Gallup poll. No less than 71 percent of Republicans said they would vote for her for president. That overwhelming majority isn’t just the “base” of the Republican Party that liberals and conservatives alike tend to ghettoize as a rump backwater minority. It is the party, or pretty much what remains of it in the Barack Obama era.

Sometimes, I feel as Cassandra. Just a few weeks ago, I wrote that Frank Rich was wrong to think that the culture wars were over. Now, July 12, 2009, Rich is quaking with rage over the politics of resentment--which, if you look carefully, looks a hell of a lot like the culture wars.

But I can go even farther back. I wrote about my experiences as a college freshman, working as an intern in a Congressional Rep's office. Of the disastrous 1980 election of Reagan, and how, that night,  I watched the lights go out: Bayh, Church, McGovern, Magnuson, and Carter (among others).  And, as I watched a new crop of freshly scrubbed, morally outraged, greedy kakistocratic patricians rise to the throne, led by that man, I knew that we would never be the same. 

I knew that Reagan would start the process of stacking the court with conservatives. I knew that Reagan would spend every last dime on his Cold War fantasies. I knew that public education would get shafted. I knew that soon, women who were just starting to make real progress were about to get hit by a tidal backwash that would drag them out to sea. I COULD SEE IT COMING. And I wrote a friend a letter that night about the new vision of America that would emerge. 

The places I knew they would attack were education, services for the indigent, and anything else that might help the "undeserving" poor crawl out of poverty. After all, these white men, all claiming the mantle of "working class" or coming from "hard-working parents" where mom stayed home while dad either worked the farm or toiled at his job (all stories told by Reagan based on movie roles, not real life) offered themselves in contrast to "welfare queens" (code word for African-American women with children) and told stories: stories that were later disproven by a thoroughly emasculated press as in love with the Teflon president as the narcississt was himself.  But the breakdown of the urban legends of the women with 17 children all claiming welfare--those stories were not dismantled by our public news watchdogs until the damage had been long done. 

And the press sold us that bill of goods for years: things were getting better for the middle class, even as the mental institutions were emptied out, and the homeless slept on grates, (I SAW THEM), and families begged for money on the streets (I SAW THEM), and friends dropped out of college as student loans and grants disappeared, and public education lost its funding from the federal government (conveniently converted to "block grants" that states could do with as they wished). 

It was the dismantling of whatever safety net there was for those of us who were not, as the late, great Molly Ivins Ann Richards (thanks ktm!) said about VP Bush, "born with a silver foot in  his mouth".

I saw this coming. This particular day. This day, when after 30 years of no services for the poor, no help for the struggling middle class, "circe et panem" (bread and circuses) offered to the masses--oooh look! Something shiny! The bread and circuses kept us dumb and entertained, led us to believe that everything was all right. That we were safe. Now that the nasty old USSR was gone. 

In the meantime, our kids got less and less education. Our teen pregnancy rates went up as we abolished access to contraceptive information. Our crime rates may have gone down, but our incarceration rates went ... up. And guess who is more likely to be in prison than college? Young, black men. (If they're not murdered before they get there.)

It's not that I want credit for having seen all of this coming. Jesus. I have taken my lumps. When I have compared this country post 9/11 to Weimar Germany and the growth of Fascism, I've been accused of mis-using the word and being an alarmist. In my posts on fascism, I called it "male fantasies: Revenge fantasies dreamed by those who wanted to avenge the metaphorical rape of this country by dark foreign men in planes, and the emasculation of men by uppity women. 

But it's not about men.   Please understand this is not men vs. women. It's about power. About how power gets distributed, and about how--right now--power is seen by those seeking to stir the pot as having tipped the balance in favor of minorities, and women, and the elites. 

Having  a college education used to be something to be proud of, to aspire to. Living in a college town has taught me two things, however: professors' kids will always go to college, and many families who live in the outskirts of these towns will seethe with resentment to the point where their children will never go to college--because to do so would be an act of class betrayal. (That's another blog post--I see this a lot in England).

So, after declaring that the culture wars were over, Frank Rich finally looked outside the streets of New York (I love Rich, don't get me wrong), and lo and behol: he observed the Palin resignation and noted that she became more popular. He observed that Michael Jackson, butt of jokes for two decades, had died and been beatified over night. And he scratched his head and figured out that he lives in the land of short-attention span theatre.

 He writes: 

The essence of Palinism is emotional, not ideological. Yes, she is of the religious right, even if she winks literally and figuratively at her own daughter’s flagrant disregard of abstinence and marriage. But family-values politics, now more devalued than the dollar by the philandering of ostentatiously Christian Republican politicians, can only take her so far. The real wave she’s riding is a loud, resonant surge of resentment and victimization that’s larger than issues like abortion and gay civil rights.

That resentment is in part about race, of course. When Palin referred to Alaska as “a microcosm of America” during the 2008 campaign, it was in defiance of the statistical reality that her state’s tiny black and Hispanic populations are unrepresentative of her nation. She stood for the “real America,” she insisted, and the identity of the unreal America didn’t have to be stated explicitly for audiences to catch her drift. Her convention speech’s signature line was a deftly coded putdown of her presumably shiftless big-city opponent: “I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a community organizer, except that you have actual responsibilities.” (Funny how this wisdom has been forgotten by her supporters now that she has abandoned her own actual responsibilities in public office.)

In Klaus Theweleit's magisterial study of fascism between the wars in Germany, he writes:

Fascism, then, waged its battle against human desires by encoding them with a particular set of attributes: with effeminacy, unhealthiness, criminality, Jewishness--all of which existed together under the umbrella of "Bolshevism."

On June 30, 2005 I parsed that sentence this way:

Christo-Fascism, then, waged its battle against human desires by encoding them with a particular set of attributes: with effeminacy [as in lesbians/gays/feminists], unhealthiness [bogus claims about abortion causing breast cancer or condoms not preventing HIV or all STDs], criminality {street crime], Jewishness [I think Muslim is the new Jew for the time being]--all of which existed together under the umbrella of "Liberalism."

Okay, I've been writing long enough, and I sense a thesis coming out of this. But here's what I think needs to be said. 

Reading the message boards on right-wing sites is like watching people plan a mass revolution. There is talk of shooting (name your target here) in order to change (name your cause here) so that "real Americans," who have suddenly become white, non-college educated along with those who, as the economy continues its freefall and more and more people lose their houses, their retirements, their college savings, (even their $70 haircuts, as one of our new posters wrote) will find themselves joined together in a great seething mass of resentment. 

Targets? Well, of educated women, who find themselves arrested for leaving their adolescents in malls. Black men and women, who will be seen as having achieved their educational success because of affirmative action. Latino/as, who will benefit from affirmative action (and have escaped immigration policies, too); gays--who are so fucking loud in their desire for civil rights. (I mean, why the hell can't they just get over themselves? )

I am not saying to ANYONE on this site that I see you among the class of the resentful, but having studied history most of my adult life, I can tell you that these movements tend to be like that proverbial pot of water the frogs are sitting in.

It's getting warmer around here, people. It's time to start responding to our neighbors when they start lashing out at "those people." Whomever those people are.

And here's my part: I'm not going to complain about some resentful mass, but will continue, as long as I am able, to talk to and with individuals in my own town who make comments about (insert group here) getting away with everything while others benefit. 

I'm not saying that we have a Holocaust coming. But I do remember this: when the "revolution" that is being called for comes, the elite intellectuals will be the first to go.