Posted on 07/15/2004 3:56:00 PM PDT by swilhelm73
When I was eight years old, school was let out early. The teachers were inexplicably upset, several were crying. But we students weren't. We were happy to be suddenly released. I didn't begin to be troubled until I got home and saw that my mother was crying too.
"Honey, I have to tell you something," she said. "The president's been shot."
"Dead?"
She nodded.
An hour later, my father came home, looking terrible. This I did not quite understand. My father loved to laugh at mean things he would read about the president in columns written by someone named Buckley. My father often said that Kennedy was too busy being a "playboy" (whatever that was) to stand up to Khrushchev. Oddly enough, though, my busy father had come home early too, just as upset as my mother.
He fixed himself a Scotch and downed it all just before the phone rang in late afternoon. My mother answered it and told my father who it was, a family friend. I couldn't hear what my father was told, but I witnessed his reaction. He got all red in the face, and starting barking harsh, angry words. He hung up on his friend, slamming the phone down. A long time would go by before he ever talked to that man again.
When I was older, I learned what the family friend had said to my father. The man, a Republican Kennedy-hater, had said, "Well, they finally got the son of a bitch."
Forty-one years later, something terrible has reemerged in the soul of America, something immoral. A major publishing house, Alfred A. Knopf, which once published H.L Mencken, D.H. Lawrence, Albert Camus, Franz Kafka — and, most recently, former president Bill Clinton's My Life — has decided that it is now acceptable to sell, as edgy entertainment, Checkpoint, a novella by Nicholson Baker that explores explicit fantasies about killing President George W. Bush. With saws. With boulders. With bullets. A British newspaper reveals that a main character runs through various outrages over Iraq and concludes, "I'm going to kill that bastard."
The author and publisher, no doubt, will argue that they are expressing an emotion, not an intention (which would be illegal). The problem is, intentions emerge out of emotions. A powerful enough emotion, validated and popularized by a prominent book by a seemingly respectable publisher, can be taken as an incitement. Checkpoint, whatever its literary conceits, will be an act of linguistic terrorism. "He is beyond the beyond," the Washington Post reports the main character saying of Bush. "What he's done with this war. The murder of the innocent. And now the prisons. It makes me so angry. And it's a new kind of anger, too."
It is, indeed, a new kind of anger. It is one that takes me aback, even though I am no stranger to partisan rancor. Like many conservatives, I have been willing to risk being considered outré for questioning the Clintons' ethics, motives, and how they explain their personal life. I have written unkind things about them, as people often do about their leaders in a democracy. There are times when I see Bill Clinton on TV that I want to throw something at the screen.
But I never would throw anything at him. I'd rather break my TV. Nor would I nod in agreement with lunatics who believe that Hillary murdered Vince Foster and dumped his body in a park. I am frightened of people who hate so much, because hate rests on fanatical certitude — an inability to grasp the idea that they might actually be wrong. I could well be wrong about the Clintons. Maybe there is something great about them that I just cannot see. Millions of Americans do.
There was a time when most partisans had such an internalized reality check, and a larger concern for the well-being of the country. On the day President Reagan was shot, I saw reporters and editors — almost all liberal Democrats — with tears welling up in their eyes. They were crying because they realized that a hole had been shot through our Constitution.
Today's Left has lost its way. The season's most-talked-about film portrays President Bush as willing to send Americans soldiers to their deaths in order, somehow, to enrich himself and his buddies. Entertainment figures turn fundraisers turn into hate rallies. And such events are embraced by the Democratic establishment as acceptable.
Now I have to wonder — God forbid — what the reaction would be if someone called a senior editor at Knopf and said, "Well, they finally got the son of a bitch." Would he hang up?
The difference between 1963 and 2004 is quite stark. Regardless of political affiliation, most Americans today don't engage in the silly idol-worship of politicians that was so common back then. In fact, the 1990s taught us that the Mexican immigrant working for the local landscaper probably has more integrity than many political figures in this country.
It is very sobering to see what is going on today with anti-Bush sentiment. And yet I see commentators on the news going on about how politics has always been cruel at times and people say mean things and blah blah blah. But not like this. I can remember the stuff people said about Nixon, and about Reagan and Clinton, and it doesn't hold a candle to what people are doing and saying about Bush. Additionally, the internet has brought leftists and hate-mongers across the globe into the fray.
Then you gotta wonder, where will it go from here?
"Honey, I have to tell you something," she said. "The president's been shot."
Wow. Exactly the same thing that I experienced, albeit I was 12. I hope I never live to see another President assasinated, be he be Democrat, Republican or some third party... I will never forget that day.
I'm watching my republic slowly but surely going down the tubes, but I would never wish death to any President. FMCDH(BITS)
The NAACP flap over W not speaking caused Fox to rerun the NAACP ad implying W was responsible for the dragging death murder in Texas while he was Governor. You're right, it's getting well beyond the pale.
I love America-- and by inference, it's leaders and representatives.
I am afraid. There is a sickness spreading through the nation-- not just among the left. All people are suseptible and none are immune.
If you are reading this-- don't succumb to this sickness.
We are ONE NATION.
After Bush wins in November, the World's Leftistas commit mass ceremonial suicide in hopes of joining Heaven's Gate?
This is for the Islamists. The Taliban or the Khmer Rouge fit the definition of fanatic. It should not be introduced into American politics. Unfortunatly it has. Full blown, you have the supporters of McVeigh and the Weather Underground in the past and ELF, Anarchists, Islamists today. The left is sliding closer to the abyss as this author notes. Perhaps two dozen congressional types are there or on the verge -- McDermit, Lee, Johnson, Waters, are there. Before the end of August, a good portion of the country could slip past the point of no return.
The riots in Seattle and the proIslamic mania on our college campuses match anything the Weather Underground or their contemporaries ever thought.
Much has changed. I believe it was Thomas Sowell who observed that a good deal of the nation's social history over the last thirty years has been spent replacing what worked with what felt good. I wonder what year he first observed that?
"Nor would I nod in agreement with lunatics who believe that Hillary murdered Vince Foster and dumped his body in a park."
Either hillary got to this idiot, or he can't read or think for himself!
How many have DIED simply for knowing the clintons?
I spent 12 years in the Marine Corps and did not know as many people who died MYSTERIOUSLY and VIOLENTLY as did the "friends of bill & hillary"
He'd been a target of the left since he defeated Helen Gahagen Brown in California, decades earlier and they were going pay him back.
actually, it's WHAT'S RIGHT REPLACED WITH WHAT FEELS GOOD
Nor would I wish death on any president. Now I do wish Clinton would disappear back into the hills of Arkansas. During the torturous 8 year tenure, fantasies of his death never entered my mind nor anyone else's that I was acquainted with.
Let us never kid ourselves......the left wouldn't spit on us if we were on fire - they live to hate. Something about their childhood I suppose. Yeah, that's it. They're not evil, they were abused as children. (sarcasm button/off)
"We're depraved 'cause we're deprived".
FMCDH(BITS)
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