Letter: "The Audacity of Hate"

Editor,

With the so-called “democratic” election that catapulted the worst, least qualified, candidate into the White House, America’s ugly face has fully come to its bully head. There is a uniqueness in what has been a longstanding American tradition of consistent regress away from real democracy whenever minimal efforts have been successful to approach it. Gone is the pretext of American goodness. The veil of hypocrisy is torn. The honesty of blunt brutality speaks through bloody holes ripped open by filthy words of a foul language reminiscent of the racist and misogynist past.

Euphemisms are now solidly obsolete, not for the sake of truth, but for the sake of power. White supremacy denigrates restorative justice as (false) “political correctness.” Not only does the new White House Occupant (WHO) not mince words, he has redefined the use of them. We no longer speak to communicate, connect, combine and understand (each other) in order to resolve issues (of disagreement), but to confront, divide, confuse and irritate in order to raise more issues with even less solvable problems, so that newest frontlines can be staked out as a measure of political progress. Political success counts as the set up of impossible tasks. After all, the new common modus operandi is war — against the enemy at home and abroad. Enemies are all those in opposition to the dictates of the White House. The list includes nature, the planet and even reality itself. Critical words of wisdom will be charged with the “crime” of truth.

Hence, the nominations made for the new horror cabinet look like the gathering of slave traders and slaveholders. It’s as if George Orwell’s Animal Farm was used as a script. The pigs conspire together with the longtime oppressors to undo the achievements of liberation and worsen the condition of humanity — here as everywhere. The politics of wrath does always both employ and fuel the ill temper of hatred. Its warfare is cannibalistic. It’s known to consume itself.

In the context of the general confusion, facts have only importance in so far as they can be ignored. They are of no real-political concern, only “ego-nomic” (!) interests are, since they “trump” all moral-ethical worries. To promote those interests, new (fictitious) “facts” will have to be asserted, to give, at least temporarily, at the instant of decision-making, the semblance of rational justification. After all, the new rulers are rational creatures too. They understand the basic rules of logic, which is how they navigate around them.

Rumor has it that “the rapist in chief,” as some choose to call him after his inadvertent public admissions, is working on a book, despite his fondness for the brevity of tweets. Unsurprisingly, the title has already been leaked: “The Audacity of Hate.” The stubborn antagonism is not principled, but pathological. In the realm of science it is simply talibanesque. Its defiant denial of reality (of, i.e., climate change) pays tribute to the anachronism of ideological — religious or secular — fundamentalism. While ISIS is trying to annihilate the past with the destruction of most ancient monuments at the ancient city of Palmyra, pseudo-Christian ideologues are planning to annihilate the future with the destruction of government research data to dispel legitimate concerns of the looming global catastrophe. Patriotic songs of capitalism are sung stubbornly on the sinking ship of “America.”

Given the tacit sympathy for the murderous white supremacist terrorist organization known as the Ku Klux Klan, and the explicit fondness for European fascism, specifically in the person of Benito Mussolini, we may speculate whether America’s newest (mis)leader and his fervent followers could solve the riddle of the 220-pound iron gate stolen from the Dachau concentration camp, which after two years of disappearance suddenly popped up in Norway. If they were simply interested in its iron letters that are emblematic of the brutal cynicism of Nazi fascism — “arbeit macht frei” – “work sets you free” — there is a simpler way for the elated enthusiast of torture to give expression to his sadistic fantasies. The honesty of America’s cynicism is full of horrid treasures.

As soon as the Chief Tormentator speeds up Bush’s torture program at the American gulag of Guantánamo Bay, the following letters ought to be wrought in iron onto the official entrance gate, preferably by the wretched themselves, in reminiscence of Hitler’s doomed work slaves, as America’s own are forced to perish in the “Land of the Free and Home of the Brave!”

Joachim L. Oberst
UNM Faculty