The Huffington Post is airing a new cable show called…wait
for it…The Huffpost Show. Brilliant. Anyway, I caught a few minutes of it and
the subject of the day was a phrase that Rand Paul is using in his stumbling,
bumbling campaign for the Presidency: “We’re going to take our country back.”
The two hosts were like “from whom?” and then a singer did a satirical song
about it.
Since the phrase is a
center point of his campaign and, from a brief clip they showed of a Paul
speech, very popular with his supporters, it seems fair to me to exam it a bit
more thoroughly.
“We’re going to take our country back” implies that there
was a time in the past when America was a conservative utopia and it
exemplified the basic tenets of conservative ideology. Okay. When, exactly was
that time?
Perhaps America’s golden era was as recent as the Reagan
years where Ron and his band of neocons began the destruction of the Middle
Class, made a secret pact with Iran to keep the American hostages until after
Carter left office, illegally sold guns to the Contras and left this country in
an economic mess when his term was up.
No? Well, we can definitely rule out the sixties. Maybe they
really like the fifties, when taxes on this country’s richest individuals was
as high as 80 percent, teen pregnancies were at the highest level they’ve ever
been, Jim Crow laws still applied, and American citizens were persecuted if
rabid officials eve thought you were a communist. It was, however, the Golden
Age of television, that fictional world where father always knew best and
children apologized if they disappointed their parents.
How about the thirties and forties? What? Turn back the
clock to the New Deal and all of FDR’s socialist programs? No thank you. The
twenties and thirties? The stock market crash, the Great Depression,
prohibition, the Dust Bowl, etc. etc. The turn of the century? Robber barons,
Tammany Hall, Native American genocide? Pre-Civil War? 1200 B.C.?
Obviously, there is no “back” to go back to for
Conservatives. Whatever utopia they have in their fevered minds is a delusional
blend of Ayn Rand, fifties sit-coms and racist dreams of a time when white
people lorded over everyone without question.
What a minute. Hold on. Maybe the phrase “take our country
back” actually means, “take our country backwards,” in which case I apologize
and give Paul kudos for his brutal honesty.
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