The Beast in the Ether

You may have noticed something peculiar in America lately.
Crowds of middle class Americans liberally exercising their first and second amendment rights; descending on town hall meetings and angrily confronting their congressmen. Crowds of angry citizens that are actually swaying public opinion away from the ruling administration's agenda, which is something more than can be said for the Iraq war protests.
Normally this kind of spontaneous populism would have me excited, but of course it all is about opposing health care reform. And the United States is entwined in a health care system so insane and awash in greed, so singular in its lack of fairness to the majority of its citizens, that I am not surprised at the violent wave of opposition to changing it. What I am surprised at is the opposition coming from the ground up.
We know that the health insurance companies and their shill non profit front groups are recycling a lot of false propaganda into their own echo chambers, generating a great deal of this supposed righteous popular indignation. But to dismiss these town hall saboteurs as paid agitators serves only to legitimize their angry protests, these dismissals coming themselves from media talking heads and Democratic politicians. Of course, these mobs are anything but spontaneous, and of course they are receiving a great deal of marching orders from the worst kind of lobbyists and political action committees. But it doesn't change the fact that these bizarre legions of white middle class near-geriatrics, many of them in fact on government health care already, are truly and incontestably angry. Its their anger than interests me, not their claim to truth.
In America today, there is a complete distrust of all the traditional institutions, and this cynicism has bred two kinds of reaction: fatigued detachment and vitriolic anger. Many in my generation have merely shrugged and turned away from caring about the shabby state of our nation, their brooding ennui punctuated of course by last year's over earnest rush into the embrace of Obama. On the other side of the equation, there is a seething anger ready to be seized upon by any savvy politician, be they Hillary, Obama, Palin, Rush Limbaugh, etc. We know that something is very wrong in our country and the need to point the finger in some direction can lead to people being led in disparate but equally outraged directions. Obama rode this wave of anger into the White House. The Republicans and their allies in the health care industry are now attempting to ride this anger into a complete demolition of health care reform in the autumn.
This anger is not hard to understand. We have been led in the last ten years into a deceptive and costly war in Iraq. Our real estate market and a large sector of our economy has collapsed in a speculative bubble whose transparent greed and unsustainable growth are only reinforced by the likes of Madoff, Enron, and other cases of brazen fraud. Our priests are now suspected of molesting children, we are not surprised at being spied on by our own law enforcement agencies, the toys and pet food we import from other countries may be fatal, we are running out of oil, our athletes are on steroids, and our television is dominated by crime dramas. We as a people have never been in a position quite like this; at the peak of our power and yet the dawn of our decline. Everything we consume is imported, our chief national export is now our debt, people work harder and longer hours for less and less, and we are bombarded by more information 24 hours a day than any other people in the history of the world.
What has emerged then is a sort of reactive anger that lingers in the air, something easily called upon for service by any politician or public figure savvy enough to seize it. I call this the Beast in the Ether. It is a beast because it is uncontrollable once summoned, and while as strong as steel, it is as tenuous as clouds. It lives in the ether, no one can quite speak its name, and yet we all feel its shadow.
In the 1976 movie "Network", the fictional news caster Howard Beale directed his audience to walk to the window and shout "I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take it anymore!" as if the words themselves were a sort of talisman. From time to time, people will get so exhausted, so choked from the bullshit, that they will indeed shout at the sky, they will band together for no other reason than to make the outside world aware of their anger, what comes of it be damned. It has happened so many times in history that it is barely worth reiterating, from 1848 to 1968 and all points in between.
I believe we as a nation are at a very dangerous crossroads. Our president is also our first president of color, and his only tragic flaw may be giving too much credence to the innate rationality of his citizens. As people like Wilhelm Reich have demonstrated in "The Mass Psychology of Fascism", the anger of the mob dwells in a murky, subliminal and even psycho-sexual realm of the collective unconscious. To the savvy leader, this is a wellspring of primal fear and insecurity waiting to be tapped. It is truly ironic that all this talk of "Nazi" policies is being hurled at Obama's health care legislation with absolutely no ground to stand on, almost as if the word "Nazi" itself is potent enough of a missile to bring down any semblance of opposition. The true fascist tactics are of course being utilized by the right wing to discredit this noble yet anemic attempt at bringing some sort of science of sanity to our crippled health care system.
While we are busy drumming up Hitlerian comparisons on both sides I think it is worth remembering one of the more savvy things the disaffected Austrian rabble rouser said once. He remarked to the effect that the bigger the lie, the more people are willing to believe it. Well, the spasms of possessed anger greeting these town hall conclaves are a testament to the truth of Hitler's statement. When people are upset, they are very willing to follow the most outrageous lie thrown down before them, and run with that lie until everyone else either believes them or has been silenced. It is our duty now as citizens to guarantee that the Beast in the Ether not escape our watch, and begin to rule tyrannically over our confused land.