Radical Spew Causes Amnesia: What Was It Like To Be American?

                                    Tom Joad and Ma from Grapes and Wrath

                       What It Was Like To Be A Working American - Out Of Work

In Huffington Post on  4-8-11 author Will Bunch discussed Beck, and Limbaugh’s favorite propaganda tool the Overton Window: “the Overton Window is a notion that you can radically move the parameters of political debate by pushing talk to the outer limits, so that ideas that were once deemed as extreme suddenly appeared to be normal.”  Their purpose, of course is to radically cleave the body politic into two separate groups that believe the nation’s ills imamate from two completely different sources.  Beck and Limbaugh’s target groups believes that government is the source of all evil while many of the rest of us believe that corporate influence on government is the problem.  Once convinced that target group of working and middle class voters can be used to swing close elections to benefit wealthy funders.  The polemicist, Beck and Limbaugh, have been handsomely rewarded for this valuable service.

            Beck and Limbaugh’s have so effectively used this device to radically shift what is considered normal by their working and middle class demographic, they have even

created amnesia about what is was like to be an American.  As a result, many working and middle class people are now able to believe that; it is OK to systematically destroy the rights of the working and middle class to a fair wage, and safe working conditions.  Such rights were won by our great grandfathers, grandfathers, and fathers through a long and bloody struggle against the same corporate foes that we faced then and now.  They are the rights that have defined America since the 1930s and have insulated working and middle class people from abuse by the wealthier and more powerful for more than 80 years.

By being subjected to this device of rhetoric, Beck and Limbaugh’s audience of working and middle class people are now able to believe that allowing union organization and attempts at providing low cost medical care to all Americans, constitutes socialism and class warfare, waged by the poor against the very wealthy.  This target group of working and middle class people are now able to believe that it is normal for 1%  of the Nation’s population to  holds 40% of the Nation’s wealth (the greatest top to bottom wealth disparity since the great depression).  They have been told that hard work and innovation should have unlimited rewards, not just reasonable or ample rewards.  They believe this even though most of the wealthy 1% do not work at all.

       These are fundamental changes in our national psyche that we would not have entertained until the Radical Spewers gained the support and tools necessary to shift our sensibilities and redefine what is ethical, fair, and inherently American. They have caused the grandsons and granddaughters of the men and women who fought for fair wages and reasonable conditions to forget how hard life was in the early 20^th century.  Also lost, is the memory that unbridled greed and unregulated corporations caused those hardships and that our government helped us climb back from that abyss.

  They have forgotten the America accurately depicted in John Steinbeck’s epic novel of the great depression and dust bowel, The Grapes of Wrath.

Tom Joad’s dialogue with his mother:

Tom:  I've been thinkin' about us too. About our people livin' like pigs and good rich land layin' fallow. Well, maybe one guy with a million acres and a hundred thousand farmers starvin', and I've been wonderin' if all our folks got together and yelled...

Ma:  Oh, Tommy. They'd drag you out and cut ya down just like they done to Casy.

Tom:  They're gonna drive me anyways. Sooner or later, they'd get me for one thing if not for another. Till then...

Tom Joad’s Soliloquy:

Well, maybe it's like Casy says. A fella ain't got a soul of his own, just a little piece of a big soul - the one big soul that belongs to ever'body. Then...then, it don't matter. I'll be all around in the dark. I'll be ever'-where - wherever you can look. Wherever there's a fight so hungry people can eat, I'll be there. Wherever there's a cop beatin' up a guy, I'll be there. I'll be in the way guys yell when they're mad - I'll be in the way kids laugh when they're hungry an' they know supper's ready. An' when the people are eatin' the stuff they raise, and livin' in the houses they build - I'll be there, too

                                                                                                            Trent Rager

                                                                                                            Perishable Democracy