A last summer breeze mummers through maple and oak leaves on this idyllic morning. A blend of bird song, distant and near, the blur of tires on Scrub Oak and sunlight. It would probably be better if I let well enough alone, tried to block the insidious hate mongering from my consciousness at least out here, just while I drink my morning coffee. Instead I read, first Charles M. Blow’s “I Had a Nightmare” and then Bob Herbert’s “American Is Better Than This” op-ed articles in yesterday’s NY Times writing against Glenn Beck’s hate rally on the Mall in DC. Beck is quoted as saying, “I think we reclaim the civil rights movement.”

Blow and Herbert’s op-eds bring to mind the horrible televised persecution of Civil Right’s protests—the horrors I and those my age, witnessed as we ate our TV dinners not so many years after the end of WWII and months before the string of assignations that would take President Kennedy, his brother Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King’s lives. 

The breeze rustles the edge of op-ed page. It is Sunday morning, the day after thousands have crowded the Mall to hear Sarah Palin rally to “restore honor.” It would be hilarious to watch these two ego-centric light minds try to replicate history if they were not stoking the flame that singes the tattered hem of what remains and passes for democracy in the U.S.

Herbert quotes Lincoln, King, and Beck in his op-ed:

“Consider a brief sampling of their rhetoric.

Lincoln: “A house divided against itself cannot stand.”

King: “Never succumb to the temptation of becoming bitter.”

Beck: “I think the president is a racist.”

Something is rotten in the United States (paraphrase Shakespeare). In context to the 1960’s Civil War (remember Kent State) the Tea Party, Fox News, the dysfunctional Congress hobbled fear of the ballot, is more reminiscent to Marie Antoinette’s reply before the French Revolution, “Let them eat cake.” The cake American’s have been fattened has had its desired effect—we are fatter, and less educated, primed for exploitation by Beck, Limbaugh, and Palin’s corporate backers named in Frank Rich’s op-ed “The Billionaires Bankrolling the Tea Party.”

Our consumer society dances to our master’s tune that since Palin entered the 2008 Presidential campaign has been an ever increasing message of hate. Hate rallies against the exotic other (immigrants, and Muslims) are not new. It has happened in this country before but somehow, something pulled us back from going over the edge. But that was before. What will happen this time around is what worries me. What breaks my heart is the distortion of truth that is subverting individual potential. Am I still nostalgic for the misty, Hippie indoctrination of peace, love and equality? Cynical as I am I cannot bring myself to believe the spectacle of a puffed up Beck on the steps of the Lincoln memorial is credible to the majority of Americans.