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Pat Buchanan: The Angry Jester
Pat Buchanan's eurocentric views often slide over into white supremacy rhetoric. Especially when he capriciously assigns race to history's success and failure and projects it as a value onto future advance and decline. As wrongheaded as his views are—they are based on sweeping, unfounded but familiar generalizations, glaring omissions, deliberately overlooked details and an ignorance of specifics that is arrogance supreme--Buchanan is guilty of deeper crimes. Buchanan misses entirely the rice production done by Africans which made southern rice planters the world's wealthiest economic class in the 18th century. That African cultivated rice, saved northern Europe from famine, revitalized Sweden, and established a singular prosperity in Cowes, England, and paid for the legal educations of many of the founding fathers, including South Carolina's Charles Pinckney whose ghost draft of a constitution became a template for Jefferson and Madison.
Today, American Express, Xerox. Merck (yes), and Aetna are headed by African-Americans. Tell them they are leading the nation into decline.
But Buchanan's greatest threat is not his wild assertions (mostly recycled from 18th century English parliament debates, Klan warnings of the decline of America and the rhetoric of US senators like SC's Cotton Ed Smith in the 1920s and NC's Jesse Helms more recently), or his role as an apologist for white people. It's not his network and media platform. His greatest danger is as a distraction, the opposite of Athena's apples, but for the same purpose. His role is to focus the public vision away from the GOP's drive for unfettered, unchecked power. He appeals to the old order, while blinding everyone to his own irrelevancy. Buchanan is a modern Falstaff, vain, bombastic, cowardly, trading fear for courage. In every situation and action that he engages, Buchanan subverts the right order and stands for absolutist rule, feudal economics, and military virtues. He is ready to use other people as a means for his own ends. He steals old, re-cycled ideas. He and other pundits have lost their ambition of critical discovery.
They never reference the amazing growth of Brasil and its rise as a world economic leader in markets and moving 31 million of impoverished masses into middle class in the last decade. They ignore the means are no longer about the old ends. Buchanan is what one Shakespearean scholar described as a “stage butt.” Take much of what he says as a jest and remember ideologically he is a thief.
Walter Rhett writes about power: its worst and best cases, its hidden relationships; the strategies, paradoxes, and personal and social scorecard of its pursuit as the prize.
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