Closets and Caves

So there I was, minding my own business, reading my political blogs and not expecting anything particularly interesting because Bhutto's assassination has used up all the news oxygen, when I read this:

A Rudy Giuliani campaign booster is standing by his comments that the U.S. needs to defeat "the Muslims" - or "chase them back to their caves."

And this:

John Deady, co-chair of the New Hampshire Veterans for Rudy group, told The Guardian of London, "We need to...keep pressing these people until we defeat or chase them back to their caves or in other words get rid of them."

Asked if he was referring to all Muslims, Deady said he was.

"I don't subscribe to the principle that there are good Muslims and bad Muslims," he told the TPM Election Central Web site.

"When I say get rid of them, I wasn't necessarily referring to genocide," he said.

In the last thirty years, there have been a lot of closets left empty, because the country has become liberal and open-minded enough that gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgendered people could find acceptance and be (largely) left alone.

Can we maybe fill those closets with these fucking conservative republican bigoted pinheads, and nail the closets shut? I thought we were well past the era when it was acceptable for people to spew vile shit like that in public. I couldnt care less if they want to sit in their darkened cross-filled abodes and rant and rave like rabid dogs, (freedom of speech and all) but when this stuff is spewed forth in a political campaign, the response should be derision, laughter, and rejection. I am not talking about laws here, I am talking about what OUR response should be. The LISTENERS.

Our 200+ year long national conversation about freedom of speech has almost always focussed on the speaker and her/his rights. The listeners to speech have no rights except the right to not listen, to change the channel, turn down the volume or walk away. But don't the listeners have an obligation? Especially if those listeners are journalists, there is an obligation (in my opinion) to point out the vileness, repeat it, satirize it, shout it from the fucking rooftops, "Did you hear what this guy said?"

For years the press has refused to call Bush a liar, even when it was obvious and incontrovertible that he was, in fact, lying. Now Rudy, who wants to run the whole country the way he ran New York -=twitch, shudder=- has hired a guy who wants to "get rid of" the Muslims, and is anybody shouting about it? Anybody but me and a few DFH bloggers? Not that I can see. And as of this morning, this dangerous microcephalic moron STILL WORKS for Rudy.

I am a bit of an amateur historian, concentrating on the consequences of the fall of the roman empire. How does this relate to anything? After Rome collapsed, the Catholic Church basically burned every bit advanced scientific knowledge they had gathered, plunging most of the west into what we now call the Dark Ages. But they couldn't get everything, because Spain was ruled by - you guessed it - the Muslims. If it were not for those Muslims and their innate love of knowledge and reason, we would not have the works of the ancient Greeks. You know, unimportant shit like Logic, Reason, Coherent argument, Medicine, Astronomy. Aristotle, Plato, et al. The folks who pretty much invented western thought. When the Muslims conquered someplace, they didn't BURN books, (like we ignorant, unwashed and illiterate white Europeans did) they COPIED them. Translated them. Distributed them. Taught from them. Saved them.

Islam today is not what it once was, and a small (but very very loud) minority of Muslims have abandoned reason, logic and science for fanaticism and self-immolation. Much like Europe did under Catholic domination.

We don't need to fight Islam, we need to fight stupidity, ignorance and generalized race-hatred. Stuff them in the closets and see how THEY fucking like it.

If I had the time, I suppose I could have found a better way of saying this, but I am too angry, too upset, and too scared to really pay attention to literary merit. The idea that one of the Rethuglican candidates might win the next election (and the more chaotic the world gets, the more likely that is) leaves me with a fervent desire to move to Greenland.