Republican Pathologies
I’ve been watching the unfathomable chicanery of Republicans in office since 1969 — when Richard Nixon took office, the Vietnam War was ramped up to help his standing with his anti-Commie-maddened Republican constituents, the draft became still more egregious in its demands, and the youth who would become my first husband began the first of two tours in the field with Special Forces training. I received daily letters from the various fronts he was deployed to, so I knew EXACTLY what was going on on the ground. I did what I have done since childhood when profoundly puzzled by something; I studied it down to that ground so as to render some kind of understanding and informed assessment.
I watched closely, while pursuing conscientious objection to the war and activism against Right-Wing social atrocities and bigotry against women and people of colour (and basically all non-WASP, non-male individuals and groups) on U.S. soil and worldwide, with sheer amazement at their, for the most part, manifest ill-will and obsessive repudiation of normal life values, while: Reagan attacked integrated, sound and thriving families, clans and villages in Central and South America so as to install his Right-Wing military-industrial corporate proxies; George Bush Sr. wage war on several fronts after having predicated his presidency as head of the CIA, during which time he and they installed Saddam Hussein and the vicious Baathist Party in Iraq, only for their proxy to turn and bite the hand that had made him and become the bane of the Middle East; Bush Jr., Billy Graham, and Cheney, et alia, begin and never end pointless wars based on fallacy and religious intolerance, which is to say Islamophobia, effectively creating ISIS, the Taliban, and a strengthened and renewed Al Qaida; and the dangerously dick-headed Trump was elected by their benighted numbers.
Though much of Republican Right-Wing ideology can be explained away by poor toilette training, incipient ‘Strong Man’ ideology with its fascist bent, male-identified dominance-ranking, ingrained fear-based-authoritarian religious indoctrination or some other punitive-dominant ideology, one would think the afflicted would grow up, figure it out, get deprogrammed, get some therapy, and stop supporting so much nasty (messed up elitist, deprivation-model, austerity for the ‘unworthy’ or marginalized) bullshit.
Somehow or other, Republican ‘governance’ always seems to end up being so fundamentally mean. Witness the socially-destructive life-long missions of Sessions, Ryan, McConnell, and their ilk. I am left, after nearly a half century of watching Republicans very, very closely, through a myriad of wars of their exclusive design and/or instigation, and uncounted racist, sexist, religious and generally misanthropic societal desecrations, with one abiding question:
WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH THEM?
