Lynching Makes Its Comeback, by Mike Gold – Brainiac On Banjo #137
September 28, 2009 Mike Gold 14 Comments
Well, let’s see what the liberal press has to say. The U.N. Obama. Health care. Still another incredibly stupid football player. Hmmm… nothing here about a government census worker getting lynched in Kentucky.Lacking any sense of history, the liberal press seems to be okay with that.
First, the story. According to the Associated Press in a story updated on September 25th, census worker Bill Sparkman was found on September 12th hanged, bound and naked, from a tree near a Kentucky cemetery with the word “FED” scrawled on his chest. It was his job to survey the area and ask residents about the size of their house, how many rooms it has and how much they pay monthly for electricity. Nothing like “how many guns do you own?” or “do you belong to the Ku Klux Klan?”
FBI agents – and this is a direct quote from the AP piece – are trying to determine if foul play was involved. No shit, Sherlock.
Last June, the astonishingly loony Republican Minnesota Congresswoman Michele Backmann proclaimed she will not fill out the 2010 Census. “Why does the government need our phone numbers?” The following month she told her soul-mate Glenn Beck that she is concerned with whether the government should know about its citizens’ “mental stability.” She went on to drag ACORN, that old chestnut, out of the fire, claiming Obama made $8.5 billion available to the organization to “conduct” the census. Non-partisan fact checking organizations have been very polite: they “dispute” her accuracy.
The census has become one of the latest bugaboos haunting the Great American Right. It’s evil. It’s intrusive. It’s anti-privacy, un-American and most certainly anti-Christian. They’ve joined Bachmann in diligently spreading the word across the pyromaniac right-wing media.
The census has been in the United States constitution since it was ratified. The first census was taken in 1790 – that’s 220 years ago next year, the time of the next census. That’s 77 years before Karl Marx wroteDas Kapital and 135 years before Adolf Hitler published the first volume of Mein Kampf, so these fools have been having a hard time linking the census into the great socialist/fascist conspiracy. Anyway, we’ve had us our census taken every decade since the U.S.A. became the U.S.A. You can’t get more conservative than that.
Of course, they deny their efforts might have egged on the people who lynched Sparkman. They say that the area he was working was notorious for its hidden meth labs. Those were the people who killed the guy.
Right. And then they carved “FED” in his chest and hanged him from a tree. Absolutely. And right after that, they put up neon signs that proudly proclaimed “METH SOLD HERE!”
So. Is there blood on Michele Backmann’s hands? You betcha.
And where has the “liberal” media been while all this has been going on? Right where it’s always been, with its head squarely up its ass.
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Mike Gold performs the weekly two-hour Weird Sounds Inside The Gold Mind ass-kicking bizarro music and blather show starts up Sundays at 7:00 PM Eastern on www.getthepointradio.com, replayed the following Thursdays at 10:00 PM Eastern. Likewise, his Weird Scenes Inside The Gold Mind rants pop up every on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday exclusively at www.getthepointradio.com. The regularWeird Scenes Inside The Gold Mind rants continue every Monday and Friday on The Point podcasts, available right here at www.michaeldavisworld.com, as well as at www.comicmix.com,www.getthepointradio.com, www.zzcomics.com, and www.ravenwolfstudios.com. You can subscribe to The Point podcasts at iTunes by searching under “The Point Radio.”
Gold is also a regular contributor to www comicmix.com, and edits their online comic book content. Check out the all-new GrimJack: The Manx Cat #5 and Jon Sable Freelance: Ashes of Eden #3, now being solicited in the IDW Publishing section of this month’s Diamond catalog.
Rick Oliver
September 28, 2009 - 10:15 am
To paraphrase an old anti-war slogan: “What if they gave a democracy, and nobody came?” The primary purpose of the census is, of course to ensures proper, fair distribution of representation in the House of Representatives, half of the only branch of the federal government that Thomas Jefferson, darling of the right, actually approved of. (He wanted a much weaker executive branch and abhorred the judicial branch.) So it’s mildly ironic that the most vehement, violent, flag-waving supporters of our American “democracy” don’t want to be counted for representation in that democracy.
So here’s my suggestion: Allow people to refuse to participate in the census. They won’t be counted, and congressional redistricting will assume that they don’t exist. Federal tax dollars to their states will also be based on the assumption that those people don’t exist.
It’s a win-win for everyone. They get fewer government programs and we get fewer of their rabid representatives in Congress.
Mike Gold
September 28, 2009 - 10:22 am
Hmmm. Seeing as how they’ve got back to lynching, perhaps we should count them as 3/5ths human.
Vinnie Bartilucci
September 28, 2009 - 10:53 am
This strikes me much more a case of hillbillies going after the “revenoors” than anything else. Still wrong, and still sad, but very possibly more connected to crime than Beck-inspired paranoia. Also, since he was a white gentleman, his being hung and mutilated was likely not sufficiently newsworthy. A dumb guy who was told by his friends and relations not to go into “that area” and going anyway, as opposed to a horrible racist act of hatred.
It’s interesting how people react to these kind of stories. Popular morning radio show Opie and Anthony was talking about this recently, how the questions asked change. If a black guy is attacked in a white area, people ask “Well, what was he doing there?” but if a white guy was killed in a black area, the reply is usually “Well, he should have known better”. The subtle assumption of guilt in both cases is there, but changes slightly.
I must admit, I’ve not heard anything about the Right trying to lionize the Census, but it certainly falls in line with the idea that EVERYTHING the sitting government is doing must be evil, up to and including things they’ve been doing for 200 years.
I expect that we’ll see a dramatic increase in attempted fraud connected to the census this time around, if only because we’ll hear more about them, and we’re all so panic-striken over identity theft and the like. I can think of a few off the top of my head – posing as a census taker to commit identity theft, setting up a website desgned to PREVENT census-based identity theft, I could go on.
The would should really be thankful I have what little morals I have, because I could be making a fortune off the stupidity of others. A hastily-written pamphlet filled with completely factual information could make a guy a pile of cash if marketed as “Your secret methods to protect yourself from the Census”.
We’ll also see the return of the same scare stories from ten years ago – the census is a secret plan to root out and deport illegal aliens, etc. Much like the way that free flu shots are a plot to sterilize minorities (in conjunction with the chemical included in Tropical Fantasy soda), paranoia runs deep in America, and it doesn’t take much to flare it up.
We should get the rumor started about how we can get “Jedi” official religion status if enough people list it as their faith. It worked so well in England and Australia, after all.
Marc Alan Fishman
September 28, 2009 - 12:14 pm
Wish I had something witty or clever to say here, but frankly I’m at a loss. The media as a whole is just sad to me. It’ s all being controlled, washed down, washed out, editorialized, politicized, and then crammed down our throats via complicated scrolling graphics, and outspoken idiots who wish they had integrity.
The census seems like a good idea to me. Like my day job that tries every day to get a scope on “who our customers really are” … it’s America’s duty to know the residents living on it’s soil. To be lynched and carved up for doing that job? They don’t have a hell deep enough for the poor misguided ne’er-do-wells who did the deed.
Alan Coil
September 28, 2009 - 1:24 pm
Some people seem to be saying it’s his own damn fault for being there.
Rick Oliver
September 28, 2009 - 1:44 pm
The census is quite explicitly stipulated in the Constitution. We can argue about what questions you should have to answer or whether or not you have to answer any of them at all, but without amending the Constitution we cannot argue that the government has no business sending people out to collect census information. If you want to pick and choose the parts of the constitution you want to observe, then you need to write a new constitution. Until then, census workers are just fulfilling a patriotic duty, like our troops overseas — in fact, one could argue that it’s an even more patriotic duty since the constitution doesn’t say anything about a full-time, professional military. In fact, many of the founders, particularly Jefferson, were quite averse to the idea.
Mike Gold
September 28, 2009 - 1:58 pm
Yeah, it’s his own damn fault. And if the police get slaughtered for doing THEIR job, it’s THEIR own damn fault too.
The census thing taps into the current immigrant paranoia, which is far more Lou Dobbs than it is Glenn Beck. The Right is afraid that if the Hispanics, who are all welfare deadbeats and illegals who want to rape your mothers and play their music real loud, get a fair count more of our tax dollars will be diverted from the wealthy folk to socialist programs that give these vile loafers a free ride.
Anybody here ever study Father Charles Coughlin?
Vinnie Bartilucci
September 28, 2009 - 2:21 pm
I poked around a bit, and sure enough Michelle Bachman had indeed been making batshit-crazy comments about the census before this guy died.
In June.
I found a lot more reports about it on left-leaning blogs to illustrate her as a loon than I did on mainstream sites reporting it as news. The fact that I hadn’t heard anything about it suggests to me that maybe the media has started to realize that the woman is out of her mind for attention, and is starting to pass on the loopier of her statements.
However, I sure have found a lot of talk about it now, after this guy has been killed. She’s conveniently left it out of her recent speeches, and has done a fair job so far of dodging questions about it.
Another interesting thing – while I’ve found a lot of articles predicting how the Becks and Limbaughs of the world were going to pick up on the census as a work of the Evil Obama Admninistration (as early as August), save for Bachman, I haven’t found any actually doing it. Bachman’s statements have been reported upon, but I’ve not heard about any monologues from the big three of talk radio about it. Have there been?
Indeed, according to the huffpost, Beck actually shut her down when she started to go down the “internment camps” road on her show ( http://tinyurl.com/kj4o8r ). Later edits to the story suggest the writer may have been giving beck too much credit, but at least it seems even the talk show hosts can tell when something too goofy, at least on occasion.
I found reports of several of her Republican colleagues calling her out on the more wacky facets of her claims (while still saying having ACORN do the canvassing was questionable), so even her fellow Republicans can admit when she’s gone too far.
There sure won’t be any now, that’s for sure; this has pretty much turned the issue radioactive, and that’s a good thing.
People need to stop taking beneficial and positive ideas and twisting them into things that people will be afraid of. People are putting their babies at risk by skipping vaccinations because of spurious (and oft-disproven) claims that they may cause autism. African nations were convinced to turn down grain that would have fed millions of people because certain groups convinced them the food was genetically engineered “Frankenfood”. And others have convinced people that health care in any form is a bad idea.
There’s nary a thing in this modern world that some limelight-seeker isn’t telling us is a deadly killer. And then when people get SO scared by what they’re told that they sever all ties with society and go live in the woods, the government goes in and arrests them as dangerous radicals.
Ya can’t win.
Alan Coil
September 28, 2009 - 3:58 pm
It has not been proven that vaccinations don’t cause autism to occur.
African nations sometimes turned down genetically modified grains because of the contract that said they had to buy all future seeds from the company offering them, while at the same time forbidding the allowing of any of the GM grains to go to seed. In other words, they had to buy new seed every year at a much greater expense.
Might I suggest, Vinnie, that you spend your evenings watching MSNBC for the next 4-6 weeks so you can become more aware of the nuttiness of the right wing. The Malkin lunacy has been much discussed at MSNBC over the last several months.
Vinnie Bartilucci
September 28, 2009 - 4:11 pm
Once again, a name I wasn’t aquainted with (nor one that was mentioned anywhere on this page or in Mike’s story) till you mentioned her.
I think if more people grasped how the Streisand Effect worked, these wackburgers would get a lot less press.
Alan Coil
September 28, 2009 - 4:17 pm
Sorry. Michelle Bachman.
Mike Gold
September 28, 2009 - 4:26 pm
If Michelle Bachmann were to have her head blowed off before the next election, the Republican Right would be at the top of my list of suspects.
At the bottom — guys like Keith Olbermann, Jon Stewart and David Letterman. She gives them SO much material!
Rick Oliver
September 28, 2009 - 5:02 pm
Michelle Bachmann and Joe Wilson are the future of the Republican party. They may represent the minority lunatic fringe, but as Frank Schaeffer has pointed out, you may not have to worry about the lunatic fringe if they play by rules — but they don’t play by the rules.
Jonathan (the other one)
September 30, 2009 - 1:57 pm
Alan, the supposed “link” between vaccines (or, more specifically, the use of thimerosal as a preservative) and the incidence of autism was based entirely on anecdotal evidence, and one study in the 1990s that was so procedurally flawed, its own author later disavowed it.
Meanwhile, studies conducted by the WHO, the CDC, Canada, Holland, and a number of US states have found no link whatsoever. Further, while all this was in dispute, the use of thimerosal was outlawed in several countries and states. It affected the incidence of autism not in the least.
The problem here is that typically, autism makes itself obvious shortly after the age of two, when a child is noticed not to be achieving a number of milestones. (Further, regressive autism, particularly Rett’s Syndrome, will cause loss of existing skills between two and three.) And most children get a barrage of vaccines at around the age of two. Some people assume post hoc ergo propter hoc, which is often flawed reasoning.
It is interesting to draw parallels between the thimerosal-autism hypothesis, and the ancient legend of “changelings” – at least none of Wakefield’s followers urged us to leave the young ones in the woods, so that autism would bring back our real children…