Epic Volumes of Offal


Well, even though I've probably lost the few (albeit exceptional-quality) readers during my four day blogging weekend, it was a nice break...and an actual working vacation, as I managed to knock out a bunch of pressing chores. We're also seeing a return to a more normal Loosiana climate with some regular afternoon showers...the cat might not like it all that much, but I'll bet the plants are relieved (and they're even showing it: a couple of the azaleas are sprouting a few flowers)...

But...in the midst of the four-day, it seems a twitnut tempest-in-a-teapot--rather, make that several--creeped and spewed their way across the internets, starting with this story and this photo: purportedly, the latest instances of Pravda-on-the-Hudson treason. Mixed and matched with some other choice material, like John Tierney's plea for division along antebellum lines, and the ongoing pellmell retreat from reality when it comes to Iraq, well, I'm beginning to wonder, along with Billmon, just where the hell it's all going to lead:

Talk of disunion and civil war may seem like hyperbole. I'm sure it would certainly seem so to the vast majority of Americans who don't think much about politics or culture and just want to get on with their lives. I'm sure most Spaniards felt the same way in the summer of 1936, just as most Americans did in the winter of 1860.

But the historical truth is that civil wars aren't made by vast majorities, but by enraged and fearful minorities. Looking at America's traditionalists and the modernists today, I see plenty of rage and fear, most, though hardly all, of it eminating from the authoritarian right. For now, these primal passions are still being contained within the boundaries of the conventional political process. But that process -- essentially a system for brokering the demands of competing interest groups -- isn't designed to handle the stresses of a full-blown culture war.

Compared to most countries, America has been very lucky so far -- those kind of passions have only erupted in massive bloodshed once (well, twice if you count the original revolution.) By definition, however, something that has already happened is no longer impossible. It's easy for newspaper columnists to fantasize about disunited states, but only madmen would actually try to make them so. Unfortunately, the madmen are out there. It's up to the rest of us to keep them under control.

Indeed.

As weird--and as bad--as things are now, with an entire region still reeling from the federal government's textbook example of how NOT to do things during the 2005 Atlantic Hurricane season...matched by their equal example in losing wars to TWO FAILED STATES, matched by their failure to stop 9/11, their failure to capture Osama bin Laden, their failure in countering Al Qaeda (now MORE powerful than it was in January of 2001)...as bad as things are now, they'd be a hell of a lot worse if the twitnut fantasy of cultural armageddon came to some sort of macabre fruition.