Poisonous politics
Rhetoric absurd and divisive
When she announced her run for governor, Sarah Huckabee Sanders proclaimed she’d “protect” Arkansans from the “radical left.”
By what measure does one become her bogeyman, her “radical left,” her imagined enemy?
Will you become Sanders’ “radical left” when you deposit your Social Security check? When you use your Medicare? Or worse, your Medicaid?
What if you want teachers to be better-paid? With better benefits? And smaller classes? Are you the “radical left”?
Reading which newspaper makes you the “radical left?” The Democrat-Gazette? The New
York Times? The Arkansas Times? Your town’s local newspaper?
Not reading newspapers at all? Does that rescue you from dwarfing into Sanders’ “radical left”?
If John Brummett writes a column critical of Sanders, does he become the “radical left”? Does his “radical left” column endanger the Democrat-Gazette of being tainted as “radical left”?
What about Paul Krugman? George Will? What are they?
If you discover by way of history that our European ancestors arrived in the new world bearing the plagues of Europe which devastated native Americans, are you yet again Sanders’ “radical left”?
Or the history of the Trail of Tears that gouged its horrid scar of brutal white dominance right through Arkansas, have you become yet another of Sanders’ “radical left”?
If your great-grandfather fought with Hood’s Brigade, battled through the Peach Orchard and became trapped under withering fire at Little Round Top, and you know his horrid role was meant to keep enslaved those Africans who had built the U.S. Capitol, whose blood and forced subjugation and agony and loss of their humanity while they were brutalized to hold aloft a faux classical Greek mythology in the South, and you swear, never again, never again, does that make you Sanders’ “radical left”?
If you know that anti-loitering laws which sprung up across the South during Reconstruction were not meant to rid towns of riffraff but to ensnare Black men into a darkness far more brutal than what had been wretchedly carried out on plantations throughout the South prior to the Civil War, have you become yet another of Sanders’ “radical left”?
If you acknowledge science as a valid measure of the universe, of how we evolved, of the harm humankind is doing to our only Earth, are you the “radical left”?
If you take vaccines to protect you and your loved ones from a virus that has become a worldwide killer, are you the “radical left”?
Were election officials in Georgia and Arizona the “radical left” when they refused to overturn the 2020 election results?
Sanders opened her campaign with poisonous rhetoric similar to what gave her former boss a following willing to undo two centuries of the governed governing themselves, a government disdained by authoritarians who squelch voices not in harmony with that of its dear leaders.
As Anthony Doerr writes in his brilliant “All The Light We Cannot See” about Germany’s destruction of its own humanity as it sought to dominate Europe, “Radio: It ties a million ears to a single mouth. Out of loudspeakers all around … the staccato voice of the Reich grows like some imperturbable tree; its subjects lean toward its branches as if towards the lips of God. And when God stops whispering, they become desperate for someone who can put things right.” Is that where we are?
Is that why we tolerate a candidate who proclaims her war against the “radical left,” a designation so poisonously absurd it belongs in the telling of a demented authoritarian from a time we thought we had put behind us?