Memorial Day: Enter Hitler, Release 2.0By James Howard Kunstler
on May 30, 2011 8:58 AM
Adolf Hitler liked leather and crypto-military costumes, too, and the build-up to the Third Reich was all about colorful pageantry. Make no mistake - to borrow a favored presidential locution, if I may - Sarah Palin's campaign is all about shame, about being a nation of losers and feeling bad about it. Adolf Hitler's career was all about him feeling like a loser at a peculiar moment in history when his whole country felt like a loser nation. His feelings resonated with the crowd's. Germany had just lost the First World War. The victors (England, France, Great Britain) had imposed a harsh peace, including massive cash reparations. Germany was broke, demoralized, and humiliated. Hitler had fled to Germany from his own loser homeland, the fading empire of Austria, after a shiftless decade in Vienna of living in rented rooms and homeless men's shelters, having failed twice to get into the national arts college.
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......And it was in the years 1920 to 1923 that he discovered his theme: playing on Germans' feelings of humiliation and promising deliverance back to lost greatness.
This is exactly the theme of Sarah Palin's campaign. A large segment of the American public has entered the dark wilderness of loserdom. They've lost jobs, incomes, and even their homes. They can't support a family, can't afford to gas up their God-given cars, can hardly even afford to buy food - though many of this group have been programmed, tragically, to get much of their food from hamburger and taco dispensaries that "free market" America has generously dotted the landscape with. They are ashamed, especially living in a nation where liberty is supposed to enable you to get a leg up in the world, to be self-reliant, to make something of yourself. Hence, they imagine themselves to have somehow been deprived of liberty (and honor!) which they must now get back.
They have even lost their racial standing now that the role of president is occupied by a half-African man (who, they suspect, is not even a legitimate citizen, but rather an alien opportunist!). This is very hard for them to articulate, because racism is also something to be ashamed of, and they are already overwhelmed with shame - but nonetheless the old tribal-ethnic feelings dog them. So they express it in a convoluted way as the hobgoblin of "socialism" - the government lavishing money on people who don't deserve
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