The _____ are coming! The ______ are coming!

When I was a young boy, riding the bus to school with my younger brother, I experienced two things that have consistently stuck with me over the years.

The first was the constant harassment Evan (my now deceased younger brother) received based on the fact that he was sort of a weirdo. It was hard to understand who he was, and what motivated him. What I thought of, at the time, as just intensively abusive, I see now as a rhetorical strategy: The kids didn't understand him or who he was or why he acted the way he did, so they applied a category to him they thought they understood. They called him faggot. Gaylord. Queerbait. They heaped homophobic abuses on him as a way of categorizing and demeaning him. All of these young country boys and girls used these terms uncritically, and without much thought at all to what those words actually represented.

The other, much less important thing, was a radio personality on the local country music station. I forget what his name was, and I don't feel invested enough in him as a topic to search for it. What I do remember, is that he would "say it like it was" (speak plainly, satirically, about the issues of the day), and then sign off with the following catch phrase: "Wake up, Uhmurica!"

What brought these anecdotes to mind? A few news stories. Perhaps you've heard that a gay blogger was told on his blog that "all faggots must die." And that, when someone traced the comment, they found that the computer from which the comment was written, was located inside the office of Senator Saxby Chambliss. Further, the comment came on the heels of the Senate's failure to get the votes it needed to repeal Don't Ask Don't Tell, the military policy that makes it possible to legally discriminate against a group of people based a categorical distinction that lawmakers, military officials, and citizens think they understand.

These stories, and this information, began, in my mind, to coalesce with some other things I've been reading lately about the series of far-right Tea Party darlings moving in on Senate and Representative seats this November. On Salon, Justin Elliot reported on an ad put out by North Carolina Republican Senate hopeful Renee Ellmers, in which Muslims are blatantly, and probably consciously, equated with "terrorists." Meanwhile, unapologetic racist, Chuck Paladino [NSFW] is inching closer to Cuomo in the NY race, and Delaware is dealing with its anti-masturbatory Tea Party favorite, Christine O'Donnell. The same Christin O'Donnell whose aides write stories about Obama's secret adherence to Islam, and who is alleged to have illegally spent campaign funds on everything from her rent to 19$ worth of bowling games. Salon also covered the story of a GOP hopeful named Jim Russell, who wrote, in 2001 (not 1901-- focus on that, OK?) about how destructive miscegenation was to Western Civilization. The GOP is now doing damage control on that last one, distancing themselves from Russell.

Reading this, I thought to myself that America should wake up. They should recognize these patterns for what they are: adherence to rhetorical norms that have given conservatives the upper hand in almost every public policy debate from the War on Drugs to the War on Terror. When I say conservatives, I'm being extremely inclusive. I'm not talking about the Republican Party. I'm not talking about Karl Rove and George Bush, I'm talking about cultural traditionalists, who have been found in every party, at all times.

Joe McCarthy did it. Early labor unions did it. Regean did it. It is this: utilizing cultural fear and economic uncertainty (check out the book Working Towards Whiteness by David R. Roediger, or At the Hands of Persons Unknown by  Phillip Dray) to ignite waves of the most reprehensible sorts of "populism." The kinds of populism that define an "Us" and a "Them," between which no reconciliation is intended or desirable.

The Formula for stoking such cultural anxieties is simple: 1) Identify a social problem. 2) Identify a target group. 3) Claim that before the recognition and acknowledgment of that target group by the institutional United States (Schools, Churches, Governmental bodies, etc), the social problem in part 1 did not exist. Repeat. And repeat. And repeat(these stories - Jan Brewer claiming that there are "beheaded bodies" in the desert, Newt Gingrich claiming Obama has a "Kenyan, anti-colonial" worldview, and a random poster on the anti-feminist Spearhead blog blaming "the fall of Western Civilization" on the 19th Amendment, all rely on this logic: These groups and individuals cause these problems through their mere existence... through their mere inclusion in our political discourse). The result is that even those people who don't believe such things to be true, are defending their position in the terms of the debate as you've set them. The upper hand is lost.

That's why, some twelve or 15 years ago, on a bus traveling past the apple orchards (picked clean by immigrants legal, and illegal) of a small town in New York, my little brother had to make the case that he wasn't a "faggot," instead of being able to expose his accusers' homophobia for the problem it was. That's why we have to defend Islam as not inherently evil, rather than asking why some people are convinced that it is, and why we have to defend the president against claims that he is an Islamo-Fascistic-Kenyan-Socialist rather than focusing on the actual results of his actual policies.

My point is this: the kids on the bus are still screaming "faggot" at the top of their sexless, prepubescent, ignorant, lungs. You can deny it, and implicitly reinforce their homophobic fear, or you can confront them and label their fear mongering for what it is: absolute bullshit.

How long will fear work as a party platform? As long as we let it.