Updated.
Their arguments haven't changed in decades.
To the Meet the Press audience on December 12, 1949, there was nothing special about the confrontation between I.F. Stone and Dr. Morris Fishbein. As editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association, Fishbein was a well-known foe of what the AMA called "socialized medicine" in any form; Stone, a sometime member of the Meet the Press panel since 1946, could always be relied on for provocative, irreverent, and persistent questioning. The country's most influential physician had already denounced national health insurance as "the kind of regimentation that led to totalitarianism in Germany." When Fishbein also condemned compulsory coverage as "socialistic," Stone demonstrated why the show's producers considered him "a good needler": "Dr Fishbein, let's get nice and rough. In view of his advocacy of compulsory health insurance, do you regard Mr Harry Truman as a card-bearing Communist, or just a deluded fellow traveler?"
That's the first paragraph of the preface to American Radical: American Radical: The Life and Times of I. F. Stone by D.D. Guttenplan.
Guttenplan doesn't get into the health care debate of the time. He uses that anecdote to begin describing Stone's fast fade from the limelight and virtual disappearance from the world of mainstream journalism at the beginning of the 1950s. That's another story. I'm quoting it here, with a heavy sigh, because it shows that the opposition to universal health care used the same vocabulary sixty years ago as now, although I doubt Dr Fishbein showed up at any debates packing heat or waving pictures of the President with a little mustache drawn in.
It's socialism! And it's fascism! All at once. Obama's turning us into Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union or, worse, France, at the same time. His stormtroopers and his KGB goon squads will fight it out in your living room for the privilege of dragging grandma in front of the death panels.
Can't somebody tell these raving loons to just shut up!
Well, that was refreshing. And I'd like to think it was the beginning of something, which maybe it is. But before we start expect every Democratic Congressman and Senator to start sounding like Barney Frank, let's remind ourselves that not every Democrat represents Barney Frank's district.
You'll notice in the video that the crowd starts grumbling as soon as that woman used the word Nazi and they cheer when Frank asked her on what planet she spends most of her time. (They don't cheer quite as much when he compares her to a dining room table because I think they felt Frank had gone a little too far. He'd already embarrassed the woman, and shut her up. He didn't need to humiliate her.) Frank has something going for him that many of the Congressmen we've seen getting shouted down at their town halls don't have. He's from Massachusetts.
His constituents, however, are at a disadvantage when it comes to getting their voices heard by the mainstream media. They're from Massachusetts, which our media seems to regard as a foreign country instead of the birthplace of American democracy. America, on television and in the editorial pages, is somewhere west and south of Boston, west and south of Washington, actually. America is a small country filled with angry white people who live in states where the economy is based on growing corn or collecting federal money while the local politicians decry socialism and champion thrift and self-reliance---as with the stimulus money, watch: if and when health care reform gets through, their states will benefit the most.
As far as a visitor from outer space could tell judging by our media, Americans, real Americans, are white, Southern, Midwestern, Right Wing Christian, mostly male, and too smart to have bothered getting a college degree or a union card, too busy to read, and too "authentic" to think for themselves---they don't need to, because they feel when things are right and wrong in their guts. This is how their ignorance and their repeating of lies fed to them by cynics and loons and their rage that is clearly motivated by Obama-phobic hatred, racism, panic, and fear gets portrayed as the "legitimate concerns" of ordinary folks acting in the great traditions of our democracy and exercising their rights to speak freely and bear arms to shout down and frighten anyone who disagrees with them.
Meanwhile, the rest of the country, which is to say most of the country, gets ignored.
But maybe it's not Frank's response to that woman that's the beginning of something. Maybe it's the crowd's cheers. Maybe it will get noticed---or maybe we can make it get noticed---that those are the cheers of Americans who aren't afraid of Nazis and commies under their beds, who don't need to carry weapons in public to make their points, who listen and pay attention and think, and who want good health care for everyone.
_________________
Related: Scott McLemee on how there's nothing new in the Right's repertoire and Glenn Beck's act is almost as old as radio. You go with what works.
Prophets of Deceit describes Beck’s act perfectly, six decades avant la lettre: “something between a tragic recital and a clownish pantomime.”
The performance is intended, not to provide information or even to persuade, but rather to create a space in which rational discussion can be bypassed entirely.
Updated Wednesday night:
Roy Edroso gets Inside the Heads of Obama's Health Care Town-Hall Rowdies.
Media Matters chronicles 75 years of the Right's "socialism" smear against health care reform.
Yes, southern whites are disproportionately represented in the lunatic fringe. I have no real idea why they are so eager to demonstrate and fight against their own best interests other than ignorance. It's sad but it's damned frustrating, too.I'm so unlikely to be represented by someone who will actually represent the interests of his own constituents that I am forced to donate to candidates in other states who stand a chance of winning and also doing some good.
Posted by: Mark | Wednesday, August 19, 2009 at 12:28 PM
Hi Lance,
I enjoy reading your blog. Cheers to you for this post today. I mean really, what's up with carrying rifles/pistols like this is Dodge City? The part in your paragraph about "too busy to read, and too "authentic" to think for themselves" accurately describes these people. Like some have noted, all that is missing are the gun nuts to drive by in jeeps waving thier guns and yelling like they are in Somalia. I have been disappointed with NPR Radio's very tepid coverage of these people, the oranizations behind them,etc.
Posted by: Anne Davis | Wednesday, August 19, 2009 at 06:17 PM
The really funny thing is, Anne, that in Dodge you had to check your weapons at the saloon.
Posted by: Linkmeister | Thursday, August 20, 2009 at 02:36 AM