Suvendrini Perera (editor) - Living Through Terror

In these first heady days after the November 2008 US election, one bizarre slogan stands out: Rednecks for Obama. Even weve had enough. The New York Times reported that this sign was seen emblazoned on a Confederate flag before the historic 2008 election. Something in the redneck slogan was telling. One simply cannot overestimate how powerful a symbol of bigotry that Confederate flag is, or how keen are the resentments felt by many white southerners against the levels of educational attainment and economic power represented by the coasts. So what does it mean to say Even weve had enough? After all, this is a nation of superstition, as per the Confederate legend. The vast majority of the population attests to the existence of a devil and individuated angels. Forty-five percent say aliens have visited Earth. Three times more people think there are ghosts than was the case a quarter of a century ago, and over a third avow that houses can be haunted. Eighty-four percent believe in the posthumous survival of the soul, up 24 percent on 1972. Only 25 percent subscribe to evolution, almost two-thirds anticipate millennial doom and rebirth, 55 percent are certain that Satan exists, 44 percent know there are demons (the same national proportion that has seen Mel Gibsons anti-Semitic paean to sadomasochism, The Passion of the Christ, where his screen and social identities of oleaginous businessman, vengeful messiah, anti-authoritarian larrikin, and right-wing real-estate magnate collided) and in the South, 44 percent say lightning is sent by god to punish wrongdoers. Forty-one percent are converts to fundamentalist evangelism across a bizarre array of groups, and 18 percent align with the religious right. The latter are the most skeptical people in the United States population about environmental protection. Apparently there is no future for the planet. Gods design is to destroy it and deliver true believers to safety in a kinky theological draft of wind (Miller, 2008). But the Republican Party does not serve these misguided souls, even though they represent its electoral core. The Party functions in the service of specific corporate interests: mineral extraction, real-estate speculation, health care [sic], pharmaceutical companies, and high finance. The country has been governed for almost a decade by people who are driven by their own class privilege, even as they deploy populist and anti-elitist rhetoric to capture straight, white, god-bothering xenophobic suburb- and exurbanites. So how have the rednecks, in whose name these financial and mineral elites operate, worked the fraud out? Perhaps it became clear to them that the store was being minded by incompetents. Consider the litany of idiocies, from warmongering to climate-change denial and disaster mismanagement. The Obama election represents, among other things, a return to policy mandarinism, to rationality, to accredited expertise, to Weberian bureaucracy.