“…concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it.
(Excerpted quote from Eric Francis’ article in the series on Auschwitz called “The Big Lie.”)
“We need to know the full extent of Senator Obama’s relationship with ACORN, who is now on the verge of maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history in this country, maybe destroying the fabric of democracy.“
(Republican Presidential nominee Senator John McCain at the third and final Presidential debate, October 15, 2008)
“George Wallace never threw a bomb. He never fired a gun, but he created the climate and the conditions that encouraged vicious attacks against innocent Americans who were simply trying to exercise their constitutional rights,” … “Because of this atmosphere of hate, four little girls were killed on Sunday morning when a church was bombed in Birmingham, Alabama.”
(Georgia Congressman John Lewis, civil rights veteran, on the hate-speechВ at the McCain campaign rallies.)
Dear Friend and Reader:
WE BEGIN THIS EXORCISM with a prayer for four little girls in Alabama, for Matthew Shepard, for James Byrd, for theВ 16 children killed in the daycare centerВ of theВ Alfred P. MurrahВ Federal Building blown up by domestic terrorist Timothy McVeigh in Oklahoma City in 1995В and for everyone who has everВ directly confrontedВ a torch, a gun, a bomb or an epithetВ in the name of unthinking hatred and fear.
In Wikipedia, a scapegoat is defined as someone “who is blamed for misfortunes, generally as a way of distracting attention from the real causes”. For some, those real causes can range from isolation and loneliness to outright terror of the natural and inevitable changes that life brings — in one’s personal life,В in your community, culture, religion orВ world.
Real causes can also include one’s own guilt and remorse projected onto someone else, making them, not you, everyone’s focus. In some cases the distraction deals with the ineptitude and rootlessness of one’s campaign. In all cases, it seems all too easy to project fear onto “the Other.”
At the end of Mercury Unbottled – Part 1, I wrote: “He (McCain) is now like liquid mercury unbottled. Once spilled, hard to contain, even harder to keep a finger on and lethal to swallow. But at that point, when cornered as he is, a political animal becomes all the more dangerous.”
Since the debate, the campaign of Senator John McCain the political animal has become dangerous. ScapegoatingВ is occuring at a rhythmic pace. Remember Casey’s words from “A Coup on the Mind“? They lie. Rinse.В Repeat.