“On the right, hateful words are fired like bullets”
Richard Cohen took a bike ride and thought that today is just like Kent State and CSNY’s Ohio:
On the right, hateful words are fired like bullets…I listened hard: “Tin soldiers and Nixon coming. We’re finally on our own. This summer I hear the drumming. Four dead in Ohio.”…
Bullets had killed those kids, sure — but they were fired, in a way, from the mouths of politicians…now it is the language of our time. It is the language of Glenn Beck, who fetishizes about liberals and calls Barack Obama a racist. It is the language of rage that fuels too much of the Tea Party and is the sum total of gubernatorial hopeful Carl Paladino’s campaign message in New York. It is all this talk about “taking back America” (from whom?) and this inchoate fury at immigrants and, of course, this raw anger at Muslims…
I recalled those days and wondered if they have not returned. Sticks and stones may break bones, but words — that singsong rebuttal notwithstanding — can kill. We lose presidents to words and civil rights leaders to words — homosexuals and immigrants and abortion providers, too.
Imagine what the conversation would be like at a dinner party with reporters from TIME and Slate, Cohen’s colleague Dana Milbank, and MoDo and Frank Rich. Can the things they say in private about the Tea Parties possibly be worse than the things they actually publish?
October 7th, 2010 at 1:30 am
What Richard Cohen didn’t write was “So shut up and let the folks who are running this country into the ground keep doing what they’ve been doing.”
This counry’s had ten percent of my life, and more of my money. I think I’ve earned the right to my opinion and my vote, regardless of what he thinks.