McCarthyism & Talk Radio

So this weekend I drove from San Diego to Carpenteria and back in a 1991 Geo Metro with a busted radio that is stuck on one AM station 24/7. Here in San Diego, that gets me El Voz del Pueblo out of Rosarito in Baja California - a great way to at least practice listening in Spanish. But as I drove north through Los Angeles, it picked up a conservative talk radio.

Now personally, I think Barak Obama is conservative and his two great qualifications to be president are he's one step to the left of John McCain and he's not a white man (we've had too many of them for president). I think Cynthia McKinney is a great, grounded candidate and her politics more closely represent the direction I think this country should go. That being said, financially I'm supporting both Obama and McKinney and hope if you're in a swing state you vote for Obama.

So back to talk radio - the alleged topic of today's monologue.

Apparently in the world of conservative talk radio, Mr. Obama is a socialist and would create a government far to the left of Great Britain and France. Given that terms left/right, conservative/liberal have no meaning for today's political climate (another topic for another day), and given that the standard of living, life expectancy and amount of vacation time are greater in those two countries and the infant mortality rate is lower (the US being better than Crotia but worse than Cuba, the UK and France), I don't see how this is a bad thing. But obviously I don't understand the psychology of talk radio unless it's as simple as fear.

McCarthyism is alive and well on talk radio. Of course now we have new words as well. In addition to communism, we have socialism and terrorism. If you don't like someone, pick your word and label them, pick your word and they go directly to jail. So which is it? Is Mr. Obama a socialist or a terrorist? And does it matter? The point is to label "others," people so different from us as to no longer be living breathing creatures that are worthy of compassion and respect. Labeling people as socialists or terrorists allows us to dismiss them or kill them on the battlefield. Defining the "enemy" as "other" is one of the fundamental rules of warfare.

Once you make friends with someone formerally labled as "other", they can no longer be labeled or dismissed. They must be dealt with as a living breathing human being with wants and needs similar to your own. Then we can move foward into finding ways of living that respect all of us from the Muslim to the anarchist.

Are Americans still so guilable as to fall for McCarthyism in what ever form it takes? Unfortunately, I fear the worst. American prove me wrong.