Hateful Idiots Lacking Self Awareness: The Minutemen

Greg points out the stupidity:

The infamous Minuteman group has dissolved itself. Why? Because it sent out a call for wackos with big guns, and then was alarmed at all the wackos with big guns who responded.

On March 16, Mercer sent out an e-mail urging members to come to the border “locked, loaded and ready” and urged people to bring “long arms.” She proposed changing the group’s rules to allow members to track illegal immigrants and drug smugglers instead of just reporting the activity to the Border Patrol.

“We will forcefully engage, detain, and defend our lives and country from the criminals who trample over our culture and laws,” she wrote in the March 16 e-mail.

Mercer said she received a more feverish response than she expected — 350 personal e-mails she said — and decided the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps couldn’t shoulder the responsibility and liability of what could occur, she said.

“People are ready to come lock and loaded and that’s not what we are all about,” Mercer said. “It only takes one bad apple to destroy everything we’ve done for the last eight years.”

With luck, this is a sign of some semblance of change since 2005, when the group formed amidst a frenzy of xenophobia. Even an extremist group begins to realize how extremist it is, albeit in a bizarrely contradictory fashion.

The only thing I'd add here is that this is just another example of what can only be either A) the right-wing's hypocrisy, or B) complete lack of self-awareness. The fact that they're calling people out "locked and loaded" and then shocked when people show up "locked and loaded" is about as sensible as a man getting $1300 from the government in disability checks railing against health-care as a "government handout." I used to be absolutely confident it was item "A," and I think with politicians it still may be, but item "B" seems increasingly possible when dealing with "real 'Mericans." The fact that the conservative movement has not been invested in deep thinking or philosophical approaches to conservatism in the way that somebody like a William Buckley or an Irving kristol seems to increasingly leading to the base being the party of un-think (and to be clear, I think both men's philosophies were pretty terrible from an ideological standpoint, but nonetheless, they thought through those positions and seemed a bit more consistent compared to your performance-art dimbulbs like Bill Kristol). Certainly, that lack of self-awareness doesn't strip many of these people of their sheer hypocrisy, but it's telling of a movement that for years has been waging war against education by vilifying universities as hotbeds of "liberal" thinking and dumbing down textbooks for political reasons also seems unable to realize just how stupid they sound when they express amazement at the outcome of their violent rhetoric or the total disconnect between what they expect for themselves and what they think others should have. The minutemen, like Vanderboegh, are symptoms of what the conservative base is becoming, and the saddest part is, they will probably continue to encourage violence and hatred through their language and then remain mystified when somebody actually acts on their words.

Notes on Argentina (II) - Political Awareness

"30 years of impunity and repression, of theft and hunger
30,000 reasons to keep fighting"

"More than 30,000 reasons - popular justice. Never again. Looking to the other side" (Stencil of former president Jorge Videla)
Sidewalk painting by the law school, with names of disappeared law students.
Plaque marking the police-murder of Gustavo Benedetto in 2001.
Plaque marking police-murder of Gaston Riva in 2001.

Another thing I noticed while in Argentina was that the political activism was not limited to celebrating the 30th anniversary of the Madres de Plaza de Mayo. Everywhere you went, recent politics were still exteremely present and felt, particularly regarding the dictatorship. There was graffiti everywhere protesting against the continued (relative) impunity of war criminals like Jorge Videla and others (granted, Videla is under house arrest, but such a “punishment” is beyond offensive for a president who, for five of its seven years, led a state that killed upwards of 30,000 of its own citizens). Near the law school, there were sidewalk paintings commemmorating the disappeared from the law school during the dictatorship.

Awareness of recent politics even in the mundane of daily life went well beyond the dictatorship, though. One day, while riding in the cab, my wife asked about the recent shift in cars in Argentina (almost all cars we saw were 2-3 years old). What started as an innocent enough question simply based on curiosity became a fascinating conversation in which the cabbie went on and on (to our pleasure) about the absolutely destructive effects of Carlos Menem’s neo-liberalism in the 1990s, and how those led up to the economic collapse of 2001, and that only with the economic recovery launched under Nestor Kirchner have things improved.

Finally, although not as large as the dictatorship, the events of that economic collapse in 2001 also made themselves very present in the public arena. Along the Avenida de Mayo (which culminates on one end in the Congress, and on the other end with the Plaza de Mayo and the Casa Rosa), there were plaques commemmorating some of the protestors who Argentine police shot and killed during the upheaval that saw President De La Rua have to flee the country after its extreme downward turn (aided in no part by his ineptitude). Plaques like those above were visible along the sidewalk at random points, and one even was even re-done, because the first had been destroyed by police.

If you just went and talked to the average “person on the street”, I’m not sure you would necessarily hear anti-dictatorship or anti-Menem or anti-De La Rua talks – as with any politician or leader, some have their supporters. With the overthrow of the dictatorship and the (generally) anti-neoliberal policies of Kirchner in the wake of Menem, the victors are certainly inscribing the historical narrative in public spaces. Still, the physical presence of the darker aspects of Argentina’s recent history were far more obvious and tangible than anywhere I’ve ever seen in Brazil (although, doubtlessly, the 30,000 dead in Argentina vs. the 700+dead in Brazil probably explains some of this difference).