Stealing Our Culture, That’s What They’re Doing!

From the Anchorage Daily News:

Twenty-Six Chickens Found Beheaded in North Pole Coop

Twenty-six chickens were mysteriously beheaded at a North Pole chicken coop this week. Then things got weird…

Seems that State Troopers were called to a home in North Pole, a small town a bit north of Fairbanks, to investigate a massacre.

Twenty-six chickens had been killed in their coop, their heads ripped off.  No sign of the heads at the murder scene. Apparently the mysterious chupacabra de pollo took them, the heads I mean, perhaps for trophies, perhaps for cat toys, perhaps to make MRE Chicken Ala King. Who knows?  Who understands the mind of the chicken marauder? The headless carcasses were lined up in a row with the last few in a circle at the end – like a satanic lollipop.

The cops are baffled. It doesn’t look like a fox or a coyote, who tend to make squares instead of crop circle designs with their victims. Bears would have eaten the fowl whole and squawking and then spit out the beak, there were no beaks. It doesn’t seem to be connected to the recent spate of alien cattle mutilations in the Southwest, there were no lights in the sky and no black helicopters.  And nobody has seen Colonel Sanders on the streets of North Pole.

Three chickens survived the slaughter, the police are unsure of the significance of the survivors (Significance? I suspect those three were just a lot faster than their deceased comrades, but I’m not a trained chicken murder investigator so I’m probably wrong). So far the three survivors haven’t been able to describe what happened or give a police sketch artist a coherent description of their attacker – they just wander around pecking at the ground in a traumatized fashion.

The ADN story is here .

Why bring it up?  Other for the obvious entertainment value – and to point out that the chicken murders aren’t even close to being the weirdest mystery in North Pole at the moment?

Well, see I bring it up because of the comments under the story.  That’s what actually caught my attention. As is usual for the Anchorage Daily News (and increasingly every online news site where there’s no moderation or minimum intelligence level) most of the comments are pretty damned ignorant, but it was this one in particular that caught my eye:

justasksasquatch wrote on 05/25/2010 06:13:39 PM (copied verbatim):

get used to more of this as more and more immigrants move here.

Why would we deliberately supplant and displace our culture?

In Minnesota for instance, Somalian immigrants have restaurants where they don't allow women in their midst.

Immigrants in Florida practice 'Santeria' where they behead and bleed goats and chickens in front of children as they spray themselves with blood to cleanse themselves from evil spirits.

Hindus immigrating to our country carry on their ancient 'caste system' whereby certain persons remain at the bottom social level.

Middle Eastern immigrants carry on the barbaric practice of female genitall mutilation on their baby girls.

Many from south of our borders bring in horse tripping, cockk fighting, dog fighting and when their numbers grow to majorities, they will legalize bull fighting.

All these practices are Third World, inhumane and disgusting beyond comprehension.but we are being forced to accept them as normal part of society according to those who push the communist doctrine of diversity and multiculturalism on us. aint diversity great? [Sic]

Ah hah! Mystery solved. Obviously it was immigrants practicing the communist doctrine of diversity and multiculturalism who slaughtered the chickens.

Repeat that. Say it out loud. See if it sounds any less steeped in teabaggery:

The communist doctrine of diversity and multiculturalism.

Communist diversity. Communist. Diversity.

We don’t know what either communism or diversity is exactly, but we know we don’t like it, no siree. And it’s sure not doing the chickens any good.

The oxymoron level (emphasis on moron) has got to be pushing at least a 9.98 in that one sentence alone, hell it might even be a perfect 10.  And then Sasquatch goes for the bonus point: As soon as “They” have the majority, “They” will legalize bull fighting! Oh noes! Because, as you know, that’s the real agenda of those filthy Latinos – legalized bull fighting!  Yes! Those Fifth Column bastards (or should I say Bastardos?) are secretly swishing their capes and polishing their little matador hats, waiting to make their move.

¡Ay, caramba!

Sasquatch’s comment reminded me of a conversation I recently had.

A couple of days ago, I ran into this guy I vaguely know. He’s one of those people you meet at school functions, or little league, or in the Home Depot parking lot when you’re in a hurry. That sort of thing.  I think I know his first name, but I’m not sure and so when I run into him here and there around town I’m careful to avoid any conversational gambit that would require me to use it.  Obviously I don’t know him all that well, but I do know that he used to be in the military and he’s got a kid about my son’s age, and he’s a big damned fan of Sarah Palin and the Tea Party (the T-shirt and the little flecks of spittle around his mouth are dead giveaways).

The conversation meandered around, as it tends to do in these situations as we dodged crazed drivers in the big box store parking lot. How’s the family? Fine, and yours? Nice weather, eh? Yeah, except for the glacial dust, I could live without that.  Kids start driving next year. Sigh, not looking forward to that. Obama is destroying this country! Whoa, slow down there Crazypants, how, exactly is Obama destroying the country? Woowoo liberal diversity agenda with a side of multiculturalism nazi abortions reet! deficit weak on terrorism China Iran reet reet and thecountry is brokenandnobodyinwashingtonlistensanymore reet reet reet!

I went to Lowes to pick up some gasket material and the Right managed to barf on my shoes in the parking lot. Sigh.

It’s always some bugaboo with these people, isn’t it?  It doesn’t matter what the story is, what the situation is, murdered chickens, glacial dust, black guy in the White House, it always comes ‘round to somebody destroying the country. It’s always some damned thing. The commies, the socialists, the queers, the terrorists, Big Government, Tax and Spend liberals, the atheists, the Muslims, the Chicago political machine, the Fed, taxation without representation, the Chinese, the Koreans, the Iranians, gun control, Old Europe, the tree huggers and those bunny lovers in the EPA, FEMA, minorities, The Axis of Evil, the War On Christmas, Sex, Drugs, Rock and Roll, Wall Street, these kids nowadays, NAFTA, stem cell research, civil rights advocates, the feminists, the activist judges, and, of course, those filthy immigrants.  Somebody is always out to steal conservative America. 

America, in some mystical alternate conservative reality, used to be really awesomely great, but now it sucks. 

It always sucks with these people, the country is always going to hell. It was going to hell last week, and last year, and back in their daddy’s day and even back in their grandfather’s day and their great grandfather’s day – America has been going to hell for generations apparently, probably all the way back to the Revolution. I suspect these people can trace their family shrub all the way back to some garrulous Boston Tea Party attendee who bitched that Washington and Jefferson and Paine and Adams and the those bastards in the Continental Congress were destroying the country.  Somewhere – maybe during the glorious warmly golden autumn of the Reagan era, when the streets were paved with gold and flowed with free gasoline on which floated baskets made of money and coated in the cured hide of Karl Marx and filled with smiling Christian babies – it was pretty good, but other than that the country sucks donkey balls and it’s been sucking more and more every day.

Oh woe. Woe is us. Weep, weep for America!

This, my electronic friends, is what happens when you let Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck, and their ilk shape your worldview.  When you listen to people who get paid to tell you the sky is falling and that the country is going to hell – because if the country isn’t going to hell and the sky isn’t falling, well, then they don’t get paid.  When you listen to the doomsayers, what you hear is doom.  But you know what’s really funny?  In the last year, during the height of a recession, Sarah Palin failed to win an election, quit her job half-done and became unemployed, reneged on every promise she’d ever made to us Alaskans, backed losing candidates across the country … and yet somehow managed to make somewhere in the neighborhood of ten million dollars.  Now this empty headed baby machine is busy telling you why everything sucks and the country is headed into the crapper? What the hell does she have to be miserable about? Her empty headed twit of a daughter got knocked up by the local delinquent, dropped out of school, and became yet another unwed Wasilla teenaged mother with a GED – and she gets $30,000 a pop to come teach your kids how not to have a baby even though babies are a gift from God and everybody should have as many as possible, also abortion makes Jesus cry.  An eighteen year old amateur who doesn’t even know what a condom is makes more in an hour than one of Tiger Woods’ professional party girls does in a month, but America is going to hell in a liberal hand basket? Frankly I don’t know how the Palin family is living with the hardship.  Limbaugh and Beck made hundreds of millions last year, enough money to buy their own gilded Rupert Murdock clone, for doing nothing more than acting like diseased monkeys on the air – but, yeah, the country is going to hell.  And all their idiot followers are nodding their heads and bitching about how the country is going straight to shit, how the government is taking their last penny, and how they can’t make the loan payment on their $50,000 Lincoln Navigator with the spinning gold hubcaps and the $10,000 stereo system – meanwhile they’re shelling out fifty bucks a day for smokes, lotto tickets, and pay-per-view porn – and somehow a whole shitload of these booger eaters managed to shell out $30 a piece for Palin’s fictional ghostwritten masterpiece.

And of course, you can’t have suck without somebody to blame – and who do we blame? Why the people who stole our country, of course. We blame the liberals. We blame diversity. We blame multiculturalism. This is exactly what you get when you consider education as elitism and let people like the Texas Board of Creationism decide what your children should learn in school. This is the kind of paranoia and false perception and xenophobia that is the hallmark of lazy and defective thinking and that panders to the lowest common denominator – and that sells advertising space on talk radio and FoxNews.  Not so long ago, this same kind of diseased reasoning proclaimed people of color as sub-humans who lusted uncontrollably after white women and were suited only for life as chattel. Not so long ago, this same worldview proclaimed Jews as filthy scheming vermin, again less than human, fit only to be herded into camps – and then into ovens.  Not so long ago this same frothing nationalistic thinking proclaimed Manifest Destiny and led to genocide on a grand scale – and today, in a dozen places around the world, it still does.  This is the kind of ignorant myopic parochial world view you get when you are deathly afraid all of the time. When you only listen to people who are as afraid and ignorant as you are and you never travel outside your comfort zone.

This is what you become when you live in utter and abject fear. When you’re a coward.

So I asked him, “What is it, exactly, that makes America great?”

The answer?  “Well…uh, it just is.”

Not good enough, I said.  What is it specifically that makes America great? Baseball? Hotdogs? Beer Pong?

Well, it’s because we have freedom!

Freedom? What kind of freedom? Like the Mel Gibson Braveheart kind? Freeeeedomm! What do you mean by freedom? Give me some examples.

The Bill of Rights! Freedom of speech!

OK, but I can name dozens of countries where you are guaranteed the freedom of speech – hell you’ve got freedom of speech in Russia nowadays. Doesn’t that make them equally great?

Yeah, but we can go where we want, we can live where we want.  We don’t have to show papers and like that!

Well, except in Arizona, but I digress. So do Canadians enjoy the same freedom, and members of the European Union, Australians, Italians, Icelanders, and those people who speak the click click language in Africa and, well, I’m pretty sure Russians can live where they want nowadays – which is why so many of them live here - hell some them moved back to that radioactive village next to Chernobyl.  Doesn’t that make them great too?

No, of course not, because we have the right to bear arms too!

So, gun ownership then? It’s our guns that make us great?  Wouldn’t that mean that Somalia and Afghanistan and the Republic of the Congo where anybody can own a gun, including machine guns and grenade launchers, are pretty awesome too? If guns make you great, they’ve got us beat hands down.

No not like that, that’s different.

Different how?

You know.

So, we’ve got guns – but we also have laws? Gun control then? Gun control makes us great?

Uh…

Never mind. What is it that we’ve lost that makes us less great today?

Obama’s gutting the military!

So, it’s our military then, that makes us great? Nobody screws with us? Be nice to America or we’ll bring democracy to your country too? Aircraft carriers and stealth bombers and cruise missiles make a country great? Also, we’ve increased the size of the military and Obama just plussed up our forces in Afghanistan by 30,000 troops.  I’m not sure what you’re getting at here. If the military makes us great, we should be more great now not less. The ability to kill people? Blow up a continent? Sheer raw violent power, that’s what makes a country great?  By that logic, wouldn’t a guy that can kick everybody else’s ass be great? Jackie Chan? He’s pretty great. Better than you and me? You can’t be great unless you’re bigger and badder than everybody else?

Well, no, not exactly, but you know what I mean.

Well, no, I don’t actually.  Up until the time of Teddy Roosevelt America was not a world power – and hell, you could argue that America didn’t really emerge as a world class power, militarily, until WWII. Were we great before that? 

Uh… (apparently not)

One by one he went through the litany.

Taxes. Lowest in thirty years. Low taxes make us great? No.  Stimulus package. Contained huge tax breaks for the average American, responsible for the lowest federal income tax year for those earning under $250,000 per anum since the 1950’s.  So, Stimulus makes us more great? No, of course not. Bailout.  Saved the banks, saved GM, saved millions of jobs.  Do failed banks and closed auto plants make us great? Does keeping them open make us less great. No, no, you’re confusing me.  What about the debt!

Ah, something we agree on then, debt certainly makes a country less great. Wouldn’t it be in our best interest, greatness wise, to raise taxes? Surely, for the sake of greatness, everybody could pay a couple percentage points more?  Doesn’t reducing taxes make us less great – if it increases our debt? How much is greatness worth? Surely it’s worth a hundred bucks more a year? Maybe a thousand?

He glanced at his watch, oh look at the time.

Yeah, last question, it seems that we have more greatness than not.  Why for the anger?

And then we were down to it. Finally, the thing that’s ruining America’s greatness.

Diversity. Multiculturalism. Legal and illegal immigrants are stealing our culture! Stealing our greatness!

Stealing our chicken heads too apparently.

What else are they stealing? Are they stealing our St. Patrick’s day? Pizza? Tacos? Beer? French fries?  Our English?

Yes! Yes, exactly, they’re making us speak Spanish!

Que? When is the last time you were forced to speak Spanish? How many times today? This week? This month? This year?  Okay, in the last ten years? Ever? 

That’s besides the point. It’s happening. One day we’ll wake up and find our kids speaking Spanish. These people keep trying to change us.

So, change decreases greatness? Right?  A culture that remains static is great?  A culture that doesn’t (forgive me) evolve is great?  A culture that doesn’t change and grow is great? So we are less great today because our culture has changed, and therefore made us lesser, than in the days of our founders? Is that about right?

In the end he went his way and I went mine. 

He left angry, mad that he couldn’t convince me that America’s greatness has been diminished by Barack Obama.

Me? He left me pondering what it is that makes America great.

Frankly, I’m hoping it’s more than just guns and English and fear.