#SOL16: Death Threats, The RNC and History

I'm thinking about love and honor, about the men I know well: my dad, my two brothers, my son, my father-in-law, my husband, Rob, and a score of friends. I'm thinking about these men in light of the rhetoric of violence aimed at Hillary Clinton by some men at the RNC convention. I'm reminding myself that none of the men I know well would ever speak about a woman as Trump, his advisors and the rest of the RNC speakers have been doing.

Women, we need to be concerned, not mute.

Just take a moment to look at the convention badges and signs that populate the Republican National Convention (RNC)--badges people wear proudly. 

This is what the RNC believes. From here.

These RNC bores takes their lead from Donald Trump who said,

“You know, it doesn’t really matter what [the media] write as long as you’ve got a young and beautiful piece of ass,” Mr. Trump said in a 1991 interview with Esquire magazine.

Does this seem like the language of a self-professed Christian? 


Or this offensive comment by Trump:

"Oftentimes when I was sleeping with one of the top women in the world, I would say to myself, thinking about me as a boy from Queens, "Can you believe what I am getting?"

The RNC's candidate understands women as possessions, as appendages.  So it isn't too surprising that the RNC isn't limited to misogynist-based slogans alone. 

KFC move over as some of these Republicans are doling out death.

Yes, death.


Al Baldasaro has called for the death of Hillary Clinton. Yes, her death. And he's proud to do so. Or Michael Folk, a Republican Congressmen who said Clinton should be executed. 

Such is the reckless speech and deed that is so very, very violent at this convention and among the GOP in general.  Like the stance on women, these followers also take their lead from Trump, whose penchant for spewing loose and violent discourse knows little bounds. Trump told us,

  "I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn't lose voters."  

5000 of these posters were distributed prior to JFKs assassination in Dallas. 

Now, add to all of this the post by Jim Wright that shows a wanted poster of JFK  distributed just days before he was murdered and the danger of such loose, amoral, and violent rhetoric cannot be mistaken for campaign fodder.  Such hate-speech invites others to also act without moral fitness, without concern for life. It begs others to to do terrible things, things that cannot be undone.

Now is the time for Republicans especially to tell their candidate that the hate speech and buttons and slogans and ridiculous chants are wrong and dangerous. It's past time for GOP voters to stop being mute and say out loud to their candidate that he won't earn their vote by embracing and threatening violence on Hillary Clinton. How can anyone who professes to love the unborn turn such a blind eye at death threats? 

Hypocrites.

Rhizomatic Tendencies and the West

Late Day Light (M.A. Reilly, The Badlands, SD. 2010)

There's a feeling I get when I look to the west,

And my spirit is crying for leaving. 

                               - Jimmy Page, Robert Plant, 1971

I.

In 1893 when Frederick Jackson Turner said that the frontier had closed, he couldn't have been more wrong.

Closed for whom?  
Closed in what manner?  

Turner's speech would fuel the imagination of others who were to come as endings are a logic we understand, we want to embrace. Endings are a kind of Get Out Of Jail, Free card.  30 years after Turner, Nick Carraway towards the end of Gatsby would tells us, "I see now that this has always been a story of the West after all" (p.179).  The West is an idealized world, untouched by the greed and despair Nick finds present in New York--greed and despair that touches Nick as well.  35 years after Gatsby, the Catholic senator from Massachusetts would ask us "to be pioneers towards that New Frontier", namely--space.

There are always new frontiers, borne ceaselessly out of the past or forward into some desired future we can just, almost grasp. We want to be the green light at the end of Daisy's dock. And so we seek not what is beneath our heels for that requires us to wade in the middle of things and the middle is undefined as it is always emerging. No, we are far more comfortable out of sync with the now.

Nick and Jack epitomized how the present we actually occupy is so less sexy, so less talked about, so less believed than the reconstructed past and the imagined future. External power rests in such constructions. We live lives where the logic of starts and stops is our chief organizing force. And these forces are more often thought to be truths.

II.

We only need to reread Turner's assertion that the frontier line was "the meeting point between savagery and civilization" to understand how temporary such endings are and how (in)formed our beliefs are by the new frontiers we forge and the beliefs we carry with us. The world is made over to suit ourselves--have we enough power and ego to want to do so.

For even now as I pen this the universe, in which those frontiers clearly sit, is enlarging and if we believe current physicist will continue to do so, infinitely as our galaxy and planet are pulled apart. The universe too, has no beginning. Time, as Einstein suggested, is a fiction. Yes, we may mark time with the Big Bang, but that is more conceit, less truth. Time, like everything about us, is constructed.

Reinventing may well feel as essential as breathing.