Monday, May 7, 2012

If This Be Treason

I begin with apologies to Gregory Rabassa for stealing the title to his award-winning book about translating and translators for the title of this blog. But it fits, so well, even if the Italian pun is lost on most.

The other day at a Romney rally, a woman stood up and took the microphone during a question and answer session with the presumed Republican presidential candidate and said that President Obama should be tried for treason.

Tried for treason. Really?

On what grounds? Besides the fact that he is black and in the White House (See the New York Times Friday edition front page if you think his race is not an issue, or go to East Texas and talk to my former high school class mates.) But besides the notion of the man’s skin color, what has he done to be tried for treason? I mean Bush lead us into a non-provoked war based on lies and innuendo and cost us trillions of dollars and in the process helped put the country in the biggest economic tailspin since the Great Depression– and he’s got a celebrated library about to open on the campus of SMU. No word of trying him for treason. He would plead insanity anyway. Mental depravity at the least.

So where is this coming from? Talk radio. Sure. Some of it comes from the foul mouth stew pots of the airwaves. But there’s something else a foot in our country. Something deep, dark and very sinister. There is a mood about that says if someone does something not of our liking, he or she is un-American…or even worse– un -Christian. There is a certain my way or the hi-way mentality in civil discourse at this time. It reminds me of the days leading up to the Civil War in the late 1850’s.

But to say that someone should be tried for treason is either the sign that the woman was stupid, or that she had been so brain washed by all the right-wing media that she has totally lost perspective on reality. Or, heaven forbid – both.

To be sure, Obama has dropped the ball on several things over the past three and a half years. But so did Reagan. Nixon. Eisenhower. And I still have never truly forgiven Gerald Ford for letting Tricky Dick off the hook so easily. But none of them and neither of the Bushes or Clinton or Carter or Kennedy or Johnson or any President that I know of has ever done anything that would require us to try them as traitors of America.

So what gives? Why the hatred? Why the bitterness? If anyone was going to be bitter it should be the Democrats after the Florida fiasco in 2000, but we got over that and moved on. In fact, most of us supported Bush until he lied to us. But even then, we didn’t call for him to be tried on treasonous charges. (Although, looking back on it…)

So I don’t get it. Why can’t we have discourse in this country with out the vitriolic hatred that has encapsulated this election. Hell, even the Republicans were doing it to themselves. Bachman and Gingrich, along with Santorum all but accused Mitt Romney of being a two-headed alien. You would have thought he was the anti-Christ or at least the re-incarnation of Joe Stalin. And that was in their own primaries. Heaven help us as we approach a two party election. It will be war.

What gives, America?

Barack Obama is no more a traitor to America than Rush Limbaugh is a spokesman for freedom and liberty. If he deserves to punished, it is for being too nice to dickheads like Kentucky Senator, Mitch McConnell or Mr. ‘I can’t keep a pledge’ John Boehner. Obama is above that. He has handled himself (as has his first lady) with dignity and class the entire time he has been taking shots from the far right – even stupid things such as being tried for treason.

It is more than I would put up with. I would have arrested that woman and sent her to spend the rest of her life working for the state government in Arizona.


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