Senator Ted Cruz: Are he
and his supporters the political equivalents
of suicide bombers?
My Time with America's 'Suicide Bombers' (O Globo,
Brazil)
"We are now seeing the folly of American Republicans. They
are happy to destroy the country to prevent Obama from creating good
government. Republicans are proving that they are America's suicide bombers. They
are willing to die along with the debt default and the profound crisis they are
arranging - yet they are oblivious. ... Tea Partiers are more dangerous than
the Islamist guerillas who blow up trains and planes. They seek to destroy the
global economy out of spite, rage and racism, like the little bastards who
humiliated the Blacks in Florida when I was there."
Former Alaska Governor and Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin is back in the public eye, calling for a repeal of Obamacare and the impeachment of Obama.
The passive and
ignorant reaction of the "silent generation"
was identical to that of today's Tea Party fundamentalists.
We
are now seeing the folly of American Republicans. They are happy to destroy the
country to prevent Obama from creating good government. Republicans are proving
that they are America's suicide bombers. They are willing to die along with the
debt default and the profound crisis they are arranging - yet they are oblivious.
They cannot accept the health plan, a kind of SUS called "Obamacare"
to protect 30 million Americans that have no health insurance. I've lived in
the United States, before the 1960s, in Florida, the heart of "deep
America," and I saw how the average American has a "republican soul."
The city was just like the one in The Truman Show.
Streets, people, rituals, smiles and tears, everything seemed programmed like
an obsessive social machine. Life and death were standardized and preordained: demonstrative
hugs, identical clothes, hysterical baseball fans, happy endings, obligatory
happiness, forming a community mission of complete faith, like a rotating carrousel
of certainties leading toward an inevitable future.
The
violence of students shocked me. I was a tall "nerd" and a bit silly
in my 15-year-old virgin body, and I was shocked by the cowboy boots inlaid
with silver stars, switch blades with swinging knives, the black leather coats worn
by so-called "wayward youth," a the reactionary rebellion and "Republicanism"
of the Eisenhower years. I saw ferocious battles that went on until there were
bloody teeth and people knocked out, or where school administrators couldn't
interfere, in either the sacred right of beatings, or the culture of the cowboy
and pioneer. There was no room for doubt in that city, but you could feel that this
solidity of certainty, if broken, would lead to a grave disaster. The idols of
the time were an Elvis Presley gyrating on TV, and James Dean, a living corpse of
gestures and clothing. A climate of intolerance among Whites themselves hung in
the air: it was the strong against the weak, the pretty girls against the ugly,
the determined against the "chicken." I, a tropical tourist, was a
mystery: shy, weak, but as a foreigner who spoke English well, there was a
cautious respect, and the boys spared me for my ability to give them the answers
on spelling tests, spelling out words with their Latin roots, which for them
were an enigma.
Some
of the girls went out with me for kisses on the mouth, and nothing else, of
course. But Brenda, crazier and sexier, left me and took off with Warren
Caputo, an Italian who had a hot rod with tractor tires. They couldn't "read"
me. I navigated this obsessive culture, and for better or worse, dated Melinda
Mills, a fair-skinned blonde and daughter of an ex-Marine who had been in Rio
during the war and who showed me a postcard from Mangue
[in Rio], where he certainly knew the area and the Polish women [during WWII, the town was known for its Polish prostitutes]. Melinda loved me - she was fragile
and silly, too, and we kissed at the movies while watching An Affair
to Remember - I recall.
But
there was another America within the city: of the Blacks. They passed with
their heads down, faces twisted with humiliation, suffocation, and futile
hatred. Huddled, at the back of the bus, standing, even when the bus was empty,
they lived in a neighborhood of wood and dirt, close to the ocean inlet
where the shrimp boats stank. That injustice amazed me due to the total lack of
compassion - I who had grown with Black nannies kissing me, I who loved Rio's
beautiful mulatto women who filled me with desire at 15 years of age. I saw only
Black people shaped by suffering and exclusion, shapeless, depressed, frail
wrinkled women, trembling and ragged young men. On the yellow school bus, my blond,
red-headed and aggressive fellows yelled at the Blacks passing by: "Hey
nigger, why is your nose so ugly? Hey nigger, why is your hair nappy?"
Later, in the period of "racial integration," I saw the same Blacks
being beaten for daring to swim in public pools, where the Whites from my past threw
acid to burn them.
I
feared the Whites.
Until
one day came devastating news. The Russian satellite Sputnik had
ascended to the heavens, spinning like a basketball orbiting the Earth. There
was panic in the city. Since '49, when the Cold War had begun with the
explosion of the Soviet H-bomb, dethroning the leadership of Hiroshima's
destroyers, the Americans had awaited another catastrophe. Someting like the
science fiction film Jack and the Beanstalk.
In what seemed like minutes, the city looked like a refugee camp, filled with losers with swollen heads,
humiliated by communist invaders. In high school, incessant "fire drills"
began, and students were evacuated to basements and bomb shelters. The
then-Senator Lyndon Johnson
yelled: "They will soon be dropping atomic bombs on us, like stones
falling from the sky …"
Up
high, Sputnik with its beeping - like extraterrestrial laughter, humiliated the
Americans. From that day on, below, in that little town in Florida, I changed.
Not to me, but to others.
Posted By Worldmeets.US
My
bullying fellows interrogated me: "What do you think? Does your country
like the Russians?" I trembled and hid my vague youthful admiration for
socialism. They looked at me with suspicion: Brazilian, Latino, who knows?
After that, they stopped asking to copy my test answers and hardly looked at
me. Melinda's father, a john in Mangue, didn't greet
me from his frayed armchair. Melinda became paler and our dating languished.
Many years ago I saw the "shock and terror" of deep America. That was
the time of the passive and ignorant so-called "silent generation."
Their reaction then was identical to those of the fundamentalists of the Tea
Party today.
Whenever
something happens out of their control, they block out the present and seek a
return to the past. They are more dangerous than the Islamist guerillas who blow
up trains and planes. They seek to destroy the global economy out of spite,
rage and racism, like the little bastards who humiliated the Blacks in Florida when
I was there. Let us wait for the ides of November, when a new recession could
threaten the West.
