You Are What You Eat

Back 16 years ago, I wrote an article on the Huffington Post that began with a cautionary tale of sorts about a screenplay written by a good from of mine, David Rintels.  David is an Emmy-winning writer whose extensive work includes the Broadway play, Clarence Darrow, that starred Henry Fonda, the mini-series, Nuremberg, and the two-part TV movie When Lions Roared about FDR, Churchill and Stalin.

He also wrote a superb and very-timely screenplay, Freedom, as yet unproduced, based on the true story of a man’s astonishing pursuit of liberty for his family – so utterly heroic it has you truly beyond awe.  But then the man’s actions start to spin out of control by going too far in that same effort.  Noble virtue, carried to the extreme, becomes a horrifying vice.  And without him being aware, he becomes what he most hated.

I was reminded about all of this as I took at step back and looked at today’s Republican Party.

The long-time mantra of the Republican Party has been about keeping Big Government out of our lives.  It’s still what they push hard as their brand, and still what the party faithful insist they believe in.  But as the GOP has morphed into literal fascism, I suspect that most Republicans today have little recognition that the party they so faithfully has become the opposite of what they claim to hate and love to lambaste about Democrats.

While crying out to “keep Big Government out of our lives” (tm), Republicans seem blissfully happy to see laws passed in Red States to let government get deeply involved in our lives (most women’s lives) about how people control their bodies when it comes to abortion.  That you can only have an abortion under limited conditions, sometimes only during a period of pregnancy when a woman wouldn’t even know she’s pregnant.  And laws that let people sue those involved with abortions.

Further, Republicans seem not only blissfully fine, but supportive of laws passed in Red States that take control from local school boards and allow state government to get involved in our lives by banning what books cannot be read in public schools.  Laws that let people sue schools that don’t get rid of books that apparently make their children uncomfortable.  (No word if this includes math textbooks, and those on…well, pretty much any subject.  So, far, it appears only to be books that deal in some way with sex or gender.)

Republicans are also blissfully supportive of government getting involved in our lives by passing laws in Red States that prohibit schools from teaching certain, specific subjects.  Never mind that those subject aren’t being taught in the schools.  But it’s no longer up to school districts and local school boards – the state government is deciding the matter for your lives.

And Republicans in Red States are blissfully fine with government involving itself into our lives to keep people from voting – limiting the hours one can vote early, cutting back the ease of voting by mail, removing drop-off vote collection boxes, but it’s far more than that, it’s truly intruding in people’s lives, like governments creating laws so detailed and intrusive that you can’t bring water to people standing in a voting line.

And more and more.  To be clear, none of these intrusive Big Government laws aren’t those that come from the usual focus of Republican hatred for Big Government, Washington, D.C.  No, rather they are from inside the GOP’s own house, legislatures of Red States.

And there’s no question that Republicans support these laws that are so deeply intrusive in people lives – how you can have children, what you can read, what subjects you can teach, if you can vote, whether or not you can even just give can water to people.  Yet still insisting that they’re against Big Government and want to (supposedly) keep it out or our lives.

This transcends hypocrisy.  Hypocrisy is merely the starting point here.  This is blind, soul-engulfing ignorance.

And it’s all a part of what the Republican Party today has become – the very opposite of what its members proudly insist is why they are Republicans.  Yet members of the GOP accept it all, the complete change into what they cry out to the world they hate, and enable it.  But it’s what they have become – what they say they hate.

There are laws that protect those most in need of protection – laws which one can like or not, but that’s what they do.  And there are laws that control the lives of the public, and most often holding down those most in need of protection.  That is what authoritarianism is, what being an autocrat is, what fascism is.

The government intruding itself into your life, telling a woman what she can do with her own body.  The government introducing itself into your life, saying what books you can read.  The government intruding itself into your life, telling you what subjects a school can teach on its curriculum.  The government intruding itself into your life, limiting when you can vote and telling you that you literally can’t give water to a person.  And more and more.

And you can support all those laws.  But if you do, you must accept that you are enabling autocrats, authoritarianism, fascism.  If you support all these laws where Big Government – even if it’s “just” Big Government at the Red State level – is intruding itself into your lives, then you can’t say that you and your party are for “keeping Big Government out of our lives” (tm). 

You can’t say it, because what you are doing, in total reality, is opening the door for it, laying down the welcome mat, and throwing flowers on the path so that the thing you say you hate can waltz in.

Today’s Republican Party has become what it long-claimed to hate.  All in the name, supposedly, of Freedom.