I guess the first time I saw uncontrolled mob passions was when they showed Ayatollah Khomeini's funeral on TV back in 1989.
What I saw then was a display of such uncontrollable passions, subject to no reason, no logic, and no thought, that I was, to be honest, terrified by this awful force.
The next time it hit my TV screen was just before the attack on the trade towers. Indeed it was only 9/11 that took this off our screens in the UK. In Northern Ireland some previously sealed off roads were opened up. This gave some Catholic children a short cut to their school and, being kids that's the way they quickly took. Almost as quickly the Protestants, who had had that road sealed off to the Catholics before took, shall we say, some umbrage to this situation.
When I first saw this on TV, the umbrage escalated very fast, what I saw was the most unbelievable hatred focused on children that I've ever seen! It was obscene; I can't put it any other way. The parents of the kids now had to escort their offspring, who themselves had to be escorted by police, through this hate filled gauntlet but the focus of the ignorant jeering was always the kids.
In Iran those passions could have gone any way but here they had only one way to go and they were already on that road of hate; there is no road off there. Yet again, you could never, ever, reason with these people, reason was in fact, anathema to them. Religion, remember was the main force behind the unleashed passions in Iran, but back in Northern Ireland I realised that these hatreds on shocking display, the women were the worst as I remember, unlovely faces contorted into horrific visages, were fed from the same books of drivel. Speaking of horrific visages I thought at the time that their men should be made to watch this every night for 5 years.
Thing is though, all these passions are based on what exactly? Stories, guidance, information fed to them from the powerful. Try misinformation, lies and bullshit as a translation. To hold such malevolence inside demands a fairly empty vessel to begin with, most noise as they say. Fear from as young an age as possible is a good way to empty the vessel, into which the liars pour their poison with unconcealed glee. These hate–filled tribes speak a lot, but they keep saying the same things again and again in increasingly vociferous agreement. They agree to create increasingly complex conceptions of the other with which they can fearfully surround themselves. The malevolence concentrates their attention and what they never realise is that the other is inside them, devouring them, that what they really fear is what they are, the concept of the other as enemy, terrorist, predator is a kind of personality displacement.
They hate what they are not, in multifarious ways. Emptiness is a place into which anything can be poured. Isn't this nearly always the case? I mean I cannot stand almost anyone on the right wing, and for some it would take me a while to stop kicking, but I don't actually hate them, a passion too far and I cannot sustain it, few of a reasonable persuasion can. You can despise, recoil, avoid, perhaps avoid most of all, but hate? No, that’s an emotion that should never stretch beyond the ephemeral, or you end up with tea baggers.
Oh yes, the tea baggers and the basic pattern is just the same, they must be totally stupid, devourers of propaganda, with a tendency towards the unlovely, with a total inability to think in any other way than that which they are told. Crap actors in some ways, in an even worse play, no, make that soap; theater is a bit of a liberal kind of thing.
In all of these things TV has been one of the actors. In Iran the cameras held no sway as regards the event. In Ireland the camera was a major player, I'm sure some of the more horrific distortions of the faces were 'got up' primarily for the TV. In the current nonsense with the tea baggers you find that the TV is the instigator, Glen Beck and co, directors of operations, calling forth their players for another parade. Another Dance Macabre.
To what end though? Well, in Iran it was a demonstration of strength of feeling. In Northern Ireland it was a demonstration of a weakness of feeling, and all the more vociferous for it. In the USA it's a demonstration of hate, pure and simple hate, there's nothing underneath, nothing above, nothing behind, and nothing ahead of it or them, there is only hatred, nothing else.
You have to ask though, why are these people hardly ever arrested? In Iran, at the funeral, the unleashed passions are effectively in support of those who hold the reins of power, so that’s no problem. Later, when the protests were against the power structure there were arrests aplenty. In Northern Ireland the ugly passions are effectively still in support of the power structure that is changing but not yet far enough to go against these supporters that soon they would rather not have. In the USA you never hear of tea baggers being arrested, but that doesn’t mean they are not being arrested, but a media that is set against any change in the power structure is not about to report that. That would be to admit defeat. It’s a fair comment on the state of democracy looking at these unruly, but no, that is definitely not the right word, mobs. When the waning power has nothing positive to say, it simply gets louder, repetitive, unreasonable and the media nod their heads in vociferous agreement.
What do you do? In Iran feelings after recent elections were more reasonable than was previously the case. In Northern Ireland, 9/11 took the oxygen away from them and eventually like the sad actors they had become no one came to see them and the children passing below looked forward, not up. As for the tea baggers I don't know how to fix that one, I guess you have to fix Beck, and Hannity, and most of all Murdoch, and I don't know how you do that. The tea baggers and the media are very noisy, very dangerous, very sore losers.
Maybe in the end that's why they will fade. The world is changing and they don't like that. The may be noisy, dangerous and sore, but in the end they are losers. That's what we must remember, ensuring that they never forget. They are not only losers, they are the lost.
