RUSH: We’re gonna start here at the top. Yesterday on NPR, they interviewed former U.S. poet laureate, Natasha Trethewey. Have you ever heard of our poet laureate in there? Have you ever heard of her? (interruption) Well, anyway, during a discussion about all the protests around the country, they had this little exchange.
NPR: I don’t know if you’ve heard or read about this, but Rush Limbaugh recently said — referring to what he described as anarchists in Portland — “I can see secession coming.”
TRETHEWEY: I have heard, you know, from those kinds of outlets talk about civil war, some kind of race war — those kind of very scary, frightening things. (sigh) But the thing to remember is, this is all so familiar. We’re just seeing very, eh, visibly what has been working beneath the surface all along. Dealing with that kind of violence and racism (sigh) has always been a threat in the lives of the most vulnerable citizens.
RUSH: Okay. So, that’s the poet laureate out there who, I think, was struggling in vain for a cogent thought during her entire answer and failed to get there. So the question is really what the focal point is. “I don’t know if you heard or read about this [ahem], but Rush Limbaugh recently said, ‘I can see secession coming.'”
So, they’re fretting over at NPR that I am somehow gonna be responsible for inspiring violence and a civil war. I got news for everybody. They already started it. (chuckles) I have nothing to do with the violence taking place in Seattle, nothing to do with the violence taking place in Minneapolis, nothing to do — nor do you — with any of the violence taking place in Portland. But what I was talking about…
As usual, they hear one thing; they take it completely out of context. This was actually a very important point that I was raising. I was asking, “Is there one thing — is there even one thing — that in the worst emergency you can imagine, would unite the American people?” Do we have, in the warring factions that exist… Let’s call it conservatives and liberals, or left and right, or Democrats and Republicans.
Is there any overlap at all? Is there anything we have in common — one thing — that if the country were attacked, if the country were threatened, that we would unify, come together to defend it? And I don’t think there is, folks. I don’t think there is even a single issue, a single thing that we have in common. So I asked a very salient question:
How does a nation with these kinds of divisions, with these gaps that are so wide — how does a nation — coexist with itself, when such divisions exist? And I don’t… I think we’re seeing how difficult that is. Now, you may disagree. You may think there is something that we have in common. A value, I’m talking about, a belief. We don’t… Folks, we don’t even have in common the belief that our country’s good!
The people who are our political opponents think this country sucks. They hate this country. I’m talking about mainstream Democrats now. Mainstream Democrats are the radical left, and they hate this country, and they want to burn it down. They want to inflict massive pain and damage on it. They are catatonic with their hatred. They’re a bunch of communist anarchists.
So, what value, what belief, what issue do we have in common with them? Where is whatever it is that would unite us, even if it’s just… Like after 9/11, we were unified for a week, and all it took was for Bush to announce a military response to what has happened, and Democrats broke from it and Bush was an idiot. He was stupid. All this stuff came cascading down.
And then, of course, the Democrats spent the next eight years trying to destroy Bush and lose the War on Terror and lose the war in Iraq. This isn’t something that’s new. So, I was simply asking: With divisions this wide, can you see the day where there might be two different Americas — the left located in certain states and the right located in others? I didn’t talk about civil war or any of that, and I didn’t talk about this resulting from violence.
It was a think piece.
It was a think piece question that I asked.
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