“Perceptions,” by Gerry Warner

Op-Ed Commentary

As many as 250 million Americans will vote Tuesday in the mid-term elections for Congress, which may be the last truly democratic mid-term Congressional election in American history.

Now, let’s step back for a second. Did I really write the above? Unfortunately, I did though I can hardly believe it. Then again, I saw it coming almost two decades ago, but I didn’t fully realize it at the time. Small wonder.

I was driving my reliable old Valiant beater somewhere in the great southwest. Might have been Utah, Arizona or southern Idaho. I was alone, and as I do on long trips, I turned to the radio for company and entertainment. But what came out of the speakers wasn’t the typical CBC political patter that I was so used to up here. It was patter alright, but patter of a far different sort. It was a patter of raw hate and vituperation directed at the “enemies” of the Great Republic – liberals, foreigners, Muslims (I think the Gulf War was on at the time) as well as the usual suspects; gays, feminazis and what has become known today as LGBTQ people.

Now, being the somewhat unworldly Canadian that I am, I was truly shocked to hear the unfiltered anger being spewed by the AM shock-jock radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage, Sean Hannity and the like. Oddly enough, when these purveyors of excrement weren’t on the air what did you hear? “Back to the Bible” hosts like Garner Ted Armstrong (or “Garbage Ted” as an Alberta friend of mine called him) and a platter of God-fearing and evangelical radio hosts like him.

To repeat a popular 1960’s era cliché what a, “long strange trip” it was with these dueling talking heads spouting their poison over the airwaves. And it was poison. Hate is hate no matter how you package it. And, quite frankly, the evangelical Christian babble coming out of the speakers wasn’t much better.

So, I scratched my furrowed brow and tried to make sense out of it in a polite sort of Canadian way as we Canucks are wont to do and I came up with the term “American fascist talk radio.” And you know something? You can still hear that upsetting garbage if you drive the roads of America today with your radio set to AM stations. If you don’t believe me, try it.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not an atheist and consider myself a Christian in a laid-back sort of way. I also know a thing or two about politics which I’ve followed since I was a kid. But there’s something unsettling about the way politics and religion have come to be mixed in the “Land of the Free and Home of the Brave” as the anthem so eloquently says.

It’s not the polite leftism and oh so politically “woke” pitter-patter of the CBC. It’s anger. It’s ignorance. It’s prejudice of the vilest sort. And Nov. 8 we’ll see it exercised in its full glory or dreadfulness. You pick the word.

The US mid-term elections will be close, of course, but many  pollsters and pundits say they see a last-minute swing to the right. If this is true – and I hope it isn’t – all I can say is I fear what the United States will become under the Republican Party, a once great political institution, now reduced to a right-wing political cult under the crudely corrupt leadership of Donald J. Trump, a fascist hiding in plain sight.

Democracy will die if Trump occupies the oval office again. And if it dies in the US it will only be a matter of time until it dies world-wide and that dreadful dark curtain will fall over the world again. Canada included.

If you think otherwise, you haven’t been thinking at all.

– Gerry Warner is a retired journalist who hopes he’s no Cassandra in these end times.

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