Quote:
Originally Posted by Low Key
itt people wondering why irrational fears are not rational
Sure, but it can be instructive to discover why irrationality manifests the way it does. Lots of people think the
UFO obsession in the west was a response to Cold War fears. Unknown scary objects in the sky were basically a proxy for Cold War anxieties about Soviet nukes and the like, an airborne menace just over the horizon. That a cultural hysteria involved scanning the skies for mysterious and frightening objects and then seeing them makes sense given the context.
So we get to this question about white racial anxiety. I think it's interesting that right-wing fears about racial minorities engaged in nefarious schemes to **** over white people curiously often involve buses. I suspect, though, that it's more that the purveyors of the fantasy know that blacks and buses have a long history of conjuring up fearful and angry emotions among white America and so it's sort of the go-to "this is how they steal elections, with the buses" meme implants itself: it's easier to seep into the brain if there's been 40-50 years of priming the fear of black people on buses coming into their school districts, so the pushers of the VOTER IDS NOW policies want to quickly hit the fear and emotion-charged buttons in the hoi polloi to get them angry and they know a mythology of buses full of brown people hits the right chords to motivate.
O'Keefe admits he can't even imagine the mechanics of how it works, but he wants this story badly, because he knows, subconsciously or not, a bus full of brown people on video like going to vote playing around the clock on FNC is going to move the needle on voter IDs. There's a million ways the Democrats could conceivably steal an election that they could pour their energy into investigating, but buses full of brown people voting is the fastest and easiest way to get their end result of frightening white people, so it's the undying focus of the right to find and film these things.
As I said, that these myths occur again and again is interesting, you might be able to go one-level deeper and say some interesting stuff about whites and their fears about large groups of mobile blacks. This all of course pop psych conjecture but there's no way the reoccurring fantasies of transient blacks causing mischief and stress for whites is an accident. O'Keefe et al probably know pedestrian election stealing schemes Democrats try are probably not worth bothering about for many whites, but if they conjure up images of large groups of racial minorities moving about, and
now you've got something to give a **** about.
Last edited by DVaut1; 09-29-2012 at 02:31 PM.