"We don't want to be the community where something bad happens"

The foreshortened, layered view from our front porch in Chelsea-by-the-Sea with Bunker Hill Monument and 19th-century Charlestown townhouses in the distance, a ramp of the 20th-century Mystic River Bridge and 21st-century harbor cruise boats in the middle ground and our own Eastern Salt pile across the street up close framing the scene, suggested a metaphor for how far the nation's powers that be, succumbing to our species' worst totalitarian impulses, may have strayed from the vision of the Sons of Liberty and the Shining City Upon a Hill.

Update 8 o'clock Tuesday morning: Fox News reporting streets leading to Portsmouth High School are already lined with people!

Update: Thanks to Amy in the comments for "a heads up from Portsmouth police about parking, etc.

The Leader of the Free World is coming to the Portsmouth, NH, High School just up the pike from us tomorrow (We're attending a peaceful protest, details here), and what does our local Boston TV have to say? Pretty fair and balanced at first, noting Portsmouth police are putting on extra details. "We don't want to be the community where something bad happens. Their mission is just to be heard," says a local man in blue. Then the inevitable: The fresh-faced if intellectually incurious local reporter, Kimberly Bookman of News Center 5, asserts police will be there to make sure protesters "won't lash out and end up in handcuffs" like earlier anti-Obamacare demonstrators. Had Ms. Bookman been keeping an ear to the ground on talk radio, Fox News, the blogosphere and the twittersphere, she would have known that the only handcuffs and arrests so far in this summer of our discontent involved union thugs bussed in to intimidate legitimate protestors like us.

More likely the cute but clueless local freelancer has her ear to the ground on the fading Gray Lady, whose editorial decisions apparently continue to set the agenda for major broadcasters, even as the sun sets on old media memes. Which brings us to Sarah Palin, the brightest star in the Shining-City-Upon-a-Hill community, whose every utterance sends the New York Times and fellow travelers into a death spiral. "The United States, like most countries, has long had a lunatic fringe who channel in the flotsam of delusion, half-facts and conspiracy theories," writes Pulitzer-Prizewinner Timothy Egan, unwittingly diagnosing his own psychological ailment as he projects his symptoms upon people like us "who should know better":

In Egypt, 43 percent of people think Israel was behind the 9/11 attacks in America, a poll by WorldPublicOpinion.org found last year. In the United States, six percent of Americans say the moon landing of 40 years ago was staged, according to Gallup.

And in Alaska, the former governor, a woman who was nearly a heartbeat away from the presidency, now tells followers that “Obama death panels” could decide if her parents and her baby, Trig, who has Down’s Syndrome, will live or die [Our own diagnosis of Sarah's use of muscular language here].

The United States, like most countries, has long had a lunatic fringe who channel in the flotsam of delusion, half-facts and conspiracy theories. But now, with the light-speed and reach of the Web, “entire virtual crank communities,” as the conservative writer David Frum called them, have sprung up. They are fed, in the case of Sarah Palin, by people who should know better.

'Guess we should know better, but since we don't, we'll be out there, camera and amateur reporter's notebook in hand, on the frontline outside Portsmouth High School tomorrow morning. Stay tuned.

Comments

[goomp]

Cheers and thanks for an America that is finding its voice through the internet.

[Account Deleted]

Here is a heads up from Portsmouth police about parking etc: Obama visit. I may be stopping by, depending on some other commitments. I'll look for you!

[Aine]

Last night @HeyTammyBruce posted a link on Twitter from Yahoo news about Obama's visit to your back yard. Headline, "Obama braces for 'vigorous' town hall health talk"

So I "tweeted" her:

@HeyTammyBruce How "vigorous" can the questions of an invitation-only town hall be? Lying little shit. MA/NH #Teaparty folks will be there!

Just after midnight she replied...and her message is for all of you:

@stardog235 Excellent! Never back down. Do not blink. Do not retreat.

My thoughts and prayers are with all of you today. The heat and humidity will take its toll. And don't let the trolls jerk your chains! That's what they want to do.

Stay strong, stay safe! You are so important to the liberty of our good country!

Godspeed~

[Teresa]

Hope it went well for you today! I'm so behind on all my blog reading I totally missed this was happening!!! However, I had a different sort of meeting I had to attend and that meant I couldn't have made it anyway. *sigh*