There are many things I’ve read in history that show how an unruly mob can change the direction of things. The blogosphere is watching an unruly mob in action right now as Wonkette is trying to stack the WebBlog awards against all things PUMA. I’ve started reading some of the threads coming in to The Confluence (example: here) and there’s a sense among some of the other folks in the other categories that they are the innocent victims of an unruly mob. I’m sure that’s how the other Hun tribes felt when Attila assimilated them.
All you have to do is take a look back at the entire dark ages and the crusades and get a pretty good answer as to how this type of thing gets its start . It basically starts with some ‘character’ who may or may not exist who gets an incredible amount of buzz placed around them that is clearly not based in history or fact or anything. Thus, a mythical hero is born. Some one to rape and pillage for … some one to use to justify an attack on other tribes, other religions, any other. It just builds and builds until you get a Spanish Inquisition or something similar.
The King Arthur legends come to mind also. A tribal king who may or may not exist turns into the great fictional hero just because tons of unruly mobs need some kind of legend to mob around. All kinds of morality plays develop to show that our legendary hero is just that mythical, legendary, and grounded more in a game of rumor than history and reality. I know I just gave some examples of things way back when. Why would I think that in an age of ‘information’ we could possibly see the same kind of history repeat itself?
While many of the blogs are now upset that they’ve been caught up in the raping and pillaging which was no fault of their own, they too, now have been caught up in the creating the legends that turn the truth into a nice mythical legend that gets WAY out of hand. In my first case, about 2000 years way out of hand.
MYTH NUMBER ONE: It’s all about Hillary losing. PUMAs just won’t get over it. They are like Astronauts for a Flat Earth or WW2 Japanese Soldiers trapped up in the Hills refusing to believe the Emperor gave in.
While Hillary Clinton eventually wound up to be the candidate of choice for me, one year ago I had no preference. What really drove me to the PUMA realization wasn’t Hillary loosing, it was HOW she lost or rather HOW the DNC went around constructing an OBAMA win. If anything PUMA is about holding the DNC accountable for cheating that occurred in caucuses, how the distributions of delegates was determined, how lopsided the punishment of Florida and Michigan was compared to other states that moved their primaries up also against DNC ‘rules’, and the railroading of the democratic convention process. If you think all of this is just one big conspiracy theory on the part of PUMAS either do some research or take up residency in the bat cave with Cheney. I’m not certain he’s turning that over to Biden even though I know the Obama administration will want to lock him up there eventually. So that’s it, it’s not about HILLARY losing it’s about HOW Obama “won”. Yes, the “win” (sic) is in quotes.
MYTH NUMBER TWO: All Pumas are conspiracy theorists. In every population there’s the average and there’s the extremes and outliers. Yes, you can find the folks that went searching for that Holy Whitey Tape and the Kenyan Birth certificate, but the majority of the PUMA sites (especially The Confluence) never jumped on to the wingnut stories. Again, I’ll go back to the basic reason PUMAs exist and that is how positively fucked up the primaries and caucuses were and how they were completely mishandled by the DNC and the DRC.
MYTH NUMBER THREE: ALL Pumas are Racists and just can’t deal with the idea of a Black Man being president. I’ll again point to the Bell Curve. Of course there are Pumas that are racists but the majority are not. The problems that PUMAs have with Obama has to do with his extremely small level of accomplishments and his overblown and now mythic intelligence and academic records (which by the way, the public has never seen). It’s been debunked that he was the first black on the Harvard Review by Harvard themselves although mysteriously in Obama’s senate site there was a resume that said that he was. It was sitting there for the two years he pretended to be the Senator from Illinois. The man has never been in an election where extremely weird things haven’t happened–like getting all your opponents thrown out on technicalities, having sealed divorce records of your opponents magically show up in public, or having the delegates to your caucuses in places like Texas leave the process with tons of forms in their arms. I’ve looked and as far as I can tell, the man has never even had a full time job. There are PUMAs of color. It’s not his skin color. It’s his Chicago political career and his appalling lack of experience. For me it was, oh no, not another person who got into Harvard as a legacy. I’m frankly tired of legacy Ivy Leaguers. The hardest thing about the Ivy Leagues is getting in there if you’re anything but a legacy. Getting out is nearly guaranteed. Think DUBYA.
MYTH NUMBER FOUR: PUMAS are bitter old white women who find sexism everywhere. Considering the number of times during 2008 racism was found EVERYWHERE, I just gasp at the total lack of awareness on the part of people on the obvious sexism. If some one stood up in a room and asked Obama if he’d shine their shoes, that would be such obvious racism that I doubt the KKK would rise to debate. If every where he went there were folks wearing t-shirts with the N word emblazoned across them, there would have been riots. If effigies of Obama hanging from trees on Halloween or Little Black Sambo dolls were being manufactured with his face on them, the outrage from every where would have been swift and justified. These things happened to the two women candidates in the white house races using language from sexist instead of racist tomes. The outrage was nonexistent.
Side myth to this: ALL Pumas are uneducated. Just having spent time on any of the PUMA sites, I have to say this is really not true. If anything, especially at the Confluence, there are a large number of PUMAS with advanced educations. Not that this really matters because having worked for universities for years I can attest that there are some miserably stupid people out there with Phds. I really get tired of the elitist meme. Believe me, some times I really wish I was kat the plumber instead of kat the economist. Last week would have been a perfect time for that in my house.
MYTH NUMBER FIVE: PUMAS voted enthusiastically for Mcain and Palin, were basically Republicans all along and were just spoilers. All you have to do is go back to The Confluence’s voting strategy series to see that there were very few PUMAS that fell into the enthusiastic Republican voters categories. Yes, there were folks who eventually decided they felt more at home as Republicans. Many decided to re-register independent. But most of the PUMAS I’ve met are still your basic democrat with no party home any more because they feel the party has abandoned its root principles including, most importantly the ONE man ONE vote principle. Most PUMAs I know disagreed with everything Sarah except for the fact that as a sitting governor, she didn’t deserve to be treated like a bimbo.
Now you can continue to rewrite history out there in the blogosphere, much like Constantine the high priest of the Sun God decided to invent Christianity, create the Jesus myth, and control slaves, women, pagans, children, barbarians and other Roman property or you can sit back and use the Internet to find the facts. This is after all, the information age or have you decided to ignore science and just restart the Spanish inquisition?
