They're flying too high

I'm struck by, actually sick of, the commentary that's been streaming out about Sonia Sotomayor that began even in advance of her nomination to the Supreme Court by Barack Obama, himself subjected to some pretty wild accusations in the MSM and the Internets. Homeland Security issued a report indicating the level of dangerousness from homegrown wingnuts is at its highest level since the early '90's, when coincidentally another unconventional person – William Jefferson Clinton – managed to make it to the presidency.

For those people who Ann Richards would label as “being born on third base and growing up thinking they hit a triple” folks like Clinton, Obama and Sotomayor represent a pretty scary prospect. After all they managed by virtue of intelligence, hard work and dumb luck to make it into positions of power in the public sector, not as “public servants” but as decision makers of the highest order. This type of achiever challenges the master narrative of who should lead and breaks the wealth equals intelligence paradigm. These are uppity types who don't know their place and the “wise Latina” remark illustrates that tendency, so it gets replayed over and over again.

This fear – the natural order of things is under attack – gets transmitted up and down the line in a variety of ways. From the people John Gresham characterizes as “living poor but voting rich” to the third basers and beyond, the word is out, the barricades are going up. The folks who intend to profit from this know enough to stay just far enough out of the way, same as the leaders of the KKK did. The messages aren't really coded, just slightly oblique, couched in good PR fashion by individuals who are clever with words. The opinions are sanitized just enough to make them acceptable to repeat and placed in contexts that inhibit us from questioning the authority or motives of the speakers.