Republican elephant should be retired

To The Eagle:

It’s my opinion that the Republican party’s emblematic elephant needs to be retired. That poor pachyderm is collapsing under the weight of its party’s last straw, denialism. A suitable new logo would be a sketch of Edvard Munch’s iconic artwork, ‘The Scream.’

The haunted face in that painting, an image of howling anxiety, eerily illustrates MAGA’s jaundiced view, eyes huge with imagined fears, mouth agape as if babbling “la-la-la,” with hands locked over the ears, refusing to hear unpalatable facts.

This new GOP, like the Party of Big Brother in Orwell’s prescient classic, “1984", has indoctrinated its fanatic ideologues into believing “Ignorance is Strength, Truth is a Lie, that 2+2 = 5.”

In the autocratic dystopia of Florida, Big Brother DeSantis has legislated Orwell’s “Thought-crime” and “Crime-speech” into its public education system. Teachers who dare mention social justice, gender tolerance, or the realities of Black history, can now be prosecuted for ‘crimes against the State.’ Stalin would have been proud.

Jewish poet Heinrich Heine penned the prophetic words, “Where they burn books, they will, in the end, burn human beings too.” Republican conservatives are desperately attempting to deny access to literary knowledge they fear will empower students, by besieging libraries and banning books with a malignant zeal not seen since Hitler’s Third Reich.

There’s no denying this new Republican Party would make Lincoln weep. It would, if it could, deny the vote to any but White men. It denies the value of teaching the bitter history of the Black American experience. It denies that any election won by a Democrat could possibly have been fair. It still denies that the only fraud to taint the 2020 presidential election was perpetrated by their own Big Liar.

Radical Republican reactionaries’ denial of truth and reason have perverted their party into a poisonous caricature of American Conservatism. It’s enough to make reasonable people scream.

JB Bouchard

Puget Island