“I’m afraid of Obama,” a woman tells Republican U.S. Rep. Bob Inglis during a town hall meeting last week in Inglis’ South Carolina district.
“Why are you afraid?” Inglis asks. Off screen, a man shouts, “He’s a socialist!” A few seconds later, amid the din of dozens of rumbling voices, the same man (at least it sounds like the same man) says, “You should be afraid of Obama. We are all afraid of Obama.”
A group calling itself Anybody But Bob posted the Inglis video to YouTube. The group cut or severely trimmed most of Inglis’ answers, and its edits muddle the context of some constituents’ questions and comments. But the fear and paranoia in the video come through loud and clear — there are off-camera shouts about “martial law!” and puzzling questions about “curlicue” light bulbs and a “mandatory vaccination program” that might refer to a possible vaccine for the H1N1 swine flu — and are extraordinary.
And familiar. The worry and anger in the Inglis video and other town hall videos (they’re easily found on YouTube by searching “health care town hall”) are the contemporary version of the fearful talk I often heard as a child in the late 1960s about Russians, Red China (it was always “Red China,” never just China), race wars, hippies — and, yes, socialized medicine (Medicare was new at the time). The greatest threat to America was reflected in that last fear, the threat from an ever-growing government, which was filled with communists, subversives and, worse, bureaucrats who schemed to take away a person’s hard-earned money and freedom and give it to someone else. Many of those old fears sound comical 40 years later, and Medicare hasn’t turned America into a socialist gulag. No matter. The fear remains.
It was Inglis, by the way, who was told by a constituent at another town hall meeting to “keep your government hands off my Medicare.” A similar moment happened at a recent town hall meeting hosted by U.S. Rep. Gene Green, a Houston Democrat. At about the 4:30 mark in the video attached below a man says, “I’m curious. In this room, how many people, by a show of hands, oppose any form of socialized or government-run health care?” Most of the people in the room raise their hands. Green responds, “Let me ask, how many of you have Medicare?” Some of the same people raise their hands, including a man in the front row who had shouted “Amen!” when he raised his hand in response to the first question.
Inglis tried to point out the contradiction in his constituent’s comment. Green leaves the matter alone. Not that the man in the front row would have seen any contradiction in raising his hand against a government-run health plan while benefiting from a government-run health plan. Fear has that effect on coherence.