The Only Thing We Have To Fear Is, Er... Unfearfulness

There can be no doubt, now. The election results in MS-01 and other places are clear: the Republicans are in a world of trouble -- even in their own strongholds.

This can only mean that the usual avenues of Republican victory -- finding some imagined threat to the flag and apple pie, and goading all sufficiently gullible GOP believers into a state of panic over it -- are becoming stale. This is remarkable, as the list of threats to America grows with every election cycle: if current trends continue, by the year 2080 the GOP will have launched advertisements blaming the problems of America on every individual American citizen, by name.

Going down the current list of scapegoats to blame for destroying the fabric of America, it is truly surprising how ineffective the Republican message has been:

Muslims: Republicans sought to stoke fear of Muslims here and abroad by conflating them all with terrorists. This did not work: unlike the President of the United States, a passel of hard-right evangelical leaders, and the entire conservative foreign policy apparatus, most Americans were able to tell the difference between the two groups.

Immigrants: If terrorists are bad, and Muslims are bad because they might be terrorists, what other people might be bad? That's right -- other brown people. After years of blaming immigrants for taking American jobs (which is preposterous -- if anything, given the number of American factories relocating overseas in order to find whatever world locations have the cheapest labor, most lax environmental standards, and most lenient governments, it is those nasty foreigners who are not immigrating that are taking our jobs), the Republicans discovered a new reason to hate the same immigrants they always hated: because terrorists might sneak in too. But only on the southern border, not the Canadian border, because everybody knows terrorists hate pine trees.

Flag burners: This one was left on a mere simmer, in recent years. It turns out that there are so many actual problems to deal with, the public just isn't that into solving imaginary ones. And after watching news coverage from the Middle East these past decades, burning a flag is just over. Retro, even.

Homosexuals: While still fashionable in some circles to fear homosexuals and the devastation they might wreak upon the American landscape, this particular fear has been dampened by decades of homosexuals not actually posing a threat. At the same time, recent years have shown both clergymen and congressmen to be far more of a sexual threat to Americans, thus leading most of the public to realize that if they had to live next to a gay couple or a Republican congressman, they'd be nuts not to chose the gay couple.

Polar Bears: You thought global warming was a problem? No! The problem is the damn polar bears, who trick humans into having sympathy for them for, you know, that whole no-longer-having-a-habitat mess. This gambit, too, failed, because while both Republicans and polar bears are heartless killing machines, the bears are still easier to love.

So none of that's working? That's a damn shame, if you're a Republican. If the usual scapegoating isn't working, there's not much else the modern Republican machine has left. For decades now, it has been the practice in every election to offer up random demographic groups or other suddenly discovered terrors in order to deflect public attention from actual issues or actual policy failures. If they don't have that... well, you can already see the panic in Republican eyes.

Fear not, Republicans, I shall help! Here are my own suggestions for things that have not yet been scapegoated, but probably should be. I am sure you will be able to organize a sufficiently fear-based, sanctimoniously outraged national campaign around any of them.

Puppies: Puppies are cute, and as anyone who has ever spent time in the dating scene can tell you, cuteness is a frequent characteristic of things that later turn out to be batshit scary. I have lived at various points in my life around puppies, and they are suspicious as hell. I know of almost nothing else that can intentionally crap all over the living room rug and still be welcome in the house: all across the nation, puppies get away with this on a regular basis. Puppies are also terrible conversationalists, and are probably non-Christian.

The Reaper: We have all heard the admonition: don't fear the reaper. This is hippie-promoted nonsense; the reaper is damn scary, and any decent American should be terrified of him. For starters, he carries a giant sickle around with him. For seconders, he kills you. Even if you're willing to forgive the obsession with farm equipment, or the oddness of wearing an oversized black robe year-round, the "killing you" part should be sufficient reason to be terrified. The Republican Party should launch a campaign to make sure all Americans properly fear the reaper, and at the very least should promise to put him at the top of the terrorist watch list. Remember, guns don't kill people; the reaper does, after you've been riddled with bullets and your bloodcurdling screams have summoned him so that he can cut your soul out of your body with a large blade intended for harvesting grain.

The Metric System: We thought we had won the war against the metric system: we were wrong. My own grade-school daughter came home one day and proudly announced her height not only in inches, but in centimeters: yes, though American adults successfully fought off the menace of universally consistent units of measure decades ago, schools are still teaching this elitist "alternative theory" of measurement to our children. I am quite certain that the Republican Party could get quite a lot of mileage -- or kilometerage, as unpatriotic Europhiles might say -- in promising to protect our children from this dangerous mathematical bilingualism. Our English system of measurement is much better than a European system of measurement, in spite of the morass of inexplicable unit conversion ratios. We are quite happy with the morass, thank you very much: our willingness to not be bound by mere powers of ten shows our resolve in the face of terror.

Mothers Who Let Their Babies Grow Up To Be Cowboys: If Republicans are willing to vote against mothers on Mother's Day as mere procedural lark, they should be willing to take on a more substantial menace. Mothers who encourage cowboyism as a career choice do a disservice to their children, as there is very little need for cowboys in today's service-based economy. While Democrats would seek cowboy retraining, Republicans should be able to pin the problem squarely at the source -- poor family values. Every child who dreams of becoming a cowboy is another child who will not dream about becoming something of better use to society, like an investment banker, or energy trader, or closeted homosexual Congressman.

Actual Goats: Have you ever met an actual, real-life goat? There is a reason the term "scapegoat" still remains relevant today: whenever something on a farm is not as is should be, the odds are nine in ten that the blasted goat was responsible. A rope chewed in half? The goat. A tree stripped of bark? The goat. Canvas chewed, leather straps eaten down to the buckles, hoofprint-shaped dents all over the hood of the car? The goat. Did someone sneak onto your computer one evening and purchase a full-sized ocean kayak, which was then delivered to your door a week later, every member of your family denying that they were the one who placed the order? Blame the goat. Goats can stand a towering one hundred centimeters high at the shoulder. Their hooves and tongues are not just prehensile, but posthensile and extrahensile: for any moment in time when you are not looking directly at them, they have opposable thumbs. At least twelve of them. Stop blaming scapegoats for America's problems, and take a cue from rural Americans nationwide: blame the actual goats.

Flag-Burning Polar Bears: The old scapegoats not working, and no new ones are doing the trick? Well, get creative. Combine old, well-loved scapegoats to make new, updated ones. Perhaps polar bears are burning our flags. Perhaps illegal immigrants are sneaking across the border in order to turn our children gay. Perhaps Muslims want to raise your taxes to pay for polar bear abortions -- how would America feel then?

There is nothing more Republican than the ability to take any problem, botch the solution spectacularly, and blame the resulting mess on some group that has little to nothing to do with it. Recognizing that all Republican failures are not actual failures, but cruel sabotage by normal everyday Americans, or by sneaky ethnic people, or clever but evil animals, or devious environmental or biological processes: now that is one of the highest forms of patriotism.