The phrase “head on a stick” conjures up some disturbing and barbaric images. You can go back to the Dark Ages, when Celtic and Viking warriors paraded their enemies’ heads on axe poles. You can come to much more recent times, where Iraqi jihadists murdered a woman for supposedly being a prostitute, beheaded her, and impaled her head on a pole. (The woman’s real “crime” may have been being a doctor who was protesting the high cost of medicine in the embattled country.) The Australian torture porn flick Wolf Creek does something similar and equally gruesome to one of its female characters.
America isn’t immune to the practice, either, or at least the rhetoric. Serial killer and necrophile Ed Kemper killed a cat, dug up the poor animal, and displayed its head on a stick. (The movie American Psycho misattributed the practice to much more famous serial killer Ed Gein.) And CIA counterterrorism chief and neoconservative “tough guy” J. Cofer Black, who failed so miserably in anticipating, containing, and combating the threat of al-Qaeda after 9/11, tried to pump up his sagging ego by bragging that he would have Osama bin Laden’s head brought to Washington “in a box,” and wouldn’t rest until “flies are walking on [the] eyeballs” of the terrorists responsible for the attacks. (Black assuaged his flagging manhood by helping to implement the US’s horrific and entirely useless torture policy.)
Short version: Decent people don’t talk about heads on sticks, and they certainly don’t do it.
Which brings us to Stephen Steinlight.
Steinlight is a “senior policy analyst” for an obscure anti-immigration think tank called the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS). On July 17, Steinlight entertained a gathering of Tea Party troglodytes with his fervent wish that someone would jam President Obama’s head on a stick. He also said he believed that having Obama “hung, drawn and quartered” would be too good for him. (I’ll leave you to look up the practice of “drawing and quartering.” If you saw the end of the movie Braveheart, you have an idea of where torture fetishist Steinlight wants to go.)
Steinlight told the Highlands Tea Party in Sebring, Florida:
There’s no court that will stop Obama from doing anything. And we all know, if there ever was a president that deserved to be impeached, it’s this guy. All right? And I wouldn’t stop. I would think being hung, drawn, and quartered is probably too good for him. But you know, this man who wants to rule by the use of a pen, a telephone, let us not forget his teleprompter … the fact is that it would backfire very badly and we’ve got to be grownups and accept that we can’t have everything we want, you know, [like] his head on a skewer.
Did the Highlands membership gasp in outraged unison, storm the stage, and throw Steinlight out on his tail as an affront to humanity? If you think that, you don’t know your teabaggers. They laughed and applauded. Of course they did.
Let’s skip over the usual garbage about Obama being a tyrant (hence “unstoppable” by the US judiciary) and deserving of impeachment even though the right-wing looney bin can’t cite one actual example of Obama doing anything remotely impeachable. And we can move past the usual stupid teleprompter remark. We know they just can’t let anything go — wait until 2016, when every ignorant lie about the Clinton administration, especially the ones centering on Hillary Clinton, comes roaring up out of the grave like the zombies in 28 Days Later.
Let’s get back to Steinlight’s wish to revisit the brutal tortures of pre-medieval times on a duly elected American president. Seriously? Head on a stick? Drawn and quartered? What does Steinlight do with his time when he’s not indulging his torture fantasies in front of a bunch of fellow barbarians?
Here’s what he does. He spews to Congressional committees about immigrant children being “gang bangers,” advocating for the ban of all Muslim immigration, and calling immigration reform “a psychotic plot against America.” He gets cited as an “expert” by people like Senator Jeff Sessions (R-Inquisition) and House Judiciary Committee chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-Torture Pits).
This is why Steinlight isn’t just another obscure right-wing lunatic spraying spit and trying to get headlines. His views are being adopted and promulgated by powerful Republican lawmakers. This is why we don’t put our collective noses in the air and ignore them. They don’t go away. Instead they gain influence in the most powerful legislative body on the planet.
Oh, and just so you know, apparently the Nazis and racists on Stormfront.org hate Steinlight because he’s Jewish. I clicked on the link, and am now soaking my hard drive in bleach. (I won’t subject you to it.) As for CIS, it was founded in 1985 by John Tanton, a Michigan opthamologist whose bone-deep hatred of Hispanics and African-Americans drove him to create CIS and several other organizations, such as the Federation for American Immigration Reform and NumbersUSA, all of which have become small but influential groups screaming about the dangers of immigration. Wonder where the rhetoric about “anchor babies” comes from? These organizations were among the first to promote that twisted little meme.
I wouldn’t presume to tell you how to feel about Steinlight’s horrific and brutish rhetoric. I would advise you to remember that when you hear right-wingers like Sessions, Goodlatte, and others try to reposition themselves as “moderate” on issues like immigration, their thoughts and beliefs are being shaped and formed by rhetorical savages like Steinlight. He tells those lawmakers that, in his words, immigration threatens “the American people as a whole and the future of Western civilization.” He believes that torturing and murdering a duly elected president will remove that threat.
That is who we are up against, every single day. When given power, this is where they go. Every single time. Remember that when you find yourself thinking that some of these righties aren’t so bad. If they aren’t vocally condemning the hate rhetoric of people like Steinlight, they damn well are that bad. And worse.
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Michael has been writing about politics, history and Web development since 2001. His first book is in development.
