However one may wish to insulate oneself from the media bilge washing over into our daily lives, my feeble attempts to wall off from its toxicity seems futile, one can only yearn ardently the reality was otherwise. The latest carnival unfolding in the Land of the Brave and Home of the Free is straight out from the caverns of cuckoo land. The 'Birthers' ( A group of racist bigots) have muscled their way into the prime time slots of the electronic Media. These are a clutch of right-wing wingnuts questioning the legitimacy of President Barack Obama's American citizenship.

In other words the' Birther movement'- is a frantic movement by a fringe group drawn mostly from the majority community. This motley mix of paranoid "Patriots" fired their first repugnant broadside during Barack Obama's initial foray into the Presidential elections. As the campaigning gathered momentum the quixotic claims of the Birthers Brigade fell by the wayside, as the public disgusted with corporate malfeasance and Bush-Cheney misgovernance paid little heed to their outrageous fulminations during that time. Now, when more burning concerns like unemployment and a sputtering economy occupies the mind of majority of the population, here comes the caravan of liars camouflaged as "True Americans." The Media instead of giving a wide berth to them has devoted an inordinate amount of airtime to these professional liars.

Yesterday, finally President Obama in a last ditch attempt to quell the noise coming from the 'carnival barkers' (these are exactly Obama's words) put to rest the distraction by producing the original birth certificate to the media and the public, one can only hope this will finally quash the scurrilous claims advanced by the Birthers.

What is palpable is whiffs of racism shrouding every statements put out by this obstreperous crowd. Facts and figures don't matter to these folks, many code words dug up from the Jim Crow era seems to have resurfaced and have been employed obliquely to bolster their claims about Obama's eligibility to be the President despite his decisive electoral mandate.

I recall the days after 9/11, when America fiercely in the grip of paranoia mixed with occasional bursts of xenophobia (fomented incessantly by some jingoistic folks in the electronic media) tossed aside briefly the liberal robe and cast widely the dark shroud of unwarranted suspicion on persons of non-anglo saxon ethnic origin. The era of surveillance and spying on its citizens was born resulting in an extra pat down at the airports if one looked 'suspicious' to a "trained eye".

I guess, this national mood swings come in cycles especially, during a national cataclysm-as during the second World War, Japanese-Americans were rounded up and bused into an internment camp based on irrational fears about their true patriotic inclinations. It seems now amidst the slow economic meltdown and general economic malaise sweeping the middle and lower middle class-the Birthers have found a fertile terrain to advocate its abhorrent claims about Barack Obama's legitimacy. This is a guaranteed path to sidetrack the population from the main bread and butter issues like creation of decent jobs and investments in human capital.