Manny Pacquiao-- Another Shabby Right Wing Icon

Yesterday, far right fanatic Bryan Fischer was whining on twitter how "ANOTHER rich guy takes his money - and his tax revenue - out of US because taxes are too high." And that was Manny Pacquiao, a Filipino boxer and the congressman representing Sarangani province back home. Since being sworn in on April 16, 2012 he's been representing Sarangani's 500,000 mostly poor farmers from his two beautiful homes in Los Angeles. He's in L.A. making millions doing commercials for NIKE, for detergents, medicines, telecomm companies, cheap beer, clothing and for anyone else who will write him a check. Lately he's been pretty unwelcome around L.A. He decided to spout off about how marriage equality offends his religious feelings.

I don't follow boxing and I would have never heard of Manny Pacquiao except that I have a Filipino friend who told me about how Pacquiao is still friends with two former boyfriends, who he used to have sex with back in the Philippines and still spends time with here in L.A. Oops... how Republican! He plans to run for president of his own country so he's been making plans to move back there, which seems like a sensible thing to do. And it's probably better to be a congressman if you live there and not here. But he made a commotion this week by telling the media he's leaving the U.S. because federal taxes are too burdensome. The sleazy little hypocrite has made tens of millions of dollars... but taxes are too high. Grover Norquist, the guy who wants to drown the government in a bathtub, is on the case: “Pacquiao’s concerns lie with the federal income tax. As Nevada is one of the nine states that do not have an income tax, Las Vegas has grown to become the home for major bouts because fighters do not have to worry about the state taking a bite out of their winnings or purse... Unfortunately, Nevada’s economic benefit is now overshadowed by the federal income tax rate... [F]or boxers who stand to earn over $1 million per fight through winnings, pay-per-view revenue shares, fight bonuses, and other forms of taxable income, they will be taxed at the top marginal income tax rate of 39.6 percent.”

Always so tragic when multimillionaires are asked to pay their share! In all likelihood, he'll be apologizing as fast as golfing millionaire Phil Mickelson did for the same kind of selfish, greedy comments. In Pacquaio's case, though, he should be encouraged to go back to his own country and stay there.

I know for sure that Pacquiao, like so many conservative homophobic hypocrites, has sex with young guys but I'm not claiming that he has-- or conservatives like Steve Southerland (R-FL) and John McCain (R-AZ)-- have sex with corpses. I ran across a discussion of what Erich Fromm referred to as the "necrophilious character" in Max Blumenthal's book, Republican Gommorah and it seems sadly relevant, not just to Pacquiao and Bryan Fischer but to the right-wing's bizarre and dysfunctional sexual obsessions in general.

In his 1973 book The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, Fromm analyzed the phenomenon of necrophilia, concluding that it extended beyond the traditional concept of erotic attraction to rotting flesh and also manifested itself in "malignant aggression... unalloyed from sex, in acts of the pure passion to destroy." The necophilious character, Fromm wrote, is passionately attracted "to all that is dead, decayed, putrid, sickly... It is the passion to tear apart living structures."

Together with his research partner, Michael Moccoby, Fromm surveyed a diverse group of research subjects for necrophilious, "anti-life" tendencies. Across the board, Fromm detected a profound link between necrophilious character traits and right-wing ideology. "The study asked the respondents a number of questions that permitted correlating their political opinions to their character..." Fromm wrote. "In all of the samples, we found that anti-life tendencies were significantly correlated to political positions that supported increased military power and favored repression against dissenters."

Fromm identified necrophilious characteristics as among the most dangerous of any society. "They are the haters, the racists, those in favor of war, bloodshed and destruction," he wrote. "They are dangerous not only if they are political leaders, but also as the potential cohorts for a dictatorial leader. They become the executioners, terrorists, torturers; without them no terror system could be set up..."

Want to rethink the Republican Party's conservative base? A bit?