Let's pity the victim

There should be an emoticon for a dumbfounded guffaw or something less childishly vulgar than WTF? to express my reaction to Michael Steele's attempt to make himself a martyr instead of a hypocrite. It would save so many keystrokes.

It takes a desperate man and a little man to dismiss the scorn over his involvement with the kinky strip club incident GOP contributors unknowingly funded. There's something distinctly oily about his assertion that he has a "slimmer margin of error" as a black man, even though that might be true in general.

"It's a different role for me to play and others to play and that's just the reality of it. But you just take that as a part of the nature of it"

he explained on Good Morning America this morning.

Whether or not he actually is held to a higher standard than a non-African American in his position as RNC Chairman would be, that frisky business is certainly at a level where anyone would be condemned for it and above the level where a white Democratic president might be impeached for it.

Yes, it's true that an honest politician (we're speaking hypothetically here) has to walk on eggs, so to speak and it's true that one of a minority group has to have even more delicate toes, but that certainly doesn't apply to a gleeful romp in the slime bucket, does it Mr. Steele? Falsely posing as a victim doesn't help real victims either.

Shame on the air

George Carlin's 7 prohibited words and Janet Jacksons breasts may elicit huge fines from the FCC, but hate, racism and bigotry thrive and proliferate on the radio and neither the handful of corporations that decide what we will know about nor the FCC seem to have any interest in doing a damned thing about it. Christian Family Values seem to have more to do with human bodies and human waste than with actual evil, such as hatred or bigotry or calls to violence based upon them.

I don't think you'll be hearing about any massive fines for the following, nor any action by the small group of corporations who pay Bob Newman or Pat Robertson or Neal Boortz or James Edwards. Tune in to this:

"I want every Muslim immigrant to America. . . to be required by law to wear a GPS tracking bracelet at all times" -- Bob Newman, from the Gunny Bob Show, May 8th 2007 on Denver's Newsradio 850 KOA.

"Give 'em all a little nuclear waste and let 'em take it on down to Mexico. . . Tell 'em it's a tortilla warmer." -- Neal Boortz, on the Neal Boortz show, June 21st, 2007, Cox Radio Syndication.

" Islam is not a religion. It's a worldwide political movement meant [sic] on domination of the world." -- Pat Robertson, June 12th on Christian Broadcasting Network's "The 700 Club"

Back on May17th, James Edwards, host of "The Political Cesspool" told us the Jim Crow, pre-civil rights era was

"Back when America had a strong moral compass. You had cultural and racial integrity in those days. . . What's been taken from us, we can take back."

Edwards is an open admirer of former Klan leader and neo-Nazi David Duke who often appears on the show. It's sponsors include the CCC, or Council of Conservative Citizens, a white supremacist group and The Institute for Historical Review which produces fake history concerning the WW II extermination of Jews and Gypsies. His show appears on WRLM in Memphis which bills itself as a "Christian news" station.

Cox owns 80 AM and FM stations and tells prospective employees that high ethical standards are required. Evidently, the paleoconservative political action group known as the FCC agrees.

Why grandpa says inappropriate things

That's the title of a smug little piece of fluff that appeared the other day on the Newsweek.com site. It contains a little anecdote about an elderly gentleman who used the word "colored" to describe someone and it continues with a bigoted diatribe about how the "social security generation" are all a bunch of senile bigots and maybe it's because their brains are all rotted out at age 65 as everyone under 30 knows.

Older adults might be "more prejudiced than younger adults because they can no longer inhibit their unintentionally activated stereotypes.” is the quote from some Australian psychologist dredged up for the purpose. "Studies since the late 1990s have shown that older Americans tend to be more racist than younger people." That seems odd to me since the people who were shot in Mississippi, and hosed and gassed and beset by dogs - the people who had that dream, who spent years fighting against discrimination, segregation and for civil rights are all in the "social Security" generation.

Of course you'll recognize that this is a rigged argument and one based on a bigoted stereotype. I'm not for instance, her "grandpa" and resent being told about how I am, what I am and how I think, based on her preconceived, negative notions of her elders. The definition of racist here has nothing to do with belief or action but is about the use of "inappropriate" words and guess who gets to decide when we stop saying Afro-American and start saying African-American lest we grow hair on our palms and be called racists for it? Guess who gets to decide that Mark Twain was a racist because he used the language of his day accurately or that Dr. King was a racist for using the word Negro or that the NAACP are a bunch of bigots for using the phrase "colored People?" And the people who got shot at and gassed and hosed and torn up by dogs and cracker cops for civil rights from Selma to Chicago become racists - and worse - old racists with decaying brains.

Of course to believe this bullshit at all, one also has to disregard the self-evident prejudice of younger Americans of all races. If you don't like the way I talk, perhaps you have to make allowances for the fact that I have a better command of English than those who learned it yesterday and I know what I'm doing when I choose my words. You might want to remember that I'm old enough to be fed up with the petty condescending scorn of tongue clucking 20 year olds who don't remember segregation or Jim Crow and spend their days examining the entrails of words and sniffing each other's drawers for the odor of racism while exhibiting the most galling contempt for those who handed them their civil rights on a silver platter.

"The frontal lobes’ decline is not inevitable. To the contrary: aerobic exercise enhances their functioning among older adults." says Sharon Begley who is probably closer in years to crapping in diapers than I am. "Next time grandpa utters something out of “Birth of a Nation,” suggest mall walking." Next time Sharon writes this kind of crap, I would suggest keel hauling. Those barnacles can rip the smirk right off your face, ya know?

And next time Sharon is out like mall walking with like her friends, maybe like she'll like remember that "Grandpa" owns it and just might have her and her stereotype-soaked frontal lobes thrown out.

Crossposted to The Impolitic

Say it ain't so, Jesse

Jesse, Jesse, Jesse - you know I've always tried to like you and sometimes I've succeeded in admiring you and I've forgiven your "Hymie Town" slurs and the way your accent changes when you talk to different people, but you really haven't learned, have you?

So Obama is "acting like he's white" for not being "all over Jena." Are you accusing me of being a bigot like your friend Louis Farrakhan who threatens the Jews with destruction and thinks white people are devils? because that's what "Acting White" means in that context. I didn't accuse you of "acting black" when you accused the Jews of trying to defeat you while ignoring the large amount of support you've had from them. That's not fair and I know you're a man who has always tried to tell other people to be fair, unless of course you're referring to Jews or Hymies as you call them. That's not fair to Senator Obama either because if a man is going to be president of the United States and all its people, including Hymies and white people and others and commander of 30 thousand nuclear warheads and all, he's going to have to indulge in a bit of arrangement of things according to priority.

A good president simply isn't going to have time for and shouldn't have time for making the sad story of racial hysteria in a tiny town the center of his attention. That wouldn't mean he was "white" unless you consider responsibility to be an exclusively white trait and you don't, since you're not a racist of a kind who would talk down black people. I know that.

I'm quite sure you aren't promoting the idea that a president should intervene personally in judicial matters like the current administration and I'm sure you've heard Mr. Obama express his regrets at this unhappy situation that seems somehow headed for resolution without the Senator "being all over" it. So what is it really all about? do you really want to tell black people what they should or shouldn't; can or can't be because of their skin color?

I'm confused, I really am and although it could just be because I'm white, or worse yet - a hymie from hymietown, but maybe you could explain to me why Senator Obama isn't enough like you to be president.

Barbie's Ban

There was a time when legal terminology was larded with Latin, but of late we have laws enacted as a response to a personal grievance with names like Megan's Law, named after someone's murdered child and the result of one man's efforts and one man's grief. The desire for justice, tolerance and a harmonious society, although it takes both authoritarian and libertarian forms, often seems more of an institution than a popular or private movement; an institution that has produced some odd and occasionally disturbing children of it's own.

Mark Twain wrote many of his books in the dialect of the time, which includes the now infamous but then universal "N" word and so many schools refuse to allow the books of one who dedicated his life and risked his livelihood championing minority rights. Of course our literature is full to the gunwales with books of more or less malicious depictions of racial and ethnic groups like Sax Rohmer's once popular Doctor Fu Manchu series and Joel Chandler's Uncle Remus tales. In the last few days there has been an ad hoc ruling by the nameless institution that rules on these things, and booksellers like Border's are taking a comic book style publication in the popular European series Tintin out of the children's section because depictions of Africans therein seemed undignified to an irate customer. The book was first published in 1931. All these things are in a sense relics. The message has got through to most people that our smug Eurocentric attitudes are something worth leaving in the past, but is it going too far to insist that we redact the literature and the culture that produced it so that historical attitudes are no longer visible? It is, in my opinion. Having read all these things as a child doesn't lessen my loathing for racism any more than having read the Bible has interfered with my contempt for the ethnic, racial, class and religious bigotry enshrined therein.

I think there's a danger both in the "ban it" reflex and the tendency of one perceived grievance to set it off. We are far too ready to ascribe the opinion of one man to the kind of "communities" we invent so that we don't sound racist by talking about "the Jews," "the Chinese," etc. Sometimes it's not a community, it's a professor, it's just teacher or some irritable guy with a grudge who can wield unchallengeable power. Perhaps if we began to adopt the current legal fashion and called it, for instance, Mrs. Appleby's Ban or Reverend Plushbottom's Censorship, some perspective might be restored.

A society that buries its history creates dangers for itself which include repeating that history as well as acquiring the ability to bury any part of history, such as the secular origins of the USA and gains the ability to create a fictitious history as is being demonstrated today.

Aryan Nation

It's like Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman or Godzilla Vs. any of the other rubber monsters he was set up against in the movies; one ludicrous thing against another makes for bad movies. It makes the US into a bad movie too when we put our near-idolatrous worship of the "troops" against our hysterical phobia about Latin American illegals. One way or another, the winner will be a monster.

Yaderlin Hiraldo entered the US illegally from the Dominican Republic in 2001 and she married Army specialist Alex Jimenez in 2004. Her green card was in the works as they say. Jiminez is one of those missing troops who was taken prisoner and not heard from again until his ID card turned up in an Al Qaeda safe house and a video was found that claimed he had been killed. It's likely that he is dead, but nobody knows for sure whether Yaderlin is a widow. The country was saddened when these men went missing and all the usual rhetoric about supporting the troops was vented. Most of that rhetoric is meant to serve Bush's program of blaming America for his military losses, but all in all, it's a lot of hot air. They're certainly not going to support Mrs. Jiminez, they're going to deport her and if she wants her application to have a chance, she's going to have to leave the country and wait ten years.

So thanks Alex for your service. We're sorry you may have died under horrible circumstances and because of incompetent leaders, but we're not sorry enough that we'll treat your widow like a human being, even though we love to get all gooey about the sanctity of marriage - what with her Hispanic origin and all. We will be happy to support some nice blond white troops, but not your sort, so get the hell out of here, we've got to get ready for the 4th of July celebrations where we bow down to our own graven image and chastise Liberals for not supporting the troops.

(cross posted at The Reaction)

If you're white, you're all right

If you're brown, stick around

Well maybe not. Lou Dobbs seemed irate last night during his regular evening diatribe about illegal immigration. It seems he feels that Bush is pushing the notion that if you're against his immigration bill, you're a racist. He's right to say it's not necessarily so, but racists certainly have made immigration hysteria one of their favorite tools. Rage against Mexicans is not limited to illegals although my southern racist neighbors do assume they all ( with the exception of our Attorney General) are and all need to be deported after a bit of torture.

Northern racists like Bill O'Reilly are a bit more articulate about their concern for the dilution of America's non-existent ethnic, religious and racial purity and political prostitutes like John McCain are happy to back him up. It really isn't illegals that bother these people, it's Mexicans; it's brown people. When Lyin' Bill asked McCain last Wednesday whether immigration could "change -- pardon the pun -- the whole complexion of America." McCain responded, "You're right."

I won't pardon the pun, thank you. If that's not racism, I'm George Wallace. If it's not racist and xenophobic Christianist tribalism to whine about the impending doom of the White Christian power structure, I'm the Easter Bunny.

Dobbs' last stand

At first glance I agreed with Lou Dobbs' commentary on CNN.COM this morning: A Call to the Faithful. He's been ringing the Separation of Church and State bell, proclaiming that the constitutional wall is being breached. Of course I agree that our administration has been promoting their sectarian doctrines over the constitution they are sworn to defend, but Lou's bell sounds a bit tinny and the reader soon recognizes that his real concern is that too many Christian leaders are talking about some form of amnesty or path to legal status for some or all illegal aliens. By insisting that Churches shouldn't take a stand on the question of aliens and their treatment, he's insisting that the subject of how we treat our fellow men is not the province of religion. It's not that Dobbs is a solipsist and I suspect he's not really a complete secularist either. He can see the difference between a President preaching and a preacher preaching. He just doesn't care. He's just making a stand.

I don't know what religion is about other than power and money if it's stripped of any concerns for human welfare and made unable to promote kindness, mercy or compassion. I don't know what kind of religious values Dobbs might be in favor of in that he quotes Paul's Letter to the Romans:

"Everyone must submit himself to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God. Consequently, he who rebels against the authority is rebelling against what God has instituted, and those who do so will bring judgment on themselves."

instead of promoting any particular teaching of Jesus. It's hard to understand why Dobbs is furious at Cardinal Mahoney telling his flock that:

"Anything that tears down one group of people or one person, anything that is a negative in our community, disqualifies us from being part of the eternal city."

It sounds suspiciously like a Christian sentiment, if not equally Jewish and Muslim. It sounds like some of the clergy is taking time out from gay bashing and trying to confound science and is instead promoting what Jesus taught rather than what the Roman Paul taught to the Greco-Roman pagans.

It sounds like Dobbs is steamrolling the separation he claims to support if after all, the US government is established by God and must not be opposed. The only supposition that makes Dobbs' tirade coherent is that he just doesn't care about logical consistency or human values as long as we can quickly and ruthlessly expel anyone who entered illegally or overstayed their visa. He's waxed nearly hysterical trying to show that we are all at risk of leprosy and other horrible things because of the "Brown Peril" overrunning our borders. Dobbs explains to us that there is a growing schism between leaders who call for decency and compassion and parishioners who just want the filthy, disease ridden, dope smoking, lascivious Mexicans to go away. Someone needs to explain to him that his "argument" was used to support slavery and trash abolitionists - even though he knows it.

As a rule, I suspect someone of racism when they persist in depicting people as groups and resist looking at the indecencies and inhumanities their policies will inflict on individuals. I think that fits Dobbs like a white hooded robe. Nativism, xenophobia and garden variety racism have been and continue to be as American as the 4th of July. The screams about protecting our borders are not a bit different than what the Immigration Restriction League was howling a hundred years ago; no different than the repugnant phobias against the Irish, the Yellow Peril hysteria that resulted in the Exclusion Act and expulsion of American Citizens of Chinese descent, the arrest and incarceration of Americans of Japanese descent and all the horrors and race riots of the Jim Crow era. The same rhetoric of disease, drugs, corruption of values, traditions, language, ethnic purity and the loss of jobs that was wrong then is wrong now and although I have been on Lou Dobbs' side when he had the guts to question the Bush administration and its lies, I am not on his side now and will not be until he begins to separate the perceived need to control the borders from his need to dehumanize and demonize a group of people. Some people may deserve a legal path to citizenship, others may not. It's not beyond comprehension that we may be able to accommodate both without resort to brutality, that we may be able to treat people as we would be treated - at least not for me.

White men can't jump?

Oh bullshit. Imus should be fired the day after Chris Rock or Dave Chapelle get fired for making jokes about white people and Korean people. He should go off the air after CNN goes off the air for calling every woman over 50 "granny" or Bill Maher gets fired (again) for making diaper jokes about people 10 years older than he is or making rude comments about fat people. Did anyone try to shut down Billy Graham's "crusade" after he agreed with Nixon that "Jews are ruining the country?"

He is no better or worse than the endless mass produced stream of rappers calling women bitches and whores and anyone who took no offense at Archie Bunker making Polish jokes about his son in law, yet thinks Imus should be canned, should be caned.

I don't watch Imus. I don't think he's funny and his weird way of talking annoys me, but although his attempt to emulate the patter one hears from other people who get rich talking that way was tasteless, tastelessness is the rule in nearly every aspect of American life. If every group of people were able to get anyone fired for ridiculing them, we would have no editorials and damn little news. While I would delight in seeing Rush Limbaugh fired for insulting our entire species, I like freedom far too much to allow people like Al Sharpton to censor the media and as much as I like and contribute to the NAACP, I think they should stick to expressing their displeasure and stop calling for the destruction of anyone making a stupid joke.

How dare you call me articulate?

To call George Bush a delusional incompetent or Karl Rove a miserable bastard could be taken as being insensitive to their feelings. To call the junior Senator from Illinois a brilliant orator is, as we are told, insensitive to his feelings and insensitive to the feelings of a "Community" that we are simultaneously told he belongs to and does not belong to. Nobody seems to care what Mr. Obama actually thinks.

Words, you see, have to be interpreted in a strictly racist way in order to avoid the appearance of racism. People must be stereotyped, pigeonholed and treated as groups so that people of a racist mind won't call those who are not, racists.

We're all supposed to be "sensitive" and because this is America, we need to carry it to ridiculous and self-defeating extremes. Because this is America, we can no longer depend on words meaning what they mean - they can only be interpreted by the political priests who represent "communities" and because this is America, anyone objecting to anything becomes a "community" even if its a community of one. So what do you do to point out that Barak Obamaindispensable talents for a Statesman, you don't say anything; you ignore the man, lest some ad hoc "community" put words in your mouth. Best not to be impressed by his intelligence and capability, because the inquisition will assume some heresy no matter how sincere the compliment. Is there a sneakier way to enforce bad stereotypes than to suppress open admiration?

Carl Rove, of all people, should know better than to put his foot in his mouth and there is probably something "ulterior" about everything he says, but I can't disagree that Obama is articulate. I may delight in everything unpleasant that happens to Rove, but I'm sick to death of the crepuscular and rebarbate semantics. If nothing we say can be taken to mean what it means anymore, if nothing can be understood without implanting an ulterior motive chosen by the listener; if everything must be deconstructed and reconstructed as a contradiction, then language is useless and there is no point to being articulate and no point to free speech.

A final solution

Any story about anyone with a vaguely Spanish name in my local paper is invariably received with comments like "Illegal - Illegal!" and "Deport the illegals!" Sometimes the suggestions are much more violent. Witnesses to crimes will sometimes speak to reporters through an interpreter even if they do have some facility with English, but the word "interpreter" will elicit the same calls for deportation and tirades against people who don't speak English fluently.

Last week I watched a TV story about two Florida fishermen whose boat sank some miles off Boynton Beach. They were in the water a long time and one died of a heart attack while boat after boat passed by, waved and disappeared. Why? because they were black and despite the mandate that a boat captain render assistance to those in peril, the presumption was that they were among the Haitian illegals who sometimes show up here, dead and alive. America's children of immigrants hate immigrants and nearly always have. Smile and wave and let the black men drown - lets' catch some fish and snicker about Liberals and the War on Christmas. Cubans of course are different. If they make it to shore, not only do we not drown them or lynch them; they are usually legal and are usually treated as human beings.

Early this morning, reports the Miami Herald, 11 soaking wet and shivering Hispanic immigrants, men women and children, showed up at a Key Biscayne toll booth and were given coffee and blankets. They were allowed to call relatives in Miami and unlike similar water soaked Haitians, or Hispanics from other countries, they were not beaten by police, thrown into trucks and held incommunicado until they were deported. Why? Cuba is a Communist country. We will do anything to help economic refugees from some Communist countries although those from other countries like China, might be held for decades without a hearing, but not Cuba. Cuba is right on our border. Cubans look almost like we (white people) do.

Now I'm not going to lecture about the inherent racism or the random inequities and contradictions of US immigration policies; I'm going to make a suggestion. The US can afford to eat better if we allow migrant labor to pick our crops, cut our lawns, dig our ditches and wash our dishes. Mexico can ease its burden of millions of economically deprived and hopeless people by sending them here and here's the way to make it all palatable to the xenophobic, Budweiser drinking unwashed of America: Mexico should have a successful Communist revolution and nationalize US assets. That would bring manufacturing jobs back to the US and leave the mucky, back-breaking work to immigrants we could now welcome as refugees from Communism. Everybody's happy - up the revolution!

When is black Black?

The Daily Curmudgeon wrote yesterday about the electability of Barak Obama and rightly mentioned that a hidden streak of bigotry would make his success unlikely -- and that of course, is because he is a black man, or at least his father was a black man and an African. Of course that streak of bigotry doesn't always reside behind a white face and the discussion of whether Obama is really black or African or half white or half black or African-American or an American of partial black African descent has, in my opinion at least a trace of that odor that clings to Senator Biden's now famous condescending evaluation. "He ain't like them other colored boys, is he?" is how one blogger on The Reaction heard it.

The debate amongst many people however, isn't whether Senator Obama is or isn't like some stereotype, but whether he can be further pidgeon-holed or categorized or deconstructed or reconstructed, obstructed, embraced or dismissed according to some arcane formula found deep in a forest of nuance and innuendo I dare not enter. Much about Obama's ability to understand the experience of Americans who descend from those once enslaved in the continental United States (but not elsewhere) depends, it seems, on these fine distinctions: as though his dark complexion had not exposed him to the prejudice and stereotyping by a society that in most cases doesn't care where great great great grandpa came from as long as you look black. Is it any different than saying that a black man couldn't represent a white society well?

To my way of thinking, the insistence by some African American writers that only a man whose ancestry is politically correct can represent or hope to find support from African Americans, is as demeaning as any white senator's suggestion that a black man who has confidence, poise, a command of English, a brilliant mind and a superior education somehow doesn't represent them either.

It smells funny in those woods; it smells like prejudice, but perhaps a trace of it clings to us all, even though some of us wish the Senator from Illinois could be judged on his record, his ability and his character and not what some people would make of his ancestry.