In Our Time
It’s a thought to madden a Manichaean, but the usual outcome of any struggle between ‘good’ and ‘evil’ isn’t victory for one or the other, but stalemate. Good and evil both survive to fight another day.
Thus, the astonished delight over Barack Obama’s victory in the US presidential elections last November hadn’t even begun to subside before the resultant rage of racist America was making itself heard. In a column written three weeks after November 2, this columnist (‘Keeping him safe’) remarked on that fury. Yet, in the euphoria of the moment, I was inclined to dismiss it as “the impotent rage of an unreconstructed, racist South, confounded for the third or fourth time in its history.” And I thought it would fade as time passed and ‘they’ got used to it.
Three months later, it was clear it wasn’t fading. On March 1 (‘In Obama’s America, racism fights back’), I cited more recent expressions of it (eg, a New York Post cartoon comparing Obama to a mad chimpanzee and showing him being shot by two white policemen); recalled “the murderous atmosphere of the McCain-Palin campaign rallies, at which crowds shouted, about Obama, ‘Kill him!’”; and opined that “Obama’s Secret Service agents will need to stay on their toes.”
What’s happened in the nearly six months since then is that, far from abating, that hatred has cloaked itself in two absurdly fraudulent ‘issues’ through which to express itself.
The first was (and is) the ‘Birthers rebellion’: the stubborn insistence in some quarters that Obama was born in Kenya, not the US, and therefore cannot be President of the United States.
This is a view that’s held in irrational denial of irrefutable evidence to the contrary: Obama’s Hawaiian ‘Certificate of Live Birth’, eg, or, even more compelling, a contemporary notice of his birth placed by his parents in an Hawaiian newspaper days after he was born there, a notice it would be impossible to backdate. It’s a view that breeds from another source of rightwing fury, the new President’s admission, at various times on the world stage, that the US has sometimes made mistakes; an admission such types see as proof of Obama’s ‘anti-Americanism.’ The Birthers take such ‘treachery’ one step further. Obama isn’t merely anti-American, they say; he’s not American, period! Shouted one Birther at a town hall meeting, to applause: “I don’t want this flag to change! I want my country back!”
Talk about a pathology.
While the conviction of Obama’s foreignness is mainstream in the South, however (think on that!), in most of the US it is seen for what it is, a lunatic expression of paranoia on the part of white Southerners unable to digest the fact that their country now has a black president. And that southern concentration of the Birther movement has meant that, outside of the South, Republican congressmen ambitious for re-election have known better than to espouse it.
Not so with the second issue which racist hatred of Obama has seized upon. The level of rightwing fury currently expressing itself at town hall meetings nominally called to further the debate over health care reform has turned such meetings into a (increasingly spooky) joke.
For one thing, many of the supposedly enraged citizens at these meetings (uneducated, middle-aged white men and women, mainly) haven’t a clue what they’re talking about. “Keep your hands off Medicare!” yelled one protestor in the course of a diatribe opposing government participation in health care.
For another, the rhetoric at such meetings is, typically, wildly overblown. “This is about the dismantling of this country,” one woman shouted, drawing prolonged applause. “We don’t want this country to turn into Russia.”
Unlike the Birther movement, the anti-health care reform movement has at least sussed out a possible consequence of Obama’s agenda. When rightwing columnist Pat Buchanan wrote (‘Angry White Men,’ August 11) that “Among those who benefit most — the uninsured — African-Americans, Hispanics and immigrants are overrepresented, [while] among the biggest losers — seniors and the elderly sick — well over 80 per cent are white,” a case — not a convincing one, but still, a case — could be made that he was right. It’s true that Obama’s bureaucrats, realizing that an overwhelming proportion of health care costs are incurred in the last six months of a patient’s life, have been looking for ways to cut those. But that’s a long way from Sarah Palin’s inflammatory charge that Obama’s health care reform envisages the creation of “death panels” to decide when “to pull the plug” on the ill and the elderly.
Still, the arguable aspects of Obama’s bill have empowered Republican Congressmen to publicly oppose it, closing ranks in the process with the ‘crazies’: something they feared to do with the Birther movement.
The level of rightwing fury over what’s allegedly a health care reform bill led MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann to wonder last week whether or not racism in the US was becoming “blatant.” His guest (whose name I’ve unfortunately forgotten) remarked on the effect of things like having an African-American President and, now, a Latina on the Supreme Court, and averred that that kind of change produced anxiety in people unable to accept that minorities’ participation in governing constitutes “real American government.”
(One Daily Kos blogger had an ominous note on this. Comparing the traditional position of minorities in America to that of victims of domestic abuse, NLinStPaul (‘Hate Unleashed’) wrote, “when a woman who has been abused [finally challenges] the power of her abuser, it is at that moment that the most serious violence is probable.”)
But it was left to Andrew Manis, a white professor of history in Georgia, responding to recent reports that death threats against Obama were far outrunning those against any of his predecessors, to spell it all out. Wrote Manis (‘When are WE going to Get Over it,’ Macon Telegraph):
“We white people have controlled political life for some 400 years on this continent. Conservative whites have been in power 28 of the last 40 years. Yet never in that period did I read any headlines suggesting that anyone was calling for the assassinations of presidents Nixon, Ford, Reagan, or either of the Bushes. Criticize them, yes. Call for their impeachment, perhaps. But there were no bounties on their heads…
“How long before we white people realize we can’t make our nation, much less the whole world, look like us?… How long before we white people get over our bitter resentments about being demoted to the status of equality with non-whites?… How long until we white people stop insisting that blacks exercise personal responsibility, build strong families, educate themselves enough to edit the Harvard Law Review, and work hard enough to become President of the United States — only to threaten to assassinate them when they do?
“I still don’t believe I’ll live long enough to see us white people get over our racism problem. But… every day that Barack Obama lives in the White House that Black Slaves Built, I’m going to pray that God (and the Secret Service) will protect him and his family from us white people.”
In the wake of that piece, one can just imagine what kind of reading his Inbox contains. Brave man, Professor Manis.
