American Bigotry X

The Normalizing of Hate

The Black Hat

The notion of Communism being “evil” was part of a PR campaign invented by Dean Atchison, President Dwight D. Eisenhower's undersecretary of state. Atchison felt the postwar Soviet threat was too complex a concept to explain to the American public, so he fitted the Soviets with a black hat, painting them in simplistic, child-like tones of black and white, and literally invented this notion of the evil being not merely the Soviet Union but the political ideology of Communism itself which, in turn, led to Korea and Vietnam. Atchison literally invented the Cold War, which at times threatened to destroy the entire planet, as America naively waged war against an idea; not even specific persons, but a political concept. This thinking is now deeply embedded within our cultural DNA as we still consider Communism "evil," as opposed to more properly understanding some Communists have done evil things. Right-wing conservatives have successfully translated this concept to Islam. Rather than our focus being on specific people who commit evil acts, we ascribe the quality of evil to an ideology and fight the air. People can be hunted down and killed. Ideas cannot.

Ideas, however, continue forever. Once metastasized into the cultural bloodstream, ridiculous and illogical notions such as Communism = “evil” endure and become accepted as fact, no matter how anti-intellectual or illogical. This can have unexpected consequences, like the Cuban Missile Crisis where the U.S. almost destroyed the planet in a dispute over one-half of a tiny, impoverished island, or the completely pointless “police action” in Vietnam which cost over 58, 000 American lives while benefitting or protecting America in no perceptible way. In retrospect, both arguments were fallacious. Communism itself, as an ideology, wasn’t evil, although Nikita Khrushchev and the Soviet political structure may well have been. But we wasted lives and resources on completely pointless war making and a race to the moon all in an attempt to battle an ideology which, we now realize, threatened the U.S. in no meaningful way. It was all propaganda—theirs and ours—but the damage and ruin to countless lives was very real.

Politics, by definition, concerns managing public perception. By managing public perception, you can galvanize support for a cause or purpose. Making Communism evil helped galvanize the public to fight the Russians, our former and very important friends during World War II. Making Saddam Hussein—arguably an evil individual—seem to be a looming threat to the U.S. (which he was not) was the main purpose of an extremely effective propaganda campaign by the Bush Administration in the run-up to the start of the Iraq war in 2003. Skip ahead to 2009, where the Republican Party here in America were shown the door to great applause by the American public after eight disastrous years of The Bush Legacy, and we find a new weapon in the political war: race. Race was the most obvious, most powerful and most volatile weapon left to a political party accustomed to dominating the American political landscape only now humbled back on its heels saddled with a legacy of ineptitude and failure. America’s troubles, the political argument went, were the fault of undocumented Mexicans and, of course, blacks. The newly sworn-in president became the literal face of America’s minorities in spite of the fact the president’s truer and more accurate life experience does not differ measurably from any middle-class white child raised in Kansas. The president rarely if ever touts his white heritage or pushes back against the conservative right’s relentless blackening of the president. The president is not lack. He is biracial. This is not merely a semantic differential: there is likely no more genuinely American an individual in this country than Barack Hussein Obama. Yet, both he and his enemies seem to focus on what is arguably only one half of his amazing story. The president himself, therefore, is in large measure responsible for the unqualified success of the Republican Party’s relentless campaign of hate.

As painful and unsettling as the racist and sexist jokes on TV shows like Mad Men are, I believe they play a role in speaking a certain truth about us without glossing it over the way network TV had done for generations. We laughed at Archie Bunker, but we laugh at Roger Sterling more nervously because Mad Men does not appear to be disposed to educate, while Archie Bunker was clearly designed to profit from racism while combating it at the same time. All In The Family said, it’s just Archie and made Bunker a kind of obvious fool. Mad Men treats Roger Sterling and other characters as normal, saying, this was us, this is still us, which is a lot more unsettling. What disturbs me more than Duck Dynasty Guy’s racist and homophobic rhetoric is that White America is not abandoning is TV show. They don’t care, it doesn’t bother them. Duck Dynasty Guy evokes the good ol’ days. His greatest sin was having been caught telling the truth. But truth is good for America. It’s good to know where we stand. The AMC Network is obviously more interested in short-term profits than in the long-term goodwill making a stand of conscience would bring them. Why? Because blacks don’t watch AMC. I’d never even heard of this show until all the flap about one redneck homophobic racist. So what? There’s millions of them out there. Duck Dynasty ratings are way up, their DVD’s flying off the shelves. This is the truth of White America, brought to you by the Republican Party in their endless obsession with not only pushing their own agenda (they don’t actually have one), but with destroying the legacy of Barack Obama at any cost—including rending the very fabric of the society they portend to represent.

Making Racism Acceptable: Obama is the target, but the overarching damage to the fabric of American ideals is inestimable. The GOP's naked pursuit of power represents the most shameful and utterly disgraceful betrayal of American principles.

A Silver Lining?

And, maybe that’s a good thing. Shocking as it seems, maybe this radioactive fallout of hate will ultimately be good for America, as the next attempt to deal with what is, at its core, intrinsically childish tribal behavior will be more sincere than the cosmetic approach of Political Correctness. Maybe the public schism, the two and three and forty-seven Americas, spit along lines of race and ethnicity and gender and sexual orientation, will do so much damage that, ultimately, we’ll all be forced not only to live with one another or tolerate one another, but to actually evolve our thinking past what Grama anem taught us.

Between now and whenever America actually deals with these issues as opposed to glossing them over, we will have absolutely insane public initiatives like Arizona (now synonymous with Intolerance)’s what-on-earth-were-they-thinking Senate Bill 1062, which veiled racism and homophobia in religious freedom, more Congressional redistricting and “voter protection” laws clearly designed to disenfranchise blacks and other minorities, “Dog Whistles” being replaced by overtly racist rhetoric aimed at this president, and more weakening of social safety nets for the poor (which benefit twice as many whites as blacks, although the GOP has successfully equated food stamps and welfare exclusively with Black Americans). This is the GOP strategy: to return to power on a rising tide of hate. But, then what?

The divisions the GOP political strategy have created have arguably destabilized the social contract of America. This will make the nation that much more difficult to govern regardless of which party next comes into power. The hardening arteries of American discourse has created only polarization and gridlock. It is beyond childish for either party to believe this phenomena will simply vanish after the next election, but that is precisely how these lunatics are behaving. It’s a mess now, they seem to be saying, but things will settle in once we’re back in power. This is deeply disturbing, unhinged thinking. It will take more than a generation to clean up the social mess this political party has, in capricious calculation, deliberately caused in a futile attempt to subvert the U.S. Constitution by effectively nullifying a national election of a U.S. president.

The GOP has ushered the lunatics onstage. Hatred and violence are now en vogue. Not only can we not get the guns off the street, we can’t even conduct a reasonable background check, in spite of the repeated mass shootings and school shootings—which have killed many more whites than blacks. In my local Walmart, I’ve never seen a black man buying guns or ammo. Ever. It's all been white people, many of them paranoid about blacks and Latinos and gays because of all the unfettered knowing lies the GOP continues to spread twenty-four hours a day. Their propaganda is specifically designed to stoke the lunatic fringe and keep them in a frenzy until election day. But, far too many of these lunatics own guns. The GOP has seen to it and work actively to ensure the lunatics can keep their guns. So, when the rap music is too loud, they can just fire ten shots into a car full of teenagers and go order a pizza. Or, in the case of Trayvon Martin, shoot an unarmed teenager and then just—it stuns me that the media’s never made a point of this—just stand idly around while the boy bleeds out, making absolutely no attempt to stop the bleeding until paramedics arrive. This lunatic Zimmerman, by his own testimony, just kind of paced idly about while Trayvon lay there, feeling absolutely no responsibility to even try to save the boy’s life.

This society was certainly not created by the GOP, but it is one most definitely exploited and encouraged by the GOP, who have placed black hats on African Americans, immigrants both documented and not, LGBT persons, and liberals in general, all of it in an attempt to make life in America as stressful, as unproductive and as difficult as possible so they can, unfathomably, present themselves as the solution to problems they themselves have created or made worse. And, sadly, white conservative America really is that stupid: they’re buying it. They know it's a lie, but they choose to believe it. This is the Republican strategy: to give conservative whites license to freely vent their intolerance, to make racism and homophobia en vogue. You’re Stupid And We Know It. They treat their entire constituency like children, scaring them with stories of the Boogeyman and disseminating disinformation they know their faithful will not challenge. White Conservative America, perhaps frightened by all this liberalism gone wild, by the browning of America, are eager to believe whatever the GOP is saying because the alternative is to confront the reality that it is not, in fact, 1965 and the overall influence of conservative White America is becoming increasingly more proportionate to their actual numbers as opposed to the outsized level of influence they’ve enjoyed for generations. Blacks and Latinos and LGBT persons are voting now, which makes them a direct threat to the GOP political will. Worse, their divide and conquer strategy has caused divisions within themselves, with patent lunatics like Ted Cruz deliberately knifing fellow Republicans in an obvious internal schism between rational GOP conservatives and the lunatic fringe Cruz represents.

Flag Day: Member saluting the American flag and then the Confederate flag during the
Ku Klux Klan's secret membership ritual, Atlanta, GA, May 1946.

Send In The Clowns

President Obama’s “Above The Fray” strategy only fuels the chaos. There is no Clintonian voice of reason shattering the Clown Car rhetoric. The Leader is not leading, which only empowers the whack jobs. The president, therefore, bears some burden in the terrible social consequences of this heinous political strategy. Trying to be reasonable, to keep his options open, has demonstrably, repeatedly failed with these obstinate lunatics. The president needs to call a spade a spade and call these evil—yes, evil—men and women out for not only the political machinations, but the threat to the very fabric of America their Endless Campaign poses.

The cartoon rhetoric of Fox News has gone mainstream, desensitizing otherwise rational whites over matters of simple tolerance and decorum. Ribald, open racism has become socially acceptable once again. Obama is the target, but the overarching damage to the fabric of American ideals is inestimable. Which makes the GOP's naked pursuit of power a most shameful and utterly disgraceful betrayal of American principles.

Christopher J. Priest
1 March 2014
editor@praisenet.org
TOP OF PAGE

Confederate Flag's
Re-emergence: Racism or Regional Pride?

---

It's been spotted on license plates in Atlantic City and Collingdale, draped across a truck in a Kohl's parking lot and flying on poles outside homes in Montgomery and Chester counties. You can see it on the side of a building off Aramingo Avenue in Port Richmond, hanging inside an apartment near Capitolo Playground in South Philly and painted on the "Dukes of Hazzard" replica Dodge Charger cruising around Delaware County. Even a Philly cop was photographed last year wearing it under his bike helmet while on duty.

Nearly 150 years after the Civil War ended, the Confederate battle flag — a complicated and incendiary symbol of rebellion, slavery, Southern pride and white supremacy — is seemingly becoming a more frequent sight north of the Mason-Dixon Line.

What's behind the popularity of the flag in the North? Is it the dark underbelly of the rapidly growing country-music scene? Disapproval of the president? An innocent revival of the rebel spirit among Yankees who don't know — or care — what it means to the rest of society? Or something more sinister?

"Me, I fly the stars and stripes," Dereck Banks, a self-described history buff from Clifton Heights, Delaware County, told the Philadelphia Daily News.

But Banks, 55, who is black, can't miss the Dixie flag plastered across the back window of his neighbor's pickup truck parked at the curb. It's also on the front license plate, with the word "Daddy."

"It offends a lot of people. White folks, too," Banks said. "Slavery is over. This is the new millennium. The South lost. The states are united."

Public schools have long been desegregated, too, but some Philadelphia-area residents are flying the same flag that the Ku Klux Klan and others adopted during the civil-rights movement to oppose desegregation.

In June, when country-rock star Toby Keith played the Susquehanna Bank Center, police said Darren Walp, 33, of Ridley Park, climbed a fence into a housing complex, waving the flag and shouting racial slurs. The flags were out again the next weekend at a concert headlined by Brad Paisley, and tailgaters were outraged because security was forcing them to be taken down.

Last month, Walp was arrested a second time in Camden while on his way to a Blake Shelton concert. Cops say he hopped out of his pickup truck to get a beer from the back, ranting at a black driver and challenging him to a fight.

"We never want to see this individual in the city of Camden again," Camden County Police Chief J. Scott Thomson said at the time, in a news release.

Some defenders of the Confederate flag say it is not inherently racist and should be flown to honor Confederate soldiers. Others, like Doug Copeland, a medical tech who said he was born in Chattanooga, Tenn., use it to show their fondness for the South. "I'm not prejudiced at all. My granddaughter is half-black," said Copeland, who flies a flag from his home on busy Route 724 near Phoenixville. "I just love the South. If I could live there, I would."

But Copeland also knows that some people find it offensive. He thinks they are the ones who removed his prior flags. "That's why I think they stole it. They came to the bus stop and stole the flag. It's my third one," he said. "It's bolted in now, but the one time they snapped it right out of the bolt." Copeland, however, doesn't seem overly concerned with political correctness, as evidenced by the sign on his door that reads, in part: "Unless you are blind or cannot read this sign, you can bet your ass I am going to stomp the s--- out of you if you bother me!"

Read Full Article

Except As Noted, Text Copyright © 2001-2014 PraiseNet Electronic Media. All Rights Reserved.
Creative Commons CC BY-NC (Text Only)