BLACK LIKE THEE

Outrage is an easy emotional reaction. It feeds on our easiest emotion, anger, to which it is too close kin. It stems from all the wrongs done to us in the past but hasn't a lot to say about the present or the future. We are, unfortunately, in a time where our outrage is far too close to the surface. The very words "President Donald Trump" outrage me. Practically everything he, his cabinet and his supporters in Congress say and do is an outrage and much of it a violation of either the Constitution, our laws and/or our social norms. With the daily, if not hourly, beat of new outrages coming from our neo-Fascist Administration, Fox News, Info Wars and scum like Ann Coulter, Alex Jones, Lou Dobbs and Rush Limbaugh we are rubbed raw. Even thick skins have grown thinner with those of continually oppressed minorities like women, African-Americans and our LGBTQ brothers and sisters being the thinnest of all. That isn't a fault but rather a fact. The women exploited and raped, the African-Americans subject to hate, fear and ignorance at every turn to say nothing of the violence visited upon them and similar discrimination against those in the LGBTQ community have more than a right to be thin skinned and to respond with anger of their own to their treatment. However, that an angry response is understandable doesn't also make it inherently justified.

Let's look a little more coolly at the current mess engulfing the elected officials in Virginia as an apt example.

Democratic Governor Ralph Northam got himself into some hot water with the anti-abortion fanatics recently. I am not going to deal with that controversy here but it serves as the seed for what has followed. His support for abortion brought Northam to the notice of some right-wing fanatics who started scrounging around for something that could be used against Northam. What they found was a personal yearbook page from Northam's Medical School, Eastern Virginia Medical School, from 1984 with a photo of two people, one in blackface and the other in full Ku Klux Klan regalia.

As Trevor Noah pointed out on The Daily Show, were this a photo of an actual black person and an actual Klansman side-by-side, raising their drinks together at a party we would see it as a positive photo. It is not that. It is two white people trying to be funny and shocking while demonstrating only their cosmically great insensitivity.

Northam has not helped his case any either. First, he apologized for being one of the people in the photo. Then he apologized for the photo, claimed that he wasn't one of the people in the photo and claimed that he didn't know how it got onto his personal yearbook page. Then Northam, deepening the ineptitude, claimed that he thought that the person in blackface in the photo might have been him because he's worn blackface at around the same time when he'd impersonated Michael Jackson in a dance contest. Then to dig the hole for himself deeper, Northam's wife barely stopped him from moon walking in response to a reporter's question. I will acknowledge that Ralph Northam has dug this hole so deep that, if he can see over the rim at all, it's only on tiptoe.

The bad news for the militant right-wing extremists who want to bring down the Democrats currently in power in Virginia is that Northam's lieutenant governor can't be accused of wearing blackface because Justin Fairfax is black. Such a simple fact never stopped the right-wing fanatics before so they have defaulted to the strategy that proved effective in ridding them of Al Franken*. They found a couple of women to claim that Fairfax had sexually assaulted them at some point in the past. Let me backtrack slightly and say that the women's allegations may well be true but they require some very serious investigation before I will and many others should take them at face value. The women's allegations appear at a time that is a little too convenient for the Republiscum Party in Virginia and do not appear to have any prior history. Is it not a bit odd that these allegations did not surface in 2018 when Mr. Fairfax was running for lieutenant governor yet as soon as there is a possibility that he could succeed to the office of governor they appear?

The allegations against Fairfax and Northam bring into play the further constitutional offices that may fall in the line of succession. Thus Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring is forced to step into the spotlight as third in possible succession to the governorship and admit that he too once wore blackface at a party potentially disqualifying him for his current office let alone the office of governor. To Herring's credit, he got ahead of the right-wing fanatics and admitted this incident himself.

So who's next? If the three top elected Democrats in Virginia have to leave office we get down to Republiscum Speaker of the Virginia House, Kirk Cox. Speaker Cox, however, has his own problem since he was the editor of his yearbook at Virginia Military Institute and, mirabile dictu!, that yearbook is rife with blackface photos, racial epithets and other outright racist nastiness. Then again, wasn't this whole campaign against Northam, Fairfax and Herring designed to put a Republiscum in the governor's office?

Lost in all this recrimination and character assassination are some questions that the people outraged by Northam's, Fairfax's and Herring's past behavior should be asking: are these men racists or sexual predators? What are the motives of their accusers? Are they governing well or badly. Are they the kind of people today who would think and behave as Northam and Herring did some thirty-five years ago or as Fairfax is accused of doing fifteen years ago?

We used to have a concept called "consciousness raising". People who held awful, if traditional views, of African-Americans, women and members of the LGBTQ community, could question their beliefs, learn about the people for whom they held prejudicial attitudes and come to a higher consciousness that put aside those negative views and values emerging as better people. Today with our outrage rubbed raw by Trump and other neo-Fascists, by the murder of Trayvon Martin, Freddie Gray, Tamir Rice, Sandra Bland, Philando Castille, or Emantic Bradford, Jr., (this list is foreshortened but already 100,000 times too long), by neo-Nazis in Charlottesville and elsewhere, by inaction over gun violence generally and school shootings in particular, by rapists whose money, power or success in sports make them immune to prosecution certain offenses whose actuality may be questioned loom large, often larger than warranted.

The aphorism, "An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind," is most often attributed to Mohandas K. Gandhi, the Mahatma. It implies that if we take revenge for each offense done to us then the whole world will soon be engulfed in tit-for-tat revenge that leaves everyone wounded and no one whole or satisfied. That aphorism might well be applied here. Is it not possible that people who were either of stupid or actually evil intent thirty five years ago may have grown and become wiser and allied to good over that time? If you are an African-American living in Virginia today whom would you believe might better respect your rights and treat you are a human being worthy of respect? Would that be Ralph Northam, Mark Herring or Kirk Cox or any other Republiscum? If you are a woman, who would better respect you as another equal human being and respect your right to choose what happens to your own body, Justin Fairfax or one of the Republiscum who want abortion outlawed when a fetal heartbeat can be detected?

I am not proposing that we ignore offense for some pragmatic advantage. I am suggesting that offenses of the past need to be viewed in the context of what has passed between the offense and the moment we are in now. If Ralph Northam wore blackface in the past and would wear it now, that's one thing. He has renounced it now and denounced it too. If the man has grown and become educated to the offense and distress that such behavior causes over the last thirty-five years I do not see why he must resign his office. That is equally true for Mark Herring. If a full and complete investigation of the charges against Justin Fairfax establish that he sexually assaulted his accusers then he doesn't belong in his office. If, on the other hand, his accusers are shills for some Republiscum fanatics then they should be exposed and Mr. Fairfax continue as lieutenant governor.

Finally, all this is taking place in Virginia amongst Virginians. Is it really so hard to believe that a white man in blackface was abnormal in any state of the old Confederacy yesterday let alone thirty-five years ago? That isn't an excuse but it sure provides context. Where would we expect to find consciousness raised less, less frequently and most recently than in the states of the old Confederacy? One would always expect that racism and its cousin, racial insensitivity, would be rife in the states that fought hardest for the evil of slavery. I don't give a pass to Northam or Herring because they are Virginians but rather I'm sure that it took longer for them to learn and grow out of racism than it did for many others.

I appreciate the source of the outrage. I understand how offensive these men have or may have been yet it is also true that their offenses were from a then that is now long past. If they are no longer the men they were many years ago that must count for something. The present man should be evaluated in relation to his past but the past must also be judged in relation to the present man.


* Some stupid clowning on Sen. Franken's part not withstanding, we know that his main accuser of sexual misconduct is a long-time right-wing activist. We also know that the allegedly "unwanted" kiss during a USO tour was a part of the show and had been rehearsed before the tape that showed the alleged "unwanted" kiss was made. Al Franken was railroaded out of office by the same right-wing that delayed him from taking his senate seat until July, 2009 and by Democrats who were all too eager to appear on the side of women in general without looking too hard at this woman in particular. In that sense Democrats had trapped themselves by going to bat for women who are actually too often ignored or disbelieved when they have actually been sexually assaulted because truly investigating the woman's charges looks too much like the rampant and egregious disbelief that most truly victimized women face. The right-wing fanatics like to catch Democrats and other Liberals in traps they have constructed for themselves especially when Democrats have no idea how to get out of those traps.

Code Talkers

No. This has nothing to do with the heroic Navajo who sacrificed much to win the war against Imperial Japan in the 1940s. It certainly has nothing to do with anything one can reasonably call heroism.

No. I am writing about the talking heads like Glenn Beck, Steve Doucey, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly and Lou Dobbs. I am talking about the hardcore of racists who have learned to frame their bigotry in code.

When an American president cannot tell the nation’s school children to work and study hard without being accused of “socialist indoctrination” we are off into something other than simple political disagreement. We are in the realm of something darker, more vicious and more odious, something that, if dragged out into the light, would discredit its purveyors completely. This, of course, is why those purveyors take such pains to hide it in irrelevant language, disguise it as religious preference or even claims of upholding the law.

The storm of protest over disseminating President Obama’s speech on the opening of the public school year on September 8, 2009, had nothing to do with conservatism, nothing to do with indoctrination, nothing to do with socialism. It was the most thinly disguised expression of racism yet by the neo-fascists who call themselves Republicans. The accusation of “indoctrination” is of a piece with the “Birther” insanity. President Obama is not “white,” therefore he is not one of “us.” His father was an immigrant from Kenya and, therefore, his Hawaiian birth certificate must be phony. He must have been born in Kenya say O’Reilly, Dobbs and Hannity and many whose fathers were Italian, Greek, German or Polish. Clearly no one whose father or grandfather or some ancestor was born outside the United States can’t be a real American especially if he’s not white. Clearly, if he’s not white, President Obama is out to control the minds of our children and better hide the white women while we’re at it.

Basically, the right wing of this nation is racist at its core. It built itself just as the German Nazis and Italian Fascists did on fear and bigotry. We have simply substituted Afro-Americans and “non Aryan” immigrants for Jews. The fascist America Firsters of the late 1930s dug in while Liberalism fought World War II only to reemerge as the Red Scare McCarthyites of the post-war period. And at the very moment when their heroes, Tailgunner Joe and his vile factotum, Roy Cohn, discredited themselves and their movement, Brown v. the Board of Education came along to reinvigorate the American neo-fascist movement with an influx of racist rednecks. It took a while. After all Dwight Eisenhower sent troops into Little Rock, Arkansas. He was a Republican and a war hero which is why the billboards in the South all demanded, “Impeach Earl Warren,” and never called for Eisenhower’s impeachment. But the cultural shifts of the 1960s that disoriented those who, having lived through World War II, wanted no more upheavals and a nation conditioned to see any cause in which America fought as just, regardless of all contrary evidence, gave the neo-fascists their opening to join sweaty palms with their white racist brethren in Nixon’s “Southern Strategy.”

This marriage of bigotry and fear has a pantheon of Boogie Men. They raise up the straw men of “socialism”, “communism”, “homosexuality”, “indoctrination” even as the Log Cabin Republicans commune with their peers at the country club and indoctrinate anyone within earshot about a “free market” that demands billions of taxpayer dollars to salvage it from their mismanagement. We have had tastes of this vile bigotry before. It has been test marketed with the accusations of homosexuality by Teletubby Tinky Wink and Sponge Bob Squarepants. But now the veneer applied to this racism is getting thinner and more transparent.

Glenn Beck and the rest of the neo-fascists will certainly trot out black and brown friends to claim that they are not racist. Unfortunately, those black and brown right wingers prove nothing of the kind. They merely prove that there are minorities too who are as venal, amoral and self-promoting as there are whites.

We have reached the point at which we need to start calling this racism and bigotry for what it is. We need to drag it out in the light where the good people easily confused by rhetoric can look at this deformed, odious, disgusting thing and shun it before it churns their stomachs further.

Impeach Earl Warren

Most people won't remember the billboards that went up in the states of the old Confederacy and some plains states as well after Brown v. Board of Education overturned Plessy v. Furguson and outlawed segregation in America. Those billboards exhorted people to get behind a movement to impeach the new U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice, the former Republican governor of California, Earl Warren. Warren had led the court to a unanimous decision that when our Constitution proclaimed equal rights to all men, it meant it regardless of minor distinctions like skin color, ethnicity, and the like. But that upset a lot of people, rich and poor, who thought that equality was fine for those who were most like themselves and inappropriate for those they preferred to hate.

A decade after the Brown v. Board of Education decision one of the things at stake in the 1964 presidential election was implementation of that decision. Senators like James O. Eastland, John Stennis, Richard Russell and Strom Thurmond couldn't hold back the 1964 Voting Rights Act but they could nullify it if right-wing fanatics took the White House. They didn't get their wish then.

When they did finally elect a neo-fascist in 1968 the majority of Americans' popular perception was that all men and women were indeed created equal. Richard Nixon rode into the White House on the disarray of the Democrats following Robert Kennedy's murder and an effective campaign to blame peaceful protesters in Chicago for the police riot that victimized them. But Nixon also rode into office on his "Southern Strategy". That strategy involved pandering to the racists, segregationists, states-rights proponents, Klansmen and the like who'd been loyal Democrats since 1865. Suddenly the scum of American politics were following Strom Thurmond into the Republican Party that had been anathema to them since Abraham Lincoln's first campaign.

Truth to tell, the populist Democrats from the South in the 1920s and 1930s such as Hugo Black, Claude Pepper, Sam Rayburn and others were less concerned about race than they were about economic standing. That concern allowed them to come to an uneasy accommodation with Northern Democrats, whose more liberal views on race were out of sync with that of their Southern constituents, focused on moving America out of the Great Depression. The understanding that the chains that weighted people down had more to do with class than color opened those populist leaders to change. The casually Democratic and casually bigoted voter did not share that openness and were ripe for picking by Republicans cynically eager to heave Lincoln overboard for racist votes.

But Nixon couldn't manage to shove onto the Supreme Court the candidates of his racist backers, the Klan tainted Clement F. Haynesworth and G. Harold Carswell. He did get the Arizona racist, William Rhenquist, onto the court but Southern racists simply couldn't pass muster. The Haynesworth and Carswell fiascoes taught the Republicans that they needed to reframe their arguments and concentrate on subtlety.

They propagandized their position as opposition to "activist judges" and a focus on "the original intent of the framers of the Constitution". In fact, those catch phrases have always been an Orwellian smoke screen for promoting right-wing extremists who would take us back, not just to the Vinson Court of 1952 but to the Taney Court of 1852. Right-wing fanatics like Robert Bork, Antonin Scalia and Scalia's puppet, Clarence Thomas, have no more respect for or knowledge of the "original intent" that they trumpet than they have for the rights of individuals against corporations. They are exactly what they profess to oppose: activist judges, though they are themselves activists for neo-fascism.

The next attempt to neutralize the Supreme Court during the Reagan Presidency narrowly avoided afflicting the nation with Robert Bork. We despised Bork for firing Archibald Cox in 1973 but the reason for keeping him off the Supreme Court was his neo-fascist extremist vision of the Constitution. No one questions the contradiction inherent in the belief that Bork, Scalia and their ilk can use some bizarre telepathy to mystically understand the "original intent of the founders" even as they insist that the Constitution is ossified and unchanging, that things not specifically delineated in it do not exist. There is no right to privacy in the U.S. Constitution because "the founders" (sounds awfully like Star Trek: Deep Space 9, doesn't it?) never heard of personal privacy and were utterly unaware of the concept when they drafted the 3rd and 4th Amendments in the Bill of Rights.

But persistence counts for something. Having packed the court at last with reliably neo-fascist jurists 53 years later, the Supreme Court that couldn't be rid of desegregation by impeaching Earl Warren has now achieved a reinstatement of Plessy v. Ferguson in the Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1 et al. It is an uneasy reversal given that Justice Anthony Kennedy who swallows a great deal of rancid neo-fascist tripe choked on some of the reasoning and consequences that his even more extremist colleagues served up.

As many of us believed when Roberts went before the Senate Judiciary Committee all but wearing a t-shirt that read, "I (heart) Stare Decisis," the new Chief Justice has no compunctions for dragging us back to the 1850s. And that return to segregation if not to slavery is cynically couched in the rhetoric of being "color blind". The irrational explanation for that catch phrase is that if race should not be an occasion for discrimination then ignoring race will magically make racism disappear. One of the requirements for being a right-winger is voluntary an selective disassociation from reality and a kind of magical thinking in which idiocy like closing ones eyes and ears makes bad things go away. The 5-member Supreme Court majority has stuck its collective fingers in its collective ears and intoned "La-la-la-la-la! I can't hear racism!" As if that would make it go away.

Segregation in America was the next best thing to having "happy darky slaves" picking in the "ole cotton fields back home." Had the South been able to completely undo the Civil War it would have done so. The violent opposition to the Civil Rights Movement that culminated in the 1960s proved that. The graves of Medgar Evers, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, Viola Liuzzo, Martin Luther King, Jr. prove that. The more recent murder of James Byrd proves that the agenda has not changed. At long last Scalia, Kennedy, Roberts, Alito and their houseboy, Thomas, can effectuate that agenda. How they are going to negate the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments remains to be seen but we can have confidence those who'd sacrifice a mother to save a deformed and non-viable fetus will find a way.