The corruption “scandals” featuring Rep. Charles Rangel and former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich have a “slight” taint of hypocrisy, in my opinion. I don’t know if they are sacrificial lambs to the Democrats desire to appear “aboveboard” ethically, as if cynicism of the political process isn’t the general rule amongst the public anyways. Let’s get real for just one second. Politics these days is nothing but one big take. Lobbyists of big business and special interests have no stake in hustling lawmakers unless they get something in return, and vice-versa. They represent corporations who make campaign contributions in the expectation that they will get “favors,” and have we not been informed by the U.S. Supreme Court that corporations are “individuals?” Some of these “individuals” are billionaires who hide behind the façade of “corporation” in the hopes that their campaign contributions will pay for a “favor” that in the end puts more dough in their pockets. What is a trillion dollars in tax cuts or breaks if not a “favor” for political and monetary (in the form of campaign contributions) support? Republicans certainly like passing tax-cuts for the upper tier of economic totem pole, especially if they benefit personally. And why do you think Dick Cheney pushed to get Halliburton no-bid contracts in Iraq? So he and his political cronies could make millions. The tens of millions of dollars in “deferred payments” that Cheney pocketed could not have been “made” without his personal direction from a seat of power.
For his part, Rangel’s principle “crime” seems to be avoiding paying taxes on a vacation home in the Dominican Republican, as if this is anywhere near comparable to the billions and trillions of dollars being siphoned out the country by corporations and billionaires into off-shore banks to avoid paying taxes. The 80-year-old Rangel is also accused of soliciting donations to his Center For Public Service at CCNY. It just makes my blood boil, doesn’t yours? One episode specified by the House Ethics Committee, suggested that one “grant” of $11,000 that occurred after a “favorable vote” on a tax break is anything like the millions of dollars a said lawmaker receives in contributions before the perform some favorable action in return. Rangel’s problem is not that he benefited personally from corruption (the charges against Rangel are somewhat murky on that issue), but that his foundation was not “national” in scope; it’s OK to have the appearance of corruption if it “benefits” more than one individual—like the corporations and billionaires for who are the puppetmasters—and paymasters—of most legislators.
In regard to Blagojevich, his trial was like a comedy farce, with the prosecutors playing straight man to defense attorney Sam Adams Jr.. The fact is that the prosecution presented no evidence whatever that Blagojevich received any benefit from his blow-hard ways; in their closing statement, prosecutors admitted that Blagojevic was “too smart” a politician to explicitly ask for money or favors. Witnesses against him “assumed” that is what he wanted, but “assumptions” ought not have legal standing. This is why prosecutors claim that “intent” is sufficient to justify the millions of dollars spent on tapping Blago’s phones. His defense strategy, such as it was, was to present Blagojevich as an impoverished, insecure man who spent a lot of money on clothes and had poor people skills, but otherwise was no crook.
To be honest, Blagojevich’s real crime, it seems, is that he just isn’t very subtle. He didn’t get along with Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan, who acted more like a Republican than a Democrat. He tried to force-feed progressive programs which Madigan opposed; in this oppositional atmosphere it didn’t help that his daughter was the state’s attorney general. Blagojevic also used “salty” language that many found offensive and unprofessional (kind of like John McCain). His appeal to black voters probably rubbed some people the wrong way. The Chicago Tribune didn’t like him because it is a conservative newspaper. Illinois politicians didn’t like him because he hogged the credit for popular policy initiatives. They also didn’t like him because he gave unwanted publicity to their "insider-trading" activities. His father-in-law, Richard Mell, is on the outs with him because Blagojevich proved to be less than “grateful” for Mell's assistance in his political advancement; by “grateful” Mell means, of course, access to the “spoils.” Blagojevich obviously received in his “training” in Chicago politics from people like Mell, who had been accused in a fraud scheme involving the state teacher’s pension fund in which he was to split a “finder’s fee” with a partner of Tony Rezko—whose name seems to pop-up in every Chicago scandal. If Blagojevich had used the usual subtle language of politicians, people would be more willing to give him the “benefit of the doubt.”
Republicans in Illinois have tried to tie other Democrats with Blagojevic and a “culture of corruption” in the Democratic Party—forgetting, of course, that former Republican governor George Ryan is currently serving time in prison after being convicted of racketeering, bribery, extortion, money laundering and tax fraud—crimes in which Ryan, his daughters and associates actually did receive personal monetary benefit. Meanwhile, Carl Rove, one of the most personally corrupt political operatives the country has ever seen—destroying many good men through various sinister mechanisms—appears to be untouchable, and continues to be treated a “credible” source of “wisdom.”
Tuesday, August 3, 2010
The cost of irony
On the cover of TIME magazine there was a photograph of an Afghan woman, whose nose appeared to have been removed; the photo also appears to be retouched for maximum outrage effect, but I have no other reason to doubt its general authenticity. In conjunction with this, The New York Times ran a story about a women’s rights group in Kabul concerned about the return of the Taliban if the U.S. leaves Afghanistan “prematurely.” The Obama administration by now knows that the Taliban isn’t going to disappear any time soon, thanks to the Bush administration’s neglect of the country since its initial incursion in 2002, allowing the Taliban to regroup. It appears that the current administration is admitting that large-scale assaults on urban areas have failed in their aims, and now merely seeks to force the Taliban into negotiations by targeting individuals, and making them feel vulnerable personally.
Any return of the Taliban to de facto authority should be a concern for westernized Afghan women in urban areas where there are opportunities for political and economic advancement, although in the impoverished countryside there is much less opportunity for anyone to do much more than simply farm the sparse land. But at what price to prevent this? TIME magazine and the Times seem to suggest that rather than seeking a quick exit strategy from a war much less “winnable” than in the more urbanized Iraq, American soldiers (almost all male) should fight and die in Afghanistan for as long as it takes to insure that those women are secure from the Taliban—kind of like winning the war in Europe to prevent the Nazis from killing more than 6 million Jews and millions of other “subhumans.” It’s “OK” for soldiers to lose limbs, noses, eyes and pieces of their skull—let alone their lives—in the name of a noble cause. I am being cynical again here, but then again, American soldiers have been portrayed as murderous thugs by some of the same people for engaging in actions that have resulted in civilian deaths, and the troops cannot be blamed for noting the irony.
“Irony” is also palpable in the way most Americans view leaders of the “new left” in Latin America, particularly Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. Director Oliver Stone’s latest film, “South of the Border,” has received near unanimous pans from film critics—apparently for the crime of humanizing these leaders and not portraying them as the malevolent monsters of popular belief. Perhaps some of these critics are embarrassed by the fact the U.S. did nothing while hundreds of thousands—maybe millions—of people were murdered to maintain the “status quo” under right-wing regimes. I had to laugh when I read Karina Longworth of Village Voice Media’s mean-spirited review, right after she had declared the film “Salt” to be “unpretentious” despite the fact that the 110-pound Angelina Jolie spent the whole movie getting into 110 situations that would have killed 110 people. At least Stone has a philosophy on the issue that required some actual knowledge of the goings on “south of the border,” having directed “Salvador”—while the Reagan administration was keeping the military in El Salvador supplied with sophisticated weapons in their fight against the rebel organization FMLN, and training an “elite” paramilitary outfit that was little more than an assassination squad targeting reformers. Despite gentle prodding by the U.S., the Euro-elites in the country continue to oppose economic and social reform.
Anyways, Stone has been accused of simply allowing people like Chavez to “set the agenda” rather than asking them the “tough” questions. What they mean by “tough” questions are those which a clearly biased U.S. media would ask. The media and public apparently prefers its “tough guys” to have a right-wing flavor. Chavez and Evo Morales are no saints, but they are the face of the long-oppressed indigenous and mixed race peoples in Latin American, and their philosophies were shaped by the social, political and economic inequities perpetrated by the right-wing elites that the U.S. has always backed. The reason is simple enough: the U.S. prefers to see a country’s resources flowing north instead to the people of said country. Oppressive right-wing regimes are regarded as our “friends,” because the few people who hoard a country’s wealth like to “share” some of what they have with us because, as if it is a protection racket. And isn’t it nice have “friends” who really know how to keep those little dark-skinned people in their “place”—except, of course, when those dark-skinned people decide they don’t want to be oppressed anymore, and migrate here. Americans seem to be incapable of understanding why support of such regimes would cause an anti-American backlash when alternative regimes that represent the aspirations of the formerly oppressed come to power. But isn’t it nice to know that the U.S. really cares about the fate of the poor rich elites when their victims come to power?
The reality is that if the media supplied even a smidgeon of the truth, and the U.S. government showed the least support for the aspirations of the majority of the people in these countries, then the anti-U.S. rhetoric might decline to something akin to civilized behavior. In Venezuela, where Chavez has instituted programs to reverse the longstanding inequality, the U.S.’ primary concern is really only about the oil; for U.S. policy makers, it is better for oil profits going into the pockets of “reliable friends” rather than being used to alleviate poverty and improve the lives of the impoverished majority. One of the U.S.’ “reliable friends” of the past was Augusto Pinochet. I recall a conversation with a native of Chile named Luis—himself an unabashed Pinochet supporter—who told me that Chile’s leftist president Salvador Allende “blew himself up” after discovering the people were “against him”—this after his party had just won a plurality in the congressional elections. I laughed and asked him if he really believed this; he insisted that this was the “truth,” which led an older man in room who was not historically naïve to quip “Yeah, he shot himself with 46 machine gun rounds.” The CIA is widely believed to have played a part in Allende’s assassination.
Any return of the Taliban to de facto authority should be a concern for westernized Afghan women in urban areas where there are opportunities for political and economic advancement, although in the impoverished countryside there is much less opportunity for anyone to do much more than simply farm the sparse land. But at what price to prevent this? TIME magazine and the Times seem to suggest that rather than seeking a quick exit strategy from a war much less “winnable” than in the more urbanized Iraq, American soldiers (almost all male) should fight and die in Afghanistan for as long as it takes to insure that those women are secure from the Taliban—kind of like winning the war in Europe to prevent the Nazis from killing more than 6 million Jews and millions of other “subhumans.” It’s “OK” for soldiers to lose limbs, noses, eyes and pieces of their skull—let alone their lives—in the name of a noble cause. I am being cynical again here, but then again, American soldiers have been portrayed as murderous thugs by some of the same people for engaging in actions that have resulted in civilian deaths, and the troops cannot be blamed for noting the irony.
“Irony” is also palpable in the way most Americans view leaders of the “new left” in Latin America, particularly Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. Director Oliver Stone’s latest film, “South of the Border,” has received near unanimous pans from film critics—apparently for the crime of humanizing these leaders and not portraying them as the malevolent monsters of popular belief. Perhaps some of these critics are embarrassed by the fact the U.S. did nothing while hundreds of thousands—maybe millions—of people were murdered to maintain the “status quo” under right-wing regimes. I had to laugh when I read Karina Longworth of Village Voice Media’s mean-spirited review, right after she had declared the film “Salt” to be “unpretentious” despite the fact that the 110-pound Angelina Jolie spent the whole movie getting into 110 situations that would have killed 110 people. At least Stone has a philosophy on the issue that required some actual knowledge of the goings on “south of the border,” having directed “Salvador”—while the Reagan administration was keeping the military in El Salvador supplied with sophisticated weapons in their fight against the rebel organization FMLN, and training an “elite” paramilitary outfit that was little more than an assassination squad targeting reformers. Despite gentle prodding by the U.S., the Euro-elites in the country continue to oppose economic and social reform.
Anyways, Stone has been accused of simply allowing people like Chavez to “set the agenda” rather than asking them the “tough” questions. What they mean by “tough” questions are those which a clearly biased U.S. media would ask. The media and public apparently prefers its “tough guys” to have a right-wing flavor. Chavez and Evo Morales are no saints, but they are the face of the long-oppressed indigenous and mixed race peoples in Latin American, and their philosophies were shaped by the social, political and economic inequities perpetrated by the right-wing elites that the U.S. has always backed. The reason is simple enough: the U.S. prefers to see a country’s resources flowing north instead to the people of said country. Oppressive right-wing regimes are regarded as our “friends,” because the few people who hoard a country’s wealth like to “share” some of what they have with us because, as if it is a protection racket. And isn’t it nice have “friends” who really know how to keep those little dark-skinned people in their “place”—except, of course, when those dark-skinned people decide they don’t want to be oppressed anymore, and migrate here. Americans seem to be incapable of understanding why support of such regimes would cause an anti-American backlash when alternative regimes that represent the aspirations of the formerly oppressed come to power. But isn’t it nice to know that the U.S. really cares about the fate of the poor rich elites when their victims come to power?
The reality is that if the media supplied even a smidgeon of the truth, and the U.S. government showed the least support for the aspirations of the majority of the people in these countries, then the anti-U.S. rhetoric might decline to something akin to civilized behavior. In Venezuela, where Chavez has instituted programs to reverse the longstanding inequality, the U.S.’ primary concern is really only about the oil; for U.S. policy makers, it is better for oil profits going into the pockets of “reliable friends” rather than being used to alleviate poverty and improve the lives of the impoverished majority. One of the U.S.’ “reliable friends” of the past was Augusto Pinochet. I recall a conversation with a native of Chile named Luis—himself an unabashed Pinochet supporter—who told me that Chile’s leftist president Salvador Allende “blew himself up” after discovering the people were “against him”—this after his party had just won a plurality in the congressional elections. I laughed and asked him if he really believed this; he insisted that this was the “truth,” which led an older man in room who was not historically naïve to quip “Yeah, he shot himself with 46 machine gun rounds.” The CIA is widely believed to have played a part in Allende’s assassination.
Wednesday, July 28, 2010
An ecology lesson
Along the path I take to work I observed a strange occurrence over the past several weeks. I first detected clusters of tiny yellow and black striped caterpillars on a few ugly looking weeds, and from there the caterpillars proceeded to grow rapidly, literally stripping the weeds bare, including their flowers and branches. After three weeks the weeds were nothing more than sticks, and most of the caterpillars had disappeared too. I suppose a casual observer would perceive that the mother moth had left her little ones in a precarious position, having been placed in a weed patch with few ready comestibles. Or perhaps the weed these caterpillars fed on was an extremely rare species, and the caterpillars themselves were also of a rare breed of butterfly or moth, and what was being witnessed was another example of the fragility of life on this planet.
And I was, in a fashion. What I was in fact observing was deliberate pest control. The weed in question is the tansy ragwort, an import from Europe. The weed is poisonous, and can be deadly to livestock that eats it when mixed in with other silage. Milk taken from cows that eat the weed can be toxic. The weed is difficult to control long-term, because its seeds can lay dormant for a decade or more. The state of Washington has declared war on the weed, and its weapon is the ragwort’s natural enemy, imported from abroad. Like the Monarch butterfly caterpillar which feeds on the poisonous Milkweed plant, the Cinnabar moth caterpillars have exclusive claim on the ragwort. And they perform their mission admirably well; no ragwort in the vicinity is safe. However, as I observed, few if any of the caterpillars survive to pupate. They are voracious eaters, and when they have stripped the ragwort bare, they proceed to eat each other, and if the few that are left don’t have any cousins to eat before they have completed the larvae cycle, they starve to death.
That is our ecology lesson for the day. Now only if the Democrats could learn how to strip down and expose those Republican weeds down to the barren, lifeless twigs that they are--without, of course, eating each other in the process.
And I was, in a fashion. What I was in fact observing was deliberate pest control. The weed in question is the tansy ragwort, an import from Europe. The weed is poisonous, and can be deadly to livestock that eats it when mixed in with other silage. Milk taken from cows that eat the weed can be toxic. The weed is difficult to control long-term, because its seeds can lay dormant for a decade or more. The state of Washington has declared war on the weed, and its weapon is the ragwort’s natural enemy, imported from abroad. Like the Monarch butterfly caterpillar which feeds on the poisonous Milkweed plant, the Cinnabar moth caterpillars have exclusive claim on the ragwort. And they perform their mission admirably well; no ragwort in the vicinity is safe. However, as I observed, few if any of the caterpillars survive to pupate. They are voracious eaters, and when they have stripped the ragwort bare, they proceed to eat each other, and if the few that are left don’t have any cousins to eat before they have completed the larvae cycle, they starve to death.
That is our ecology lesson for the day. Now only if the Democrats could learn how to strip down and expose those Republican weeds down to the barren, lifeless twigs that they are--without, of course, eating each other in the process.
These guys don't know what "FAIR" is
As a very few people may know, Arizona’s immigration law was crafted by an oufit called the Federation For American Immigration, and put into legalese by its chief counsel, "new-wave" nativist Kris Kobach. It’s acronym—FAIR—is anything but accurate, but that hasn’t stopped Congress or the mainstream media to treat the organization with undeserved deference. There seems to be no recognition that FAIR speaks for a large segment of the population that is not so much motivated by the concept of illegal immigration—after all, they say nothing at all about European and Asian illegals, who constitute about at least 2 million of the total—but a fear of and contempt for “Mexicans.” It also speaks to the failure to understand that unlike so-called “black racism” that the right-wing media continually harps upon whenever they perceive some anecdotal evidence of “favoritism” toward blacks, white racism actually is as it is defined in the Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary: “a belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race.”
Take some of the commentary of FAIR’s leaders, as compiled by the Southern Poverty Law Center. We find that the anti-immigrant fervor was nothing new, at least in 1986. John Tanton, for example, both justified the theft of land from Native Americans and expressed the paranoia of whites becoming a minority through dark-skinned immigration with the following statement:
"Gobernar es poblar translates 'to govern is to populate'… In this society where the majority rules, does this hold? Will the present majority peaceably hand over its political power to a group that is simply more fertile?"
In another quote, Tanton expresses the fear that an uneducated non-white majority in a country where whites have all the good jobs would turn the U.S. into an apartheid state, like South African (in 1986 South Africa was still governed by Apartheid):
"Is apartheid in Southern California's future? The demographic picture in South Africa now is startlingly similar to what we'll see in California in 2030. In Southern Africa, a White minority owns the property, has the best jobs and education, has the political power, and speaks one language. A non-White majority has poor education, jobs and income, owns little property, is on its way to political power and speaks a different language."
Tanton, of course, never took into consideration the impact that deliberate discrimination against minorities and the opposition to affirmative action programs that opened-up avenues to higher education had on creating an “apartheid” state. It is clear that he supported white “privilege,” and keeping non-whites in a separate, impoverished state. The fear of the “Latinization” of the country is expressed in the next quote, which reveals Tanton’s ignorance of affairs of south of the border:
"Will Latin American migrants bring with them the tradition of the mordida [bribe], the lack of involvement in public affairs, etc.? What in fact are the characteristics of Latin American culture, versus that of the United States?"
The fact that current Latin American "culture" is European in nature generally escapes most people here. It is also a fact that much of Latin America has had a tumultuous history, and frequently subject to revolutions and revolts against the mostly right-wing status quo, which testifies to the fact that people there are not indifferent to the conditions in which the live, or the politics that drive it. If Tanton had considered that, he thoughts might have gone in a different direction, such as what might be his fate if the oppressed minorities in this country rose-up against the oppressors he represented.
Another FAIR leader at the time, Roger Conner, opposed Mexican immigration because he labeled them as inferior beings:
"The new immigration will not work the same as the old. For some reason, Mexican immigrants are not succeeding as well as other groups."
The problem with this idea is that nativists said this about the Irish in the 1850s, and justified it in the 1920s when establishing immigration quotas for Italians and Eastern Europeans. We have seen that most everywhere in the country “Mexicans” are becoming entrepreneurs at a faster rate than any other group, according to one recent story. Yet we have also seen that where there is a modest population of “Mexicans” they are simple not welcome; there are many people who are so infused with prejudice and hate that they don’t want to even see them succeed or “work the same as the old.”
In 1997, another FAIR “leader,” Dan Stein, wondered:
"Should we be subsidizing people with low IQs to have as many children as possible, and not subsidizing those with high ones?"
At first blush, this is the kind of thing that the Nazis justified in their eugenics theories, but Stein is also painting a broad brush over a whole group of people simply because he believes this to be true, not because he actually has facts to back-up this statement. Just because some people have better rote memories doesn’t necessarily mean they are smarter; it just seems that way. If white people, as Tanton stated, have all the good jobs and all the education, then why is the country in the horrendous economic state it is in now? Would they not, by his reasoning, be ultimately responsible for that state? Where is all this technology that is supposed to save them—unless they mean to “solve” problems here like they “solved” them in Iraq and Afghanistan? In any case, I’ll have the Seventies funk group War have the last word on this subject: “Sometimes I don’t speak right, but I know what I’m talking about.”
"Immigrants don't come all church-loving, freedom-loving, God-fearing. Some of them firmly believe in socialist or redistributist [sic] ideas. Many of them hate America, hate everything the United States stands for. Talk to some of these Central Americans."
Stein again. Note that he says only “some” Latin American immigrants believe in all that socialism stuff. Perhaps if he questioned some of these Central Americans a little more closely, he might discover that it isn’t the United States they hate so much, but its support of oppressive right-wing murder regimes.
Tanton now returns to the scene with these enlightening thoughts:
"[Millions of immigrants coming to America will be] defecating and creating garbage and looking for jobs…In the bacteriology lab, we have culture plates. You put a bug in there and it starts growing and gets bigger and bigger and bigger. And it grows until it finally fills the whole plate. And it crashes and dies."
Science and stupidity reaches it natural terminus.
"American secessions have rarely been viewed with alarm [but] in the 1990s ... we are more inclined to consider them a serious threat to national unity, especially since that unity is being stretched to the breaking point by ethnic revanchiste movements fueled by Third World immigration. ... In any major city, the peace is disturbed by Latino, black, and Asian nationalist gangs, which in some cases are only the shock troops of ethnic movements seeking the racial dismemberment of the United States. In refusing to control immigration, the Federal Government is writing a script for ethnic civil war. Why?"
FAIR found the above useful quote from Thomas Fleming, a member of the hate group “League of the South.” The whole theory behind this is patently absurd and paranoid, since it is white “gangs” like this who more than anyone else want “racial dismemberment” and seek to foment an “ethnic civil war” so they can “cleanse” the country of non-whites. I remember back around 1985 when I was in the service, I flew over from Germany to attend my sister’s wedding in Smalltown, Wisconsin. I decided to take the long way, stopping by bus in New York City and Washington, DC. On the trip to my eventual destination we stopped in a Greyhound station in Chicago; since everyone in the Army was supposedly one big happy “family,” what I saw fairly shocked me: there were two large seating areas, one completely occupied by whites, the other completely occupied by blacks. I wondered, is this because they want to, or is this a “custom” from a racist past that still lingered? I should think the latter.
"I have a secret plan to destroy America. … We must first make America a bilingual-bicultural country. … I would then invent 'multiculturalism' and encourage immigrants to maintain their own culture. … Having made America a bilingual-bicultural country, having established multiculturalism, having the large foundations fund the doctrine of 'victimology,' I would next make it impossible to enforce our immigration laws…It is clear that there is a 'fifth column' movement in the United States that professes greater allegiance to a greater Mexico or a breakaway, separatist movement based on a Latino homeland, despite the efforts of Latino politicians to dismiss it as a quixotic idea of rambunctious Latino youth, largely on university campuses."
Aside from the strange fact that there are actually Latino youth on university campuses (which would certainly surprise Tanton), what we have here is once more, FAIR taking a page from Joseph Goebbels and Julius Streicher’s racial theory propaganda handbook. The suggestion that there is a monstrous conspiracy afoot is a real head-scratcher when one recalls that “Mexicans” have just been accused of being apolitical. These people just can’t get their conspiracies straight. It is also curious to note that white complaints have a sense of “victimology” all its own, which seems to trump all others. It’s always about them and their imaginary victimization, even though, as Tanton stated before, they have all the best jobs.
"Every illegal alien is a person whose true identity has never been verified and therefore an illegal alien may be a terrorist or violent felon. I will say with a great degree of confidence that had [the 9/11 terrorists] not had driver's licenses, my son and 3,000 other people would be alive today."
This is a recent quip from a former board member of FAIR named Peter Gadiel. He suggests that every illegal alien is a potential terrorist or violent felon. He doesn’t, of course, say exactly that the Mexicans are responsible for 9-11 or any future act of that nature, but to those who “get” his “point,” a possibility is as good as fact.
"I am sick and tired of all the white bashing that goes on through the use of political correctness as an indoctrinating tool."
So sayeth Joe Turner, another FAIR functionary. Frankly, I am sick and tired of the deliberate dehumanization, the lies and falsehoods, and the preying on the worst aspects of human nature that racist like this think they can get away with without censor. The truth is plain enough to see.
Take some of the commentary of FAIR’s leaders, as compiled by the Southern Poverty Law Center. We find that the anti-immigrant fervor was nothing new, at least in 1986. John Tanton, for example, both justified the theft of land from Native Americans and expressed the paranoia of whites becoming a minority through dark-skinned immigration with the following statement:
"Gobernar es poblar translates 'to govern is to populate'… In this society where the majority rules, does this hold? Will the present majority peaceably hand over its political power to a group that is simply more fertile?"
In another quote, Tanton expresses the fear that an uneducated non-white majority in a country where whites have all the good jobs would turn the U.S. into an apartheid state, like South African (in 1986 South Africa was still governed by Apartheid):
"Is apartheid in Southern California's future? The demographic picture in South Africa now is startlingly similar to what we'll see in California in 2030. In Southern Africa, a White minority owns the property, has the best jobs and education, has the political power, and speaks one language. A non-White majority has poor education, jobs and income, owns little property, is on its way to political power and speaks a different language."
Tanton, of course, never took into consideration the impact that deliberate discrimination against minorities and the opposition to affirmative action programs that opened-up avenues to higher education had on creating an “apartheid” state. It is clear that he supported white “privilege,” and keeping non-whites in a separate, impoverished state. The fear of the “Latinization” of the country is expressed in the next quote, which reveals Tanton’s ignorance of affairs of south of the border:
"Will Latin American migrants bring with them the tradition of the mordida [bribe], the lack of involvement in public affairs, etc.? What in fact are the characteristics of Latin American culture, versus that of the United States?"
The fact that current Latin American "culture" is European in nature generally escapes most people here. It is also a fact that much of Latin America has had a tumultuous history, and frequently subject to revolutions and revolts against the mostly right-wing status quo, which testifies to the fact that people there are not indifferent to the conditions in which the live, or the politics that drive it. If Tanton had considered that, he thoughts might have gone in a different direction, such as what might be his fate if the oppressed minorities in this country rose-up against the oppressors he represented.
Another FAIR leader at the time, Roger Conner, opposed Mexican immigration because he labeled them as inferior beings:
"The new immigration will not work the same as the old. For some reason, Mexican immigrants are not succeeding as well as other groups."
The problem with this idea is that nativists said this about the Irish in the 1850s, and justified it in the 1920s when establishing immigration quotas for Italians and Eastern Europeans. We have seen that most everywhere in the country “Mexicans” are becoming entrepreneurs at a faster rate than any other group, according to one recent story. Yet we have also seen that where there is a modest population of “Mexicans” they are simple not welcome; there are many people who are so infused with prejudice and hate that they don’t want to even see them succeed or “work the same as the old.”
In 1997, another FAIR “leader,” Dan Stein, wondered:
"Should we be subsidizing people with low IQs to have as many children as possible, and not subsidizing those with high ones?"
At first blush, this is the kind of thing that the Nazis justified in their eugenics theories, but Stein is also painting a broad brush over a whole group of people simply because he believes this to be true, not because he actually has facts to back-up this statement. Just because some people have better rote memories doesn’t necessarily mean they are smarter; it just seems that way. If white people, as Tanton stated, have all the good jobs and all the education, then why is the country in the horrendous economic state it is in now? Would they not, by his reasoning, be ultimately responsible for that state? Where is all this technology that is supposed to save them—unless they mean to “solve” problems here like they “solved” them in Iraq and Afghanistan? In any case, I’ll have the Seventies funk group War have the last word on this subject: “Sometimes I don’t speak right, but I know what I’m talking about.”
"Immigrants don't come all church-loving, freedom-loving, God-fearing. Some of them firmly believe in socialist or redistributist [sic] ideas. Many of them hate America, hate everything the United States stands for. Talk to some of these Central Americans."
Stein again. Note that he says only “some” Latin American immigrants believe in all that socialism stuff. Perhaps if he questioned some of these Central Americans a little more closely, he might discover that it isn’t the United States they hate so much, but its support of oppressive right-wing murder regimes.
Tanton now returns to the scene with these enlightening thoughts:
"[Millions of immigrants coming to America will be] defecating and creating garbage and looking for jobs…In the bacteriology lab, we have culture plates. You put a bug in there and it starts growing and gets bigger and bigger and bigger. And it grows until it finally fills the whole plate. And it crashes and dies."
Science and stupidity reaches it natural terminus.
"American secessions have rarely been viewed with alarm [but] in the 1990s ... we are more inclined to consider them a serious threat to national unity, especially since that unity is being stretched to the breaking point by ethnic revanchiste movements fueled by Third World immigration. ... In any major city, the peace is disturbed by Latino, black, and Asian nationalist gangs, which in some cases are only the shock troops of ethnic movements seeking the racial dismemberment of the United States. In refusing to control immigration, the Federal Government is writing a script for ethnic civil war. Why?"
FAIR found the above useful quote from Thomas Fleming, a member of the hate group “League of the South.” The whole theory behind this is patently absurd and paranoid, since it is white “gangs” like this who more than anyone else want “racial dismemberment” and seek to foment an “ethnic civil war” so they can “cleanse” the country of non-whites. I remember back around 1985 when I was in the service, I flew over from Germany to attend my sister’s wedding in Smalltown, Wisconsin. I decided to take the long way, stopping by bus in New York City and Washington, DC. On the trip to my eventual destination we stopped in a Greyhound station in Chicago; since everyone in the Army was supposedly one big happy “family,” what I saw fairly shocked me: there were two large seating areas, one completely occupied by whites, the other completely occupied by blacks. I wondered, is this because they want to, or is this a “custom” from a racist past that still lingered? I should think the latter.
"I have a secret plan to destroy America. … We must first make America a bilingual-bicultural country. … I would then invent 'multiculturalism' and encourage immigrants to maintain their own culture. … Having made America a bilingual-bicultural country, having established multiculturalism, having the large foundations fund the doctrine of 'victimology,' I would next make it impossible to enforce our immigration laws…It is clear that there is a 'fifth column' movement in the United States that professes greater allegiance to a greater Mexico or a breakaway, separatist movement based on a Latino homeland, despite the efforts of Latino politicians to dismiss it as a quixotic idea of rambunctious Latino youth, largely on university campuses."
Aside from the strange fact that there are actually Latino youth on university campuses (which would certainly surprise Tanton), what we have here is once more, FAIR taking a page from Joseph Goebbels and Julius Streicher’s racial theory propaganda handbook. The suggestion that there is a monstrous conspiracy afoot is a real head-scratcher when one recalls that “Mexicans” have just been accused of being apolitical. These people just can’t get their conspiracies straight. It is also curious to note that white complaints have a sense of “victimology” all its own, which seems to trump all others. It’s always about them and their imaginary victimization, even though, as Tanton stated before, they have all the best jobs.
"Every illegal alien is a person whose true identity has never been verified and therefore an illegal alien may be a terrorist or violent felon. I will say with a great degree of confidence that had [the 9/11 terrorists] not had driver's licenses, my son and 3,000 other people would be alive today."
This is a recent quip from a former board member of FAIR named Peter Gadiel. He suggests that every illegal alien is a potential terrorist or violent felon. He doesn’t, of course, say exactly that the Mexicans are responsible for 9-11 or any future act of that nature, but to those who “get” his “point,” a possibility is as good as fact.
"I am sick and tired of all the white bashing that goes on through the use of political correctness as an indoctrinating tool."
So sayeth Joe Turner, another FAIR functionary. Frankly, I am sick and tired of the deliberate dehumanization, the lies and falsehoods, and the preying on the worst aspects of human nature that racist like this think they can get away with without censor. The truth is plain enough to see.
The good old days
I was listening to a left-wing radio show hosted by Stephanie Miller and friends, during which for fun they asked callers to pitch-in their recollections of the worst songs they ever heard, most of which seem to come from the Seventies. Miller and company were particularly bothered by songs that celebrated having babies and heterosexual relationships, being icky and syrupy and “morally reprehensible.” I confess that the songs offered-up for sacrifice make me cringe when I hear them, because they are icky and syrupy, but not because I find them morally reprehensible. To me, a “morally reprehensible” song is one like Mary McGregor’s “Torn Between Two Lovers,” in which the singer asks the husband/lover not to leave her just because she has another regular customer on the side who she won’t give up, because there is a part of her “that only he can fill.”
At any rate, this gives me an excuse to talk about the current state of music, or so it is called. I grew-up in the Seventies, and to me there is no question that during this period pop music (within the framework of the rock era) reached its peak both eclectically and musically. I was listening to an old AT40 show from March of 1974; virtually every song I found listenable on some level. Mainstream pop shared the stage with rock, soul, R&B, folk, country, novelty, comedy, instrumental, foreign-language and even spoken–language tunes. This was a time when listeners’ minds were open to different genres, and pop radio wasn’t as fragmented and closed-off as it is today. You could always count on the top-forty radio station to actually play all the top-forty songs. In 1974, 35 songs would hit number one on the Billboard chart; there was just too much competition. 1976 was another year where memorable songs flooded the charts, before the disco over-kill.
The odd thing was that since many of the artists of the Seventies were influenced by the music of the Sixties, and those of the Eighties still had the pop conventions of the Seventies ringing in their ears, there was a certain continuity in pop music for at last three decades; I enjoy the music of Sixties and Eighties just as much as the Seventies. But something has changed; what used to be “top forty” stations now play the same ten songs over and over again, and they are usually indistinguishable from each other, particularly hip-hop/rap which has been the predominate genre for at least a decade. Whenever there is a song that adheres to traditional song structure, if it is bad its banality would be easily exposed because of thin production values, particularly if there is no orchestration to give it an emotional push. Older music critics may praise the music of the past 15 years or so because they want to keep their jobs, while younger critics praise it because they have no sense of the reason why a classic tune is classic.
The reality is undeniable: pop music industry has become shackled by minds who are closed to new or even different sounds, and many singers—particularly female—have taken to singing in the same annoyingly unnatural fashion. There was a time you could readily identify a singer if not the song; now, if you don’t know the song, you don’t know who the singer is. I blame much of this on Mariah Carey, whose chart success has convinced many singers to ape her style, ad nauseam. Carey has eclipsed Elvis Presley as the solo artist (in Carey’s case, I use the word “artist” with some trepidation) with the most number one hits, and with her next album may overtake the Beatles. Anyone with some appreciation of the history of pop music could be excused with having difficulty in approaching the idea that Carey could be compared to either Presley or the Beatles with a straight face. But one thing is clear: the dynamics that determines what “sells” or not has become restricted. Once, pop radio threw out everything that sounded good, and if it struck a chord with the audience, record companies would churn-out 45s. Back then, the pop single drove the market, and if an artist wanted to be commercially viable, he or she had to have at least one song that might be a hit on their albums. Today, the tight and tuneful song is such a rarity that music really isn’t even the point anymore. It’s all about the “artist” and if they have “street cred” in whatever stilted genres that remain. People can sit in front of an electronic device and download a song for 99 cents to their IPod that they might not even have heard and subsequently discard, songs that in the past wouldn’t even have scratched the bottom of the Hot 100. But the sales charts count those songs as “hits,” and as long as it is the image of the artist is what drives sales, it doesn’t matter what the quality of the music is. Artist are not competing with each other to make good music, just in maintaining their “credibility” with a target audience.
The music industry can blame its continuing losses in sales to its failure to support artists or radio stations who want to break-out of the current stranglehold of “songs” that regurgitate the same note over and over again (although country music today maintains some of the conventions of soft rock, whenever I hear a twangy voice, images of dogs and fire hoses enter my mind). There is also the larger picture: Perhaps it is that we live in an era of where cynicism and narcissism predominate, that people have closed their minds. There was a time when music offered an alternative vision—not how the world was, but how we wanted it to be; it expressed our hopes, idealism and aspirations, it was about peace, love and social harmony. Now it is more often about conflict, whining and vulgarity. Instead of taking to the streets in protest, too often we hear of people being gunned down by “musical” rivals. What are young people saying today through the music they listen to? I’m not sure, but it doesn’t seem to me that it’s inspiring them to do much of anything that is positive on a community, political or social justice level.
At any rate, this gives me an excuse to talk about the current state of music, or so it is called. I grew-up in the Seventies, and to me there is no question that during this period pop music (within the framework of the rock era) reached its peak both eclectically and musically. I was listening to an old AT40 show from March of 1974; virtually every song I found listenable on some level. Mainstream pop shared the stage with rock, soul, R&B, folk, country, novelty, comedy, instrumental, foreign-language and even spoken–language tunes. This was a time when listeners’ minds were open to different genres, and pop radio wasn’t as fragmented and closed-off as it is today. You could always count on the top-forty radio station to actually play all the top-forty songs. In 1974, 35 songs would hit number one on the Billboard chart; there was just too much competition. 1976 was another year where memorable songs flooded the charts, before the disco over-kill.
The odd thing was that since many of the artists of the Seventies were influenced by the music of the Sixties, and those of the Eighties still had the pop conventions of the Seventies ringing in their ears, there was a certain continuity in pop music for at last three decades; I enjoy the music of Sixties and Eighties just as much as the Seventies. But something has changed; what used to be “top forty” stations now play the same ten songs over and over again, and they are usually indistinguishable from each other, particularly hip-hop/rap which has been the predominate genre for at least a decade. Whenever there is a song that adheres to traditional song structure, if it is bad its banality would be easily exposed because of thin production values, particularly if there is no orchestration to give it an emotional push. Older music critics may praise the music of the past 15 years or so because they want to keep their jobs, while younger critics praise it because they have no sense of the reason why a classic tune is classic.
The reality is undeniable: pop music industry has become shackled by minds who are closed to new or even different sounds, and many singers—particularly female—have taken to singing in the same annoyingly unnatural fashion. There was a time you could readily identify a singer if not the song; now, if you don’t know the song, you don’t know who the singer is. I blame much of this on Mariah Carey, whose chart success has convinced many singers to ape her style, ad nauseam. Carey has eclipsed Elvis Presley as the solo artist (in Carey’s case, I use the word “artist” with some trepidation) with the most number one hits, and with her next album may overtake the Beatles. Anyone with some appreciation of the history of pop music could be excused with having difficulty in approaching the idea that Carey could be compared to either Presley or the Beatles with a straight face. But one thing is clear: the dynamics that determines what “sells” or not has become restricted. Once, pop radio threw out everything that sounded good, and if it struck a chord with the audience, record companies would churn-out 45s. Back then, the pop single drove the market, and if an artist wanted to be commercially viable, he or she had to have at least one song that might be a hit on their albums. Today, the tight and tuneful song is such a rarity that music really isn’t even the point anymore. It’s all about the “artist” and if they have “street cred” in whatever stilted genres that remain. People can sit in front of an electronic device and download a song for 99 cents to their IPod that they might not even have heard and subsequently discard, songs that in the past wouldn’t even have scratched the bottom of the Hot 100. But the sales charts count those songs as “hits,” and as long as it is the image of the artist is what drives sales, it doesn’t matter what the quality of the music is. Artist are not competing with each other to make good music, just in maintaining their “credibility” with a target audience.
The music industry can blame its continuing losses in sales to its failure to support artists or radio stations who want to break-out of the current stranglehold of “songs” that regurgitate the same note over and over again (although country music today maintains some of the conventions of soft rock, whenever I hear a twangy voice, images of dogs and fire hoses enter my mind). There is also the larger picture: Perhaps it is that we live in an era of where cynicism and narcissism predominate, that people have closed their minds. There was a time when music offered an alternative vision—not how the world was, but how we wanted it to be; it expressed our hopes, idealism and aspirations, it was about peace, love and social harmony. Now it is more often about conflict, whining and vulgarity. Instead of taking to the streets in protest, too often we hear of people being gunned down by “musical” rivals. What are young people saying today through the music they listen to? I’m not sure, but it doesn’t seem to me that it’s inspiring them to do much of anything that is positive on a community, political or social justice level.
Tuesday, July 27, 2010
Has the right no sense of decency?
In early 1954, after several years of unsuccessfully finding Communists in every corner of the State Department, Sen. Joe McCarthy turned his attention to the Department of the Army. Much like his previous efforts, when McCarthy was asked for specific names, he could only come-up with one or two names that he had actual “evidence” on. McCarthy relied on hearsay and alleged ties to organizations that had left-wing social and labor agendas. While indeed a dozen of the names on his various lists would eventually turn out to be low-level Soviet agents, he was never able to provide proof that any of the hundreds that he charged was a security risk; in fact he padded his lists by including people who had already been removed from their positions for failing “loyalty” tests, such as belonging to “subversive” organizations or refusing to name political associations. Nearly everyone accused and interrogated before his hearings were guilty of nothing more than questioning the status quo.
McCarthy ran into trouble when he tried to force the Army to court martial an Army dentist named Irving Peress, who had refused to indicate his political affiliations on a loyalty answer form, and subsequently took the Fifth when summoned before McCarthy’s committee. Instead, his commanding officer, Gen. Ralph Zwicker, gave him an honorable discharge. Zwicker, having been called before McCarthy to explain himself, ran circles around the questioning, prompting McCarthy to call into question his IQ and fitness to wear a uniform. The Army then decided to go on the offensive, forcing McCarthy’s investigatory committee to hold a hearing on his own unethical activities regarding the attempt to block an aide’s induction in the service. McCarthy attempted to sidestep the accusations by attacking a lawyer in Army counsel Joseph Welch’s Boston law office, after which Welch famously stated
“Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator. You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”
After McCarthy was determined not to have acted “unethically” by his own committee, he went on to target the likes Annie Lee Moss, an African-American clerk in the employ of the Army; she had come to McCarthy’s attention after having been subjected to several “loyalty” investigations, and was obviously viewed as an easy mark. Moss was no fool; she made McCarthy—with the “help” of his chief counsel Roy Cohn and the reporting of Edward R. Murrow on his TV show “See It Now”—look even more the unprincipled, thuggish bully. After an attempt by Cohn to insert references to “evidence” that he did not have was ordered struck, Sen. John McClellan would observe that
"You can't strike these statements made by counsel here as to evidence that we're having and withholding. You cannot strike that from the press nor from the public mind once it's planted there. That's the - that is the - evil of it. It is not sworn testimony. It is convicting people by rumor and hearsay and innuendo."
Moss did, in fact, have associations with civil and labor rights outfits—and Communist groups did see the African-American community as fertile ground for their propaganda, but for domestic political consumption, not espionage or subversion of the state. But the reality is that racial equality in the minds of racialist whites was then equated with Communism and “subversion,” as it is today in most far-right circles, and some white people plainly see the President Obama as inferior to themselves, or “uppity” because of his Harvard education.
We can see the same dynamic being played out here in the Shirley Sherrod case, with Andrew Briebart, Rush Limbaugh, Mark Williams, Ann Coulter, Glenn Beck and the rest of the Fox News gang playing the part of McCarthy, Cohn and the rest of the paranoid far-right of the time. Now as then, accusations of “subversion” by the left was used as a partisan attack; then as now, the right used code words like “Communist” and “socialist” to attack the “enemy” on the political left. Then as now there is audience for these paranoid diversions, and it can be seen most clearly through the Tea Party Movement, and the use of deliberately falsified and misleading “evidence” such as that used against Sherrod by Breitbart—and continues to be defended by the utterly shameless and contemptible Limbaugh; both are unapologetic in their racism and nauseating self-victimization (Limbaugh, by the way, owes much of his “luck” to the job-hunting by his well-connected father). Not to be outdone, Coulter ludicrously claims that there was a “conspiracy” by the left to “plant” the “evidence” on Breitbart to make him and the right look like racist fools; but the fact is that the right has never shown any interest in “facts” when it comes to planting the seeds of race hatred and paranoia in the minds of their “constituency.”
Meanwhile, Anderson Cooper on CNN claimed that the left was just as guilty of these kind of shenanigans as the right; unfortunately, he cannot come-up with anything even remotely similar. We may find the occasional tasteless satire from the left, but not the deliberately dehumanizing falsification passed-off as “fact” that the right is repeatedly involved in. Not only that, so-called “mainstream” news media like CNN almost every day allows known racial bigots, hate-mongers and paranoid fantasizers from the right to spread their poison. A year after Cooper “outed” Williams concerning the racist fantasias on his website, Williams was still a frequent “guest” on CNN; there is simply no one comparable from the left who dwells in that sewer.
By late 1954, the majority of the public were on to McCarthy’s game, and he was such an embarrassment and political liability that the Republican majority at the time that he was censured and isolated. There had been bi-partisanship on the “Red Menace” issue, but by making it a partisan issue to attack the left, McCarthy left a legacy of bitterness that the right today seems to have learned nothing from; now, it seems as if most Republicans in the U.S. Senate have a bit of Joe McCarthy in them, and not for nothing did Harry Truman call the Republicans, when they were not engaged in “the evil of it,” the “do-nothing party.” There were Soviet agents operating in the U.S. as now, but to McCarthy, everyone who didn’t adhere to his own right-wing philosophy was potentially a “Communist.” The question now is if a majority of the public today will recognize the malevolence of the right and censure it in the polling booth. That may be a long-shot, since there are no Murrows willing to expose either the radical right or the Tea Party movement that encompasses all of its excesses. It refuses to expose the radical right as the true subversive element in the country, that exists only to vent its hate. But we ought to at least have the astuteness ourselves to ask “Rush Limbaugh, have you no sense of decency?”
McCarthy ran into trouble when he tried to force the Army to court martial an Army dentist named Irving Peress, who had refused to indicate his political affiliations on a loyalty answer form, and subsequently took the Fifth when summoned before McCarthy’s committee. Instead, his commanding officer, Gen. Ralph Zwicker, gave him an honorable discharge. Zwicker, having been called before McCarthy to explain himself, ran circles around the questioning, prompting McCarthy to call into question his IQ and fitness to wear a uniform. The Army then decided to go on the offensive, forcing McCarthy’s investigatory committee to hold a hearing on his own unethical activities regarding the attempt to block an aide’s induction in the service. McCarthy attempted to sidestep the accusations by attacking a lawyer in Army counsel Joseph Welch’s Boston law office, after which Welch famously stated
“Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator. You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”
After McCarthy was determined not to have acted “unethically” by his own committee, he went on to target the likes Annie Lee Moss, an African-American clerk in the employ of the Army; she had come to McCarthy’s attention after having been subjected to several “loyalty” investigations, and was obviously viewed as an easy mark. Moss was no fool; she made McCarthy—with the “help” of his chief counsel Roy Cohn and the reporting of Edward R. Murrow on his TV show “See It Now”—look even more the unprincipled, thuggish bully. After an attempt by Cohn to insert references to “evidence” that he did not have was ordered struck, Sen. John McClellan would observe that
"You can't strike these statements made by counsel here as to evidence that we're having and withholding. You cannot strike that from the press nor from the public mind once it's planted there. That's the - that is the - evil of it. It is not sworn testimony. It is convicting people by rumor and hearsay and innuendo."
Moss did, in fact, have associations with civil and labor rights outfits—and Communist groups did see the African-American community as fertile ground for their propaganda, but for domestic political consumption, not espionage or subversion of the state. But the reality is that racial equality in the minds of racialist whites was then equated with Communism and “subversion,” as it is today in most far-right circles, and some white people plainly see the President Obama as inferior to themselves, or “uppity” because of his Harvard education.
We can see the same dynamic being played out here in the Shirley Sherrod case, with Andrew Briebart, Rush Limbaugh, Mark Williams, Ann Coulter, Glenn Beck and the rest of the Fox News gang playing the part of McCarthy, Cohn and the rest of the paranoid far-right of the time. Now as then, accusations of “subversion” by the left was used as a partisan attack; then as now, the right used code words like “Communist” and “socialist” to attack the “enemy” on the political left. Then as now there is audience for these paranoid diversions, and it can be seen most clearly through the Tea Party Movement, and the use of deliberately falsified and misleading “evidence” such as that used against Sherrod by Breitbart—and continues to be defended by the utterly shameless and contemptible Limbaugh; both are unapologetic in their racism and nauseating self-victimization (Limbaugh, by the way, owes much of his “luck” to the job-hunting by his well-connected father). Not to be outdone, Coulter ludicrously claims that there was a “conspiracy” by the left to “plant” the “evidence” on Breitbart to make him and the right look like racist fools; but the fact is that the right has never shown any interest in “facts” when it comes to planting the seeds of race hatred and paranoia in the minds of their “constituency.”
Meanwhile, Anderson Cooper on CNN claimed that the left was just as guilty of these kind of shenanigans as the right; unfortunately, he cannot come-up with anything even remotely similar. We may find the occasional tasteless satire from the left, but not the deliberately dehumanizing falsification passed-off as “fact” that the right is repeatedly involved in. Not only that, so-called “mainstream” news media like CNN almost every day allows known racial bigots, hate-mongers and paranoid fantasizers from the right to spread their poison. A year after Cooper “outed” Williams concerning the racist fantasias on his website, Williams was still a frequent “guest” on CNN; there is simply no one comparable from the left who dwells in that sewer.
By late 1954, the majority of the public were on to McCarthy’s game, and he was such an embarrassment and political liability that the Republican majority at the time that he was censured and isolated. There had been bi-partisanship on the “Red Menace” issue, but by making it a partisan issue to attack the left, McCarthy left a legacy of bitterness that the right today seems to have learned nothing from; now, it seems as if most Republicans in the U.S. Senate have a bit of Joe McCarthy in them, and not for nothing did Harry Truman call the Republicans, when they were not engaged in “the evil of it,” the “do-nothing party.” There were Soviet agents operating in the U.S. as now, but to McCarthy, everyone who didn’t adhere to his own right-wing philosophy was potentially a “Communist.” The question now is if a majority of the public today will recognize the malevolence of the right and censure it in the polling booth. That may be a long-shot, since there are no Murrows willing to expose either the radical right or the Tea Party movement that encompasses all of its excesses. It refuses to expose the radical right as the true subversive element in the country, that exists only to vent its hate. But we ought to at least have the astuteness ourselves to ask “Rush Limbaugh, have you no sense of decency?”
Wednesday, July 21, 2010
Mark Williams' Soliloquy
Am I mad? What is mad? Mad as a hatter? What is a matter, I mean a hatter, anyways? I am not mad. I am just mad. Mad, mad, mad! Don’t ask me what I mean. I haven’t thought that far ahead yet.
My mind is aflame. It is aflame with hate. I hate things, especially if they are not white, like me. I look in the mirror and I see a white face. I love that face. I want to embrace it, put lipstick on slobber all over it. If I saw a black face in that mirror, or a brown face or a yellow face, I would hate that face. I would say Mark Williams, you are a black man, a brown man or a yellow man, and I hate you. You are a racist, lazy, shiftless bum, because you do nothing but talk about your superior race, your put-upon race, and speak in simple-minded clichés that you pass-off as intelligent discourse—like socialism, and communism, and Nazism, and Muslimism, and guns, and more guns, and taxes, and taxes. Did I mention taxes? You speak in run-on sentences, shout over people, say things that make no sense. That is what I would say about myself. If I were black, or brown, or yellow.
It is said that I hate Muslims, that they worship a monkey god. Not true! I mean, not the monkey god part (I did say that). I only said that I dislike them, intensely. I did say I hate terrorists, and all terrorists are Muslims, and all Muslims are terrorists. Well, some, or all, illegal Mexicans are violent terrorists too, or so Jan Brewer told me in Arizona. So not all terrorists are Muslims, so you cannot accuse me of hating all Muslims, because I hate Mexicans, too. You can’t hate all of them the same at the same time, although I have to confess that like many people sometimes I get Muslims and Mexicans mixed up, so I just hate them both equally. See how much sense I make? It makes things a lot simpler. Anyways, me and my wife traveled to Baghdad so we could observe first-hand all them Muslim terrorists getting wiped-out, and we got a Mark Twain Award for it. Some commie-fascists say that Mark Twain would be rolling in his grave if he knew that some National Chauvinist with a thirst for dark-skinned blood was the recipient of an “honor” given in his name, but Twain was a commie-fascist too. I think that I am going to travel to Arizona to watch that guy J.T. Ready and his neo-Nazi Wild Bunch shoot a pack of Mexicans in “self-defense” on the border. And people say I’m the one who is crazy.
Yes, yes, yes. I did say that Barack Hussein Obama Jr. was an Indonesian Muslim turned welfare thug and a racist in chief. I did call him a Nazi. I did call him a Communist too, even though Nazis and Communists hate each other. They tell me that Communists think everyone is equal, and Nazis don’t. Hmm. Let me think upon this. I don’t think blacks, browns and yellows are equal to whites. Does that make me a Nazi? Think! Think! Yes, yes, I’ve got it now. It’s all under control. Just because Obama is our first half-black president, the people who are all black think they have us whites by the gonads. They think they are better than us, that Obama is thief-in-chief and going to steal from us and giving everything to them. So what if there is no evidence of that. A belief is as good as a fact, I always say. Thought you had me, huh? Communist, Shmommulist.
I don’t get it. Every time I appear on Fox News or one of these right-wing radio shows, they tell me that I am 100 percent right about whites being enslaved by black racists. Just look around you; white people got all the jobs, do all the work. Just because they make all the money too doesn’t mean they don’t feel like slaves. Feelings are as a good as a fact, I always say. But that Anderson Cooper on CNN still called me a racist (and I thought we were friends). How dare he call ME a racist when I was in the streets marching for civil rights when those sheriffs in the South were swinging nail studded baseball bats at black heads? Well, OK, that was a lie, but whose checking? My mother wouldn’t let me go down there, but I did see it on TV, and it had no effect on me whatever, except make me laugh.
I say a lot of things that people call knucklehead, but at least I am a consistent knucklehead. But there are two things you can always count on: I will defend my record on race to no one (unless, of course, you attack that record) under any circumstances and I will call out any racist, any time, without regard to who they are. It’s just that I don’t know any racists who are white; we all talk the same in the Tea Party (although we encourage those who sound sane to call into left-wing radio programs). So how can we be racist if we all have the same idea? Zounds! So I wrote a letter, a satirical letter, which I thought was both very profound and very amusing to me at the same time. Now tell me I’m mad after reading this:
Dear Mr. Lincoln:
We Colored People have taken a vote and decided that we don’t cotton to that whole emancipation thing. Freedom means having to work for real, think for ourselves, and take consequences along with the rewards. That is just far too much to ask of us Colored People and we demand that it stop!
In fact we held a big meeting and took a vote in Kansas City this week. We voted to condemn a political revival of that old abolitionist spirit called the ‘tea party movement’.
The tea party position to “end the bailouts” for example is just silly. Bailouts are just big money welfare and isn’t that what we want all Coloreds to strive for? What kind of racist would want to end big money welfare? What they need to do is start handing the bail outs directly to us coloreds! Of course, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People is the only responsible party that should be granted the right to disperse the funds.
And the ridiculous idea of “reduce the size and intrusiveness of government.” What kind of massa would ever not want to control my life? As Coloreds we must have somebody care for us otherwise we would be on our own, have to think for ourselves and make decisions!
The racist tea parties also demand that the government “stop the out of control spending.” Again, they directly target Colored People. That means we Colored People would have to compete for jobs like everybody else and that is just not right.
Perhaps the most racist point of all in the tea parties is their demand that government “stop raising our taxes.” That is outrageous! How will we Colored People ever get a wide screen TV in every room if non-coloreds get to keep what they earn? Totally racist! The tea party expects coloreds to be productive members of society?
Mr. Lincoln, you were the greatest racist ever. We had a great gig. Three squares, room and board, all our decisions made by the massa in the house. Please repeal the 13th and 14th Amendments and let us get back to where we belong.
Sincerely
Precious Ben Jealous, Tom’s Nephew National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Head Colored Person
And they are still calling me a racist? Haven’t I said it was impossible for me to be a racist? Saying so is as good as a fact, I always say.
My Tea Party group has been expelled by that so-called national Tea Party umbrella organization. They call me amoral and without conscience. What? What a bunch of cowards and hypocrites! Who put up that billboard in Iowa? The one with Obama and Hitler and Lenin? It wasn’t my doing. All the people I talk to agree with me, at least in private. Didn’t you see all those Tea Party demonstrators who heckled and spat at and shouted racial slurs at those black congressmen? It wasn’t just those Crash the Tea Party people, who didn’t even exist then. If they continue to make me mad, I just might tell some more truth. And where are you, my buddy-old-pal Sarah Palin? Didn’t you attend not one, but two of my Tea Party events—for nothing? Didn’t we have a good time talking violent nonsense? Don’t abandon me now, like you did your constituents in Alaska.
They’ve got me on TV, although I’m not having as much fun now, because they want me to explain myself. It’s hard. I try to sound reasonable instead of shouting like a funny farm escapee, which is why people think I’m mad. So I try to sound not mad, at least for now. But it is hard. My mind, as I have I said, is aflame with thoughts of black people, and brown people, and sometimes yellow people. I just can’t stop thinking about them. I am not a racist, but in every corner I see race, like rats. I can’t even think about taxes without seeing a black face. We have high taxes because we white people have to give it all to black people, and brown people, and yellow people sometimes. But how can I prove that I’m not a racist when race is all I talk about? I talk about race more than the NAACP does. Think! Think! I’ve got it! I will do a rewrite of my letter to Mr. Lincoln, and everyone will know that I’m not really a racist:
Dear Mr. Abram (sic) Lincoln
We Crackers have taken a vote and decided that we Reject that whole emancipation thing. Freedom means having to work for real instead of being a Tea Party Spokesperson, think for ourselves instead of taking our orders from Fox News, and take consequences along with the rewards, like developing melanoma in tanning beds. That is just far too much to ask of us Cracker People and we demand that it stop!
In fact we held a big meeting and took a vote in some Mexican-Free Zone in Arizona this week. We voted for a political revival of that old Enslavement spirit thing and called it the “Tea Party Express.” Only Crackers with Saltine complexion need apply.
The Tea Party position to “end the bailouts,” for example, isn’t silly because we Crackers hadn’t thought about it when George Bush was behind it, only when that half-black Muslim terrorist was around. Bailouts are just big money welfare and isn’t that what we want all Crackers to strive for? Didn’t Rush Limbaugh tell us that it was bad for the country if we didn’t allow corporate executives to make billions while 20 millions were out of work? What kind of racist would want to end big money welfare? Well, not us! What they need to do is start handing the bail outs directly to us Crackers! Of course, the National Association for the Advancement of Cracker People is the only responsible party that should be granted the right to disperse the funds. We just don’t have a plan yet on what to do with it, because we just have these slogans and one-liners that Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck let us borrow.
And then there is that ridiculous idea of “reducing the size and intrusiveness of government.” We went on about it, but then we realized that we need the government spending trillions killing those Muslims wherever they can be found; we can’t do it ourselves, it’s just too big a job. We also need that gigantic bureaucracy to spy on anyone who isn’t the color of a Saltine. We still need the government to help hunt down every last one of them Mexicans. We ought not worry ourselves, of course. What kind of massa would ever want to control our pathetic lives, anyway? We say a lot, but it’s mostly stupid shit, we admit. As Crackers we must have somebody care for our white rights, like Fox News, otherwise we would be on our own, have to think for ourselves and make decisions!
The Tea Parties also demand that the government “stop the out of control spending,” like on stimulus packages. Why? Because that means more jobs are created, and that means there are more jobs that those blacks, browns, and yellows could have, and we Crackers have to be more non-discriminatory about that and that is just not right.
The Tea Parties also demand that government “stop raising our taxes.” What’s so outrageous about that? That the Obama administration hasn’t raised anybodies taxes, and we are just blowing foul emanations from our pie holes? Blowing foul emanations from our pie holes is as good as a fact, we always say. How will we Crackers ever get to watch Glenn Beck on wide screen TV if billionaires don’t get their tax cuts? Outrageous! Totally racist! And Crackers are expected to be productive members of society without a daily dose of Glenn Beck’s puffy jowls in HD? Get real!
Mr. Lincoln, you were the greatest racist ever. We Crackers had a great gig, but you allowed all them non-Crackers think that they had the Right to keep the bread they earned with their own labor. Please repeal the 13th and 14th Amendments and let us get back to where we belong. As the Massa Race, sitting on a sofa, beer in hand, watching Glenn Beck.
Sincerely
Mark Williams, Adolf’s Nephew NAACP Head CrackerPerson
You see, I’m not a racist. I’m just mad (they're coming to take me away, hahaheehee).
My mind is aflame. It is aflame with hate. I hate things, especially if they are not white, like me. I look in the mirror and I see a white face. I love that face. I want to embrace it, put lipstick on slobber all over it. If I saw a black face in that mirror, or a brown face or a yellow face, I would hate that face. I would say Mark Williams, you are a black man, a brown man or a yellow man, and I hate you. You are a racist, lazy, shiftless bum, because you do nothing but talk about your superior race, your put-upon race, and speak in simple-minded clichés that you pass-off as intelligent discourse—like socialism, and communism, and Nazism, and Muslimism, and guns, and more guns, and taxes, and taxes. Did I mention taxes? You speak in run-on sentences, shout over people, say things that make no sense. That is what I would say about myself. If I were black, or brown, or yellow.
It is said that I hate Muslims, that they worship a monkey god. Not true! I mean, not the monkey god part (I did say that). I only said that I dislike them, intensely. I did say I hate terrorists, and all terrorists are Muslims, and all Muslims are terrorists. Well, some, or all, illegal Mexicans are violent terrorists too, or so Jan Brewer told me in Arizona. So not all terrorists are Muslims, so you cannot accuse me of hating all Muslims, because I hate Mexicans, too. You can’t hate all of them the same at the same time, although I have to confess that like many people sometimes I get Muslims and Mexicans mixed up, so I just hate them both equally. See how much sense I make? It makes things a lot simpler. Anyways, me and my wife traveled to Baghdad so we could observe first-hand all them Muslim terrorists getting wiped-out, and we got a Mark Twain Award for it. Some commie-fascists say that Mark Twain would be rolling in his grave if he knew that some National Chauvinist with a thirst for dark-skinned blood was the recipient of an “honor” given in his name, but Twain was a commie-fascist too. I think that I am going to travel to Arizona to watch that guy J.T. Ready and his neo-Nazi Wild Bunch shoot a pack of Mexicans in “self-defense” on the border. And people say I’m the one who is crazy.
Yes, yes, yes. I did say that Barack Hussein Obama Jr. was an Indonesian Muslim turned welfare thug and a racist in chief. I did call him a Nazi. I did call him a Communist too, even though Nazis and Communists hate each other. They tell me that Communists think everyone is equal, and Nazis don’t. Hmm. Let me think upon this. I don’t think blacks, browns and yellows are equal to whites. Does that make me a Nazi? Think! Think! Yes, yes, I’ve got it now. It’s all under control. Just because Obama is our first half-black president, the people who are all black think they have us whites by the gonads. They think they are better than us, that Obama is thief-in-chief and going to steal from us and giving everything to them. So what if there is no evidence of that. A belief is as good as a fact, I always say. Thought you had me, huh? Communist, Shmommulist.
I don’t get it. Every time I appear on Fox News or one of these right-wing radio shows, they tell me that I am 100 percent right about whites being enslaved by black racists. Just look around you; white people got all the jobs, do all the work. Just because they make all the money too doesn’t mean they don’t feel like slaves. Feelings are as a good as a fact, I always say. But that Anderson Cooper on CNN still called me a racist (and I thought we were friends). How dare he call ME a racist when I was in the streets marching for civil rights when those sheriffs in the South were swinging nail studded baseball bats at black heads? Well, OK, that was a lie, but whose checking? My mother wouldn’t let me go down there, but I did see it on TV, and it had no effect on me whatever, except make me laugh.
I say a lot of things that people call knucklehead, but at least I am a consistent knucklehead. But there are two things you can always count on: I will defend my record on race to no one (unless, of course, you attack that record) under any circumstances and I will call out any racist, any time, without regard to who they are. It’s just that I don’t know any racists who are white; we all talk the same in the Tea Party (although we encourage those who sound sane to call into left-wing radio programs). So how can we be racist if we all have the same idea? Zounds! So I wrote a letter, a satirical letter, which I thought was both very profound and very amusing to me at the same time. Now tell me I’m mad after reading this:
Dear Mr. Lincoln:
We Colored People have taken a vote and decided that we don’t cotton to that whole emancipation thing. Freedom means having to work for real, think for ourselves, and take consequences along with the rewards. That is just far too much to ask of us Colored People and we demand that it stop!
In fact we held a big meeting and took a vote in Kansas City this week. We voted to condemn a political revival of that old abolitionist spirit called the ‘tea party movement’.
The tea party position to “end the bailouts” for example is just silly. Bailouts are just big money welfare and isn’t that what we want all Coloreds to strive for? What kind of racist would want to end big money welfare? What they need to do is start handing the bail outs directly to us coloreds! Of course, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People is the only responsible party that should be granted the right to disperse the funds.
And the ridiculous idea of “reduce the size and intrusiveness of government.” What kind of massa would ever not want to control my life? As Coloreds we must have somebody care for us otherwise we would be on our own, have to think for ourselves and make decisions!
The racist tea parties also demand that the government “stop the out of control spending.” Again, they directly target Colored People. That means we Colored People would have to compete for jobs like everybody else and that is just not right.
Perhaps the most racist point of all in the tea parties is their demand that government “stop raising our taxes.” That is outrageous! How will we Colored People ever get a wide screen TV in every room if non-coloreds get to keep what they earn? Totally racist! The tea party expects coloreds to be productive members of society?
Mr. Lincoln, you were the greatest racist ever. We had a great gig. Three squares, room and board, all our decisions made by the massa in the house. Please repeal the 13th and 14th Amendments and let us get back to where we belong.
Sincerely
Precious Ben Jealous, Tom’s Nephew National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Head Colored Person
And they are still calling me a racist? Haven’t I said it was impossible for me to be a racist? Saying so is as good as a fact, I always say.
My Tea Party group has been expelled by that so-called national Tea Party umbrella organization. They call me amoral and without conscience. What? What a bunch of cowards and hypocrites! Who put up that billboard in Iowa? The one with Obama and Hitler and Lenin? It wasn’t my doing. All the people I talk to agree with me, at least in private. Didn’t you see all those Tea Party demonstrators who heckled and spat at and shouted racial slurs at those black congressmen? It wasn’t just those Crash the Tea Party people, who didn’t even exist then. If they continue to make me mad, I just might tell some more truth. And where are you, my buddy-old-pal Sarah Palin? Didn’t you attend not one, but two of my Tea Party events—for nothing? Didn’t we have a good time talking violent nonsense? Don’t abandon me now, like you did your constituents in Alaska.
They’ve got me on TV, although I’m not having as much fun now, because they want me to explain myself. It’s hard. I try to sound reasonable instead of shouting like a funny farm escapee, which is why people think I’m mad. So I try to sound not mad, at least for now. But it is hard. My mind, as I have I said, is aflame with thoughts of black people, and brown people, and sometimes yellow people. I just can’t stop thinking about them. I am not a racist, but in every corner I see race, like rats. I can’t even think about taxes without seeing a black face. We have high taxes because we white people have to give it all to black people, and brown people, and yellow people sometimes. But how can I prove that I’m not a racist when race is all I talk about? I talk about race more than the NAACP does. Think! Think! I’ve got it! I will do a rewrite of my letter to Mr. Lincoln, and everyone will know that I’m not really a racist:
Dear Mr. Abram (sic) Lincoln
We Crackers have taken a vote and decided that we Reject that whole emancipation thing. Freedom means having to work for real instead of being a Tea Party Spokesperson, think for ourselves instead of taking our orders from Fox News, and take consequences along with the rewards, like developing melanoma in tanning beds. That is just far too much to ask of us Cracker People and we demand that it stop!
In fact we held a big meeting and took a vote in some Mexican-Free Zone in Arizona this week. We voted for a political revival of that old Enslavement spirit thing and called it the “Tea Party Express.” Only Crackers with Saltine complexion need apply.
The Tea Party position to “end the bailouts,” for example, isn’t silly because we Crackers hadn’t thought about it when George Bush was behind it, only when that half-black Muslim terrorist was around. Bailouts are just big money welfare and isn’t that what we want all Crackers to strive for? Didn’t Rush Limbaugh tell us that it was bad for the country if we didn’t allow corporate executives to make billions while 20 millions were out of work? What kind of racist would want to end big money welfare? Well, not us! What they need to do is start handing the bail outs directly to us Crackers! Of course, the National Association for the Advancement of Cracker People is the only responsible party that should be granted the right to disperse the funds. We just don’t have a plan yet on what to do with it, because we just have these slogans and one-liners that Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck let us borrow.
And then there is that ridiculous idea of “reducing the size and intrusiveness of government.” We went on about it, but then we realized that we need the government spending trillions killing those Muslims wherever they can be found; we can’t do it ourselves, it’s just too big a job. We also need that gigantic bureaucracy to spy on anyone who isn’t the color of a Saltine. We still need the government to help hunt down every last one of them Mexicans. We ought not worry ourselves, of course. What kind of massa would ever want to control our pathetic lives, anyway? We say a lot, but it’s mostly stupid shit, we admit. As Crackers we must have somebody care for our white rights, like Fox News, otherwise we would be on our own, have to think for ourselves and make decisions!
The Tea Parties also demand that the government “stop the out of control spending,” like on stimulus packages. Why? Because that means more jobs are created, and that means there are more jobs that those blacks, browns, and yellows could have, and we Crackers have to be more non-discriminatory about that and that is just not right.
The Tea Parties also demand that government “stop raising our taxes.” What’s so outrageous about that? That the Obama administration hasn’t raised anybodies taxes, and we are just blowing foul emanations from our pie holes? Blowing foul emanations from our pie holes is as good as a fact, we always say. How will we Crackers ever get to watch Glenn Beck on wide screen TV if billionaires don’t get their tax cuts? Outrageous! Totally racist! And Crackers are expected to be productive members of society without a daily dose of Glenn Beck’s puffy jowls in HD? Get real!
Mr. Lincoln, you were the greatest racist ever. We Crackers had a great gig, but you allowed all them non-Crackers think that they had the Right to keep the bread they earned with their own labor. Please repeal the 13th and 14th Amendments and let us get back to where we belong. As the Massa Race, sitting on a sofa, beer in hand, watching Glenn Beck.
Sincerely
Mark Williams, Adolf’s Nephew NAACP Head CrackerPerson
You see, I’m not a racist. I’m just mad (they're coming to take me away, hahaheehee).
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