American Patrol

A belated Presidential Keen Grasp of the Obvious Award to lousy President turned stellar former President Jimmy Carter, for his observation to NBC's Brian Williams September 15th that "an overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Barack Obama is based on the fact that he is a black man." His statement has generated extensive argument on both ends of the political spectrum, but the only real argument one can only be one of scale. The existence of racist content, from the "Watermelon White House" mailing to the "African Lion/ Lyin' African" and depictions of Obama as a witch doctor at the Sept 12th rally in DC to Roy Blunt's monkey golf rule joke at the Values Voters summit, is undeniable and well documented. The only question is how much racist content, and the implied sanction it receives from those who tolerate it, including Republican leaders who seem to have no trouble at all speaking before crowds dotted with racist signs and symbols, or in the case of Blunt and others, making such references their own, constitutes an "overwhelming portion"?

The problem with trying to address questions of scale in American politics is that one immediately runs into questions of perspective, and a sense of perspective is something sorely lacking in most participants in the current political dialogue. Thus Carter is denounced from the right for saying that any resistance to Obama is 100% racially motivated—which, in referring to “animosity,” he obviously did not do-- and discredited for "playing the race card." Thus testimonials from the friends and family of Representative Joe Wilson describing him as not having a racist bone in his body, his support of the Confederate flag and denunciation of Strom Thurmond's illegitimate African-American daughter to the contrary. Thus President Obama and the Democratic leadership deny Carter's claim, in fear that it will be a distraction from discussions of policy.

This last group has a point and misses Carter's all at the same time. They are right in pointing out, as Bill Clinton did, that any liberal Democrat in the White House would be facing fervent and often outrageous opposition. They are right that, given the media's love of controversy and conflict and its aversion to comparatively "unsexy" policy-based reporting, any acknowledgement on the Democratic side of even the most blatantly displayed racism would result in a media frenzy that would make the one over Carter's comments seem minor by comparison. They are wrong, however, to think that we're having a thoughtful national policy discussion now. As legitimate as some of the opposition to the Obama agenda may be, the actual dialogue concerning it has largely taken place in an atmosphere of bad faith and disrespect, an undeniable portion of which can be seen as either deriving from or finding expression in open displays of bald-faced racism.

Is that portion overwhelming? To me, certainly. Should it be taken into consideration in any fair and complete analysis of contemporary political issues? To me, absolutely. America is long overdue for an open and honest discussion of racial issues. We can have one just as soon as Americans figure out how to have open and honest discussions.

More, and certainly more serious, soon—life in general and the non-stop WTF nature of current politics in particular has had me working and reworking a couple of pieces to within an inch of their lives and mine. Which makes the following seem even more important…

I was walking down Nicollet Mall between 9th and 8th late this afternoon when a young woman of maybe 20, wearing a purple shirt, a pair of headphones, and a big smile danced past me. Literally danced, unashamedly, full tilt, get down, drop-butt dancing down the mall, reversing, crossing the avenue, and then down the other side. As I stood in front of the Walgreen finishing a cigarette, a tall, hoodie-clad Asian man of about the same age, no headphones, who had been walking normally down the street before the young woman danced by started dancing himself, spinning and vogue-ing his way down the mall towards the Barnes and Noble. I went in to the drug store, picked up a small packet of peanuts, and was walking back down to 9th Street and my office when I saw an elderly man with a white beard and a straw fedora doing, if I remember my elementary school gym class folk dance lessons correctly, the cake walk.

I hope to the dark greasy depths of my all too cynical heart that what I just witnessed was the sort of spontaneous terpsichorean chain reaction it seemed, that the people in question weren’t dancing in the furtherance of Christianity or Scientology or politics or some goddamn viral marketing campaign. Since no one tried to pass me a pamphlet or carried a banner or as much as said a word to me, I’ll ignore the possibility that they were, and just continue to grin like an idiot like I have been since I first saw the woman in the purple shirt.
And on the off chance that any of you who were dancing down the mall today should manage to catch wind of this blog post, I want you to know this—you are magnificent. Dance on, y’all, and thank you.

1) Obama speech last night. Good speech. Months too late, but good speech. The public option is still seemingly doomed (or delayed-- same thing), the President is still unlikely to throw the moneychangers from the temple, and progressives, without whose support his campaign last year would have been a footnote, received a condescending special mention and today have even more reason to compare him to another character from the Gospels entirely. But good speech.

2) Representative Joe Wilson (R-SC) interrupted the speech to yell "You lie!" after the President claimed illegal immigrants would not receive services under this bill, has predictably apologized, and equally predictably, with the backing of the wing nut media, insisted that he is in fact right. He is not. See also H.R. 3200 Sec. 246. And contemplate why this person is not facing a full House censure.

3. In my hurry to publish the post on Tuesday's MPR Midmorning program, I neglected to include (or rather, explicitly hit you over the head with) my reason for objecting to it, which is this: Kerri Miller's Midmorning, and programs like it, legitimize absurd questions by examining them. That is all. Apologies to those who got it without my saying that.

4. Jaw dropping racial insensitivity is apparently not just a Northeast Minneapolis phenomenon, nor is objecting to it. "Pimps and Hos" parties are apparently a widespread enough phenomena to rate 208,000 links on Google , including how-tos, announcements, reviews, photo albums, and discussion threads on whether or not this is disrespectful to African-Americans, women, or both. It is, by the way, as recognized in recent political controversies in Elyria, Ohio and Charlotte, North Carolina. News flash, kids-- "Tee hee, look at us, we're politically incorrect" hasn't really been that hip an attitude for quite a while now.

5. Something that I failed to mention in that story was the fact that my exhortation to take all actions one might deem fit against those attending the NE Pimps and Hos Pub Crawl in blackface wasn't just a gratuitous reference. The Curmudgeon and I were at a bar in Northeast a few years back when one of these parties came through, featuring a dumb frat boy in full makeup who somehow made it out of the place, and presumably the neighborhood, in one piece.

Minnesota Public Radio's midmorning chat program, titled, with the full force of MPR originality, Midmorning, focused this morning on President Obama's speech to school children, or rather, the "controversy" that this speech has engendered among the outraged usual suspects. Host Kerri Miller, who does a brisk trade in earnest intellectual pretense regardless of topic, stated at the top of the hour that she and her guests would be discussing, among other things, if this controversy indicated a changing perception of the Presidency in the post-Obama era.

One doesn't have to be Werner Heisenberg to answer firmly in the "duh." By posing the question to a mass audience, Ms. Miller as a member of the media is herself a part of the cause of that perception change-- no media attention, no controversy, no controversy, no perception change. To the extent Ms. Miller acknowledged this causal relationship at all, however, she, like most people who have access to cameras and/or microphones jacked into a system of mass dissemination, nattered blithely on about "the media" as if it were an abstract concept that had nothing whatsoever to do with her.

And, like most people trying to take an "in depth" look at one of our myriad current "controversies," Ms. Miller and her guests-- one vaguely on the left, one quite definitely on the right, as per media standards, plus one journo each from radio and print-- spent much of their time splashing around in the shallow end. With this particular story, that's entirely understandable-- apart from the sort of media criticism Ms. Miller implicitly separates herself from, it isn't that deep a story. This "controversy" began with yahoo "infotainers" like Malkin and Limbaugh declaring that Obama's speech to schoolchildren constituted "socialist indoctrination," and continued because folks like Ms. Miller continued to devote air time to it. It isn't a serious issue, never was, and never will be, no matter how much air and ink is thrown at it.

Perhaps the best possible comment on this sort of "controversy" derives from an old bit of schoolyard wisdom-- generally, those as smelt it, dealt it, and are probably continuing to fill the air with S.B.D.s the whole time they're telling you about it.

"You poured it,you drink it
The effervescence gone
Don't say it, don't think it
That's right-- it turned out wrong..."
-- Kirk Anderson

Of all the lessons that can be learned from the Senate career of the recently departed Edward Kennedy (D-MA), the most interesting, to me, result from the ongoing process of filling his empty Senate seat. The Massachusetts legislature is now considering a change in state law to allow Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick to appoint an interim replacement to fill Kennedy's seat until a special election scheduled for January, citing Kennedy's wishes as expressed in a letter to the Governor that his seat not stand empty after his death for the 140 days minimum required by law before a special election can be held.

They could also cite their own stupidity in having changed the law back in 2004. Prior to the summer of that year, the Governor of the state appointed successors to departed Senators. That July, the Democratic controlled legislature changed the law to its current delayed special election process to prevent Republican then-Governor Mitt Romney from appointing the successor to then-Presidential candidate Senator John Kerry (D-MA), later successfully overriding Romney's veto of the measure.

The stupidity comes not from the "to prevent Republican then-Governor Mitt Romney from appointing the successor to then-Presidential candidate Senator John Kerry...”. Though the concept seems pretty laughable in hindsight, at the time so did the concept that the United States of America would actually ever legitimately elect George W. Bush-- an impression so powerful that stolen election conspiracy theories persist to this day—and no one had the slightest inkling of Kerry’s astonishing ability to fuck up a free lunch.

No, what was stupid was the inability of Massachusetts legislators—and Kennedy himself, who supported the change wholeheartedly—to grasp the concept that at some point the Governor of Massachusetts was likely to be a Democrat just like them, and that their clever thwarting of the Republican Romney would come back to bite them in the ass. Now he is. Now it has.

It is difficult to come up with a mindset under which what the Massachusetts legislature did in 2004 was anything but a petty and unprincipled political act. The Senate was in Republican majority in 2004, and was under an even bigger Republican majority in 2005—one more seat, more or less, would not have been likely to make a damn bit of difference. This makes the change in Senatorial succession rules the kind of what-the-hell pressing of partisan advantage for partisan ends, and the kind of gratuitous unwillingness to play by the rules, that I would normally expect to be perpetrated by folks with “R”s after their names. Having made the change, changing it back when it suits them is, frankly, another petty and unprincipled act, sentimental guff about “The JFK Seat” and a dying old man’s wishes aside.