“200 Years Of Tea Party Paranoia”: From The Civil War Onward, They Always Lose
“It’s easier to fool people,” Mark Twain apparently never said, “than to convince them that they have been fooled.” You can find those words all over the Internet attributed to Twain, but I can locate no credible source.
Too bad, because it’s absolutely correct.
Twain probably did say something similar, because it sounds like an opinion the acerbic author of Huckleberry Finn would have endorsed.
Think of the hilarious episode of The Royal Nonesuch, a mangled Shakespearean farce performed by a pair of riverboat scamps called the King and the Duke for the befuddled citizens of a Mississippi river town.
“The duke said these Arkansaw lunkheads couldn’t come up to Shakespeare,” Huck says. “What they wanted was low comedy—and maybe something ruther worse than low comedy, he reckoned.”
And low comedy they got. The plan was to pocket the cash and float off downriver before the yokels got wise.
I thought of that scene watching Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Sarah Palin outside the White House recently, protesting the very government shutdown they’d fiercely championed—a confederate battle flag fluttering in the background, the emblem of disgruntled losers everywhere.
Is there no scam so transparently farcical that millions of American lunkheads won’t fall for it? Evidently not.
As you read here first, anybody with an eighth grader’s understanding of the U.S. Constitution knew that Cruz’s mad quest to destroy the Affordable Care Act could not possibly succeed. And was politically self-destructive as well, if not for Cruz, then for the Republican Party.
Of course millions of gullible voters lack that understanding. Meanwhile, the Texas Senator and his allies continue to bombard the faithful with emails promising imminent victory and soliciting cash. They’re like the most shameless televangelist faith healers.
Except now the enemies list doesn’t feature only Democrats like President Obama, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, but prominent Republicans such as Paul Ryan, John McCain, Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham.
Anyway, here’s Huck Finn’s daddy, America’s first Tea Party patriot:
“Oh, yes, this is a wonderful govment, wonderful. Why, looky here. There was a free nigger there from Ohio—a mulatter, most as white as a white man. He had the whitest shirt on you ever see, too, and the shiniest hat; and there ain’t a man in that town that’s got as fine clothes as what he had…They said he was a p’fessor in a college, and could talk all kinds of languages, and knowed everything. And that ain’t the wust. They said he could VOTE when he was at home. Well, that let me out. Thinks I, what is the country a-coming to? It was ‘lection day, and I was just about to go and vote myself if I warn’t too drunk to get there; but when they told me there was a State in this country where they’d let that nigger vote, I drawed out. I says I’ll never vote agin.”
Sound like anybody you know? The professor, I mean.
Try to put Pap’s racism aside; everybody in the novel, set in slave-owning Missouri around 1840, shares it. Among other virtues, Twain was a great reporter. Besides, liberals calling everybody racist are tedious and smug.
Equally striking are Pap Finn’s social anxiety and envy, his anti-intellectualism and paranoia, attitudes which have always run like a dark stain under the surface of American life.
The New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik finds another antecedent to today’s Tea Party in the John Birch Society:
“Reading through the literature on the hysterias of 1963, the continuity of beliefs is plain: Now, as then, there is said to be a conspiracy in the highest places to end American Constitutional rule and replace it with a Marxist dictatorship, evidenced by a plan in which your family doctor will be replaced by a federal bureaucrat—mostly for unnamable purposes, but somehow involving the gleeful killing off of the aged.
“There is also the conviction, in both eras, that only a handful of Congressmen and polemicists (then mostly in newspapers; now on TV) stand between honest Americans and the apocalypse, and that the man presiding over that plan is not just a dupe but personally depraved, an active collaborator with our enemies, a secret something or other, and any necessary means to bring about the end of his reign are justified and appropriate.”
Same as it ever was.
Then it was H.L. Hunt; today it’s the Koch Brothers.
But you know what? From the Civil War onward, they always lose. It’s powerlessness that makes people vulnerable to conspiracy theories.
And maybe I’m getting soft, because I’m actually starting to feel sorry for them—the Limbaugh and Cruz fans that send me emails calling Democrats “evil.” Not simply because they’re the pigeons in a giant con game, but because they’re so frightened, like children scared of monsters under the bed.
It must be a terribly unhappy way to live.
By: Gene Lyons, The National Memo, October 16, 2013
“Echos Of The Past”: Civil Rights Assaulted By Supreme Court
Last week was bittersweet for the cause of human dignity.
On one hand, the Supreme Court gave us reason for applause, striking down barriers against the full citizenship of gay men and lesbians. On the other, it gave us reason for dread, gutting the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The 5-4 decision was stunning and despicable, but not unexpected. The country has been moving in this direction for years.
The act is sometimes called the crown jewel of the Civil Rights Movement, but it was even more than that: the most important piece of legislation in the cause of African-American freedom since Reconstruction. And in shredding it, the court commits its gravest crime against that freedom since Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896.
That decision ratified segregation, capping a 30-year campaign by conservative Southern Democrats to overturn the results of the Civil War. Given that the Voting Rights Act now lies in tatters even as Republicans embrace Voter ID schemes to suppress the black vote, given that GOP star Rand Paul has questioned the constitutionality of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, one has to wonder if the results of the Civil Rights Movement do not face a similar fate.
Or, as Georgia Rep. John Lewis put it when I spoke with him Monday, “Can history repeat itself?”
Lewis was the great hero of the battle for voting rights, a then-25-year-old activist who had his skull broken by Alabama state troopers on Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, AL while leading a march against the use of poll taxes, literacy tests, morals tests, economic intimidation, clubs, guns and bombs to deny black people the ballot. The law he helped enact required states and counties with histories of voting discrimination to seek federal approval before changing their voting procedures. (Those that behaved themselves for a decade could be released from that requirement.)
The court struck down the formula the law uses to determine where discrimination lives (and therefore, which jurisdictions should be covered), saying the dates are too old to be reliable. As Chief Justice John Roberts noted in writing for the majority, the country has changed dramatically since that era. African-American electoral participation is at levels undreamt of in 1965.
And so it is. Because. The Act. Worked.
Using that success as an excuse to cripple it, noted Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in her dissent, is like “throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.” Indeed, had the nation not changed dramatically since 1965, would that not have been cited as evidence of the Act’s failure? Damned if you do, damned if you don’t, then: The Voting Rights Act never had a chance.
This court, said Lewis, “plunged a dagger in the heart” of the freedom movement. Nor is it lost on him that the majority which struck down this bedrock of black freedom included a black jurist: Clarence Thomas. “The brother on the court,” said Lewis, “I think he’s lost his way.”
So what now? Lewis says we must push Congress for legislation to “put teeth back in the Voting Rights Act.” Given that this Congress is notorious for its adamantine uselessness, that seems farfetched, but Lewis insists bipartisan discussion is already under way.
Fine. Let us demand that bickering, dysfunctional body do what is needed. But let us — African-Americans and all believers in freedom — also serve notice that, whatever lawmakers do, we will not stand placidly by as history repeats and citizenship is repealed, but that we will energetically resist by every moral means.
Saying that, I hear the ghostly echo of those who, once upon a generation, marched into Southern jails, singing “Ain’t gonna let nobody turn me around.” It is an ancient song of defiance that feels freshly — sadly — relevant to our times.
By: Leonard Pitts, Jr., The National Memo, July 3, 2013
“Jelly Belly Flag Wavers”: Remembering Why The Right Doesn’t Own The Stars and Stripes
Like many men who volunteered for the U.S. Army in World War II, my late father never boasted about his years in uniform. A patriot to his core, he nevertheless despised what he called the “jelly-bellied flag flappers.” But in the decade or so before he passed away, he began to sport a small, eagle-shaped pin on his lapel, known as a “ruptured duck.” Displaying the mark of his military service said that this lifelong liberal loved his country as much as any conservative — and had proved it.
Are such gestures still necessary today? For decades right-wingers have sought to establish a near-monopoly on patriotic expression, all too often with the dumb collusion of some of its adversaries on the left. But on July 4, when we celebrate the nation’s revolutionary founding, I always find myself pondering just how fraudulent and full of irony this right-wing tactic is. It is only our collective ignorance of our own history that permits conservatives to assert their exclusive franchise on the flag, the Declaration of Independence, and the whole panoply of national symbols, without provoking brutal mockery.
But we need not play their style of politics to argue that the left is equally entitled to a share of America’s heritage — indeed, in the light of history, perhaps more entitled than its rivals. So let’s begin, in honor of the holiday, at the official beginning.
Although “right” and “left” didn’t define political combat at that time on these shores, there isn’t much doubt that behind the American Revolution, and in particular the Declaration of Independence, was not only a colonial elite but a cabal of left-wing radicals as well.
What other description would have fitted such figures as Samuel Adams and Thomas Paine, who declared their contempt for monarchy and aristocracy? Their wealthier, more cautious colleagues in the Continental Congress regarded Adams as a reckless adventurer “of bankrupt fortune,” and Paine as a rabble-rousing scribbler. Popular democracy was itself a wildly radical doctrine in the colonial era, tamed in the writing of the Constitution by the new nation’s land-owning elites and slaveholders.
The right-wingers of the Revolutionary era were Tories — colonists who remained loyal to the British crown, fearful of change and, in their assistance to the occupying army of George III, the precise opposite of patriots. Only from the perspective of two centuries of ideological shift can the republican faith of the Founding Fathers be described as “conservative.”
The Civil War, too, was a struggle between left and right, between patriots and … well, in those days the Confederate leaders were deemed traitors (an epithet now usually avoided out of a decent concern for Southern sensibilities). Academics will argue forever about that war’s underlying economic and social causes, but it was the contemporary left that sought to abolish slavery and preserve the Union, while the right fought to preserve slavery and dissolve the Union. Today, reverence for the Confederacy remains the emotional province of extremely right-wing Southern politicians and intellectuals (as well as the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazi skinheads, and not a few members of the Tea Party). These disreputable figures denigrate Lincoln, our greatest president, and wax nostalgic for the plantation culture.
At the risk of offending every furious diehard who still waves the Stars and Bars, it is fair to wonder what, exactly, is patriotic about that?
Yet another inglorious episode in the annals of conservatism preceded the global war against fascism. The so-called America First movement that opposed U.S. intervention against Hitler camouflaged itself with red, white and blue but proved to be a haven for foreign agents who were plotting against the United States. While Communists and some other radicals also initially opposed American entry into World War II for their own reasons, the broad-based left of the New Deal coalition understood the Axis threat very early. Most conservatives honorably joined the war effort after Pearl Harbor, but more than a few on the right continued to promote defeatism and appeasement even then. And with all due respect to neoconservatives and other late-arriving right-wingers, the historical roots of postwar conservatism — the “Old Right” of Joe McCarthy and Pat Buchanan, the Buckleys and the Kochs — can be traced to those prewar sympathizers of the Axis.
The criminal excesses of the Cold War in Vietnam and elsewhere, so eagerly indulged by the right to this day, alienated many Americans on the left from their country for a time. Conservatives seized the opportunity presented by flag-burning protests and other adolescent displays to marginalize their ideological opponents as un-American, although only a tiny minority dove off that deep end. But how many conservatives like Dick Cheney and Rush Limbaugh beat the Vietnam draft while liberals like John Kerry, Al Gore, and Wesley Clark all served? And who truly protected this country’s best interests back then — the politicians who dispatched 50,000 young Americans to their deaths in the rice paddies, or those who dissented?
It is a lesson we didn’t learn in time to save us from another debacle in Iraq, when dissent was again vilified – and again proved more sane and patriotic than the bloodlust of the chicken-hawks.
Yet somehow our wingers always manage to wrap themselves in Old Glory, as if it belongs to them alone. But on this holiday, and every day, it assuredly does not.
By: Joe Conason, The National Memo, July 2, 2013
“Paula Deen Is Confusing People”: A Stange Epidemic Of People Pretending To Be More Stupid Than They Actually Are
American life is full of two groups of people: those who find racism abhorent, and those who find this first group of people tiresome. Paula Deen’s humilation this week seems to have brought out the members of Group 2. Why is everyone making such a big fuss, they ask?
Thankfully, The New York Times has a very amusing report from Georgia on this subject:
The line of Paula Deen fans waiting for her restaurant here to open grew throughout the hot, muggy morning Saturday. They discussed what they might select from the buffet inside The Lady and Sons, her wildly popular restaurant in the heart of Savannah. But they also talked of boycotting the Food Network, which dropped their beloved TV chef on Friday after she awkwardly apologized for having used racial slurs and for considering a plantation-themed wedding for her brother, with well-dressed black male servants.
And what are these folks really angry about?
“Everybody in the South over 60 used the N-word at some time or the other in the past,” wrote Dick Jackson, a white man from Missouri. “No more ‘Chopped’ for me, and I suspect thousands like me,” he said, referring to a popular Food Network show.
A white man? I never would have guessed. And, then, of course, the question that good white folks love to ask:
In the line Saturday, some pointed out that some African-Americans regularly used the word Ms. Deen had admitted to saying. “I don’t understand why some people can use it and others can’t,” said Rebecca Beckerwerth, 55, a North Carolina native who lives in Arizona and had made reservations at the restaurant Friday.
Really? You don’t understand it? Ms. Beckerwerth doesn’t say she wants to use it, but it sure sounds like she thinks she is making a real sacrifice by not using it.
The article descends into unintentional hilarity when the writer decides to call an expert on race:
Tyrone A. Forman, the director of the James Weldon Johnson Institute for the Study of Race and Difference at Emory University, said the use of derogatory words can mean different things to different groups. “People take a term that was a way to denigrate or hold people in bondage for the purpose of continuing their subordination and turn it around as a way to reclaim it,” he said. But that kind of subtlety is often lost in a discussion of race. “That nuance is too much for us,” Mr. Forman said. “We have a black president so we’re postracial, right? Someone uses the N-word? That’s racist. But the reality is there is a lot of gray.”
Thank God we have someone to address all this confusion, although the final sentence here left me, if anything, even more confused.
The piece ends as follows:
[One man] was particularly bothered by a commentator on a national news program who suggested that Ms. Deen should have atoned for the pain of slavery, given credit to African-Americans who helped influence some of the country food that made her famous and offered a stronger statement against racism. “She’s a cook,” Mr. Hattaway said. “She’s not a Harvard graduate.”
Hold on, aren’t we supposed to sneer at Harvard graduates? Now apparently you have to go to Harvard to understand that using racist language is wrong. The Deen case has brought with it a stange epidemic of people pretending to be a lot more stupid than they actually are. Ms. Beckerwerth and her ilk aren’t really confused. I didn’t go to Harvard, but I’d diagnose their problem as something a little worse than a lack of comprehension.
By: Isaac Chotiner, Senior Editor, The New Republic, June 24, 2013
“Well Shut My Mouth!”: Paula Deen Played With Fire And Got Burned
I take no pleasure from the trouble food “personality” Paula Deen got herself into this last week, culminating in her firing by the Food Network after she stumbled through efforts to save herself via heavily massaged apologies. I admit to have enjoyed a couple of her recipes over the years. And I usually found her over-the-top “Well Shut My Mouth” embodiment of outworn southern cultural stereotypes annoying rather than deeply offensive–just another Cracker playing the fool for the tourists, basically.
But as a Cracker myself, not that much younger than Deen, I know that she cannot plead ignorance or even innocence of the dynamite of the South’s racial history, and how perilously and inherently her own Old South shtick has skirted the thin line that separates the light side from the dark side of our heritage. The Southern Cooking Icon who occasionally forgets she needs to play error-free baseball when it comes to race is a lot like the southern white politicians who occasionally forget they represent African-Americans.
Paula Deen will do a lot to redeem herself if she refuses to let herself be used as a martyr to the cause of anti-anti-racism–a victim of “political correctness” and all that. The campaign is already developing:
Todd Starnes, who also hosts a Fox News Radio segment, wrote on his Facebook page that the “liberal, anti-South media is trying to crucify Paula Deen. They accuse her of using a derogatory word to describe a black person. Paula admitted she used the word — back in the 1980s – when a black guy walked into the bank, stuck a gun in her face and ordered her to hand over the cash. The national media failed to mention that part of the story. I’ll give credit to the Associated Press for telling the full story.”
Starnes also defended Deen via Twitter, writing: “The mainstream media hates Paula Deen […] I think it’s because most of them don’t eat meat.”
Oh good God. The multi-millionaire celebrity Paula Deen is hardly up there on the cross, and I can testify there’s at least one white southern carnivore–a biscuit eater as well–who thinks that those who work so hard to identify themselves with southern cultural stereotypes are courting controversy and disaster if they don’t watch their mouths. There are many, many southern white chefs and TV stars and book authors and even politicians who don’t set themselves up as regional paragons, yet also manage to steer clear of discrimination suits and admissions of casual, “innocent” racism. Paula Deen played with fire and got burned. She can best heal herself by refusing to be used by those who aren’t “innocent” at all.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, June 22, 2013
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 