Showing posts with label History Wars. Show all posts
Showing posts with label History Wars. Show all posts
“If I could work my will, every idiot who goes about with ‘Merry Christmas’ on his lips should be boiled with his own pudding.”
Frankly, I think Scrooge was onto something—I say we start with that little wanker, Tiny Tim.
Mercifully, though somewhat surprisingly, this year has seen relatively little outrage (with the notable exception of Sen. Jon Kyl) over the alleged “War on Christmas,” a controversy so obviously contrived and stupid that it seems more like an ironic statement on the poverty of American political discourse than anything. That controversy has become such a predictable, borderline traditional, part of December in the United States that it's actually remarkable to think it really became a national political issue only five years ago when conservative commentator (and noted Max Headroom-impersonator) John Gibson published The War on Christmas: How the Liberal Plot to Ban the Sacred Christian Holiday is Worse than You Thought.
 |
The War on the Pompadour: How the Liberal Plot to Ban the World’s Greatest Haircut is Worse than You Thought by John Gibson
|
Here is where I would normally explain Gibson's argument before pointing out its inaccuracies, inconsistencies, or fallacies, all the while making fun of him like a jerk. But I've never read The War on Christmas. And you know what? I'm never going to read The War on Christmas. Because, really, you already know what it says and I already know what it says, and what it says is stupid. So let's not bother and just move on.
What is particularly interesting and too often ignored in this moronic debate is that, if ever there was a “War on Christmas,” it was fought for ardently by the celebrated “forefathers” of the American nation itself, the Puritans, who prevented any private or public celebration of Christmas in New England well into the eighteenth-century. In short, the Puritans hated Christmas—hated, hated, hated it. For them, it was a Catholic celebration without Scriptural or historical merit (they believed Jesus to be an autumn birth) that had obviously co-opted a Roman pagan holiday. Cotton Mather derisively referred to it as a “wanton Bacchanalian feast” and Puritan authorities happily punished anyone found to be celebrating Christmas for “disturbing the peace.” Indeed, Governor William Bradford issued his first such punishment in 1620—just weeks after the first Thanksgiving.
What is particularly interesting and too often ignored in this moronic debate is that, if ever there was a “War on Christmas,” it was fought for ardently by the celebrated “forefathers” of the American nation itself, the Puritans, who prevented any private or public celebration of Christmas in New England well into the eighteenth-century. In short, the Puritans hated Christmas—hated, hated, hated it. For them, it was a Catholic celebration without Scriptural or historical merit (they believed Jesus to be an autumn birth) that had obviously co-opted a Roman pagan holiday. Cotton Mather derisively referred to it as a “wanton Bacchanalian feast” and Puritan authorities happily punished anyone found to be celebrating Christmas for “disturbing the peace.” Indeed, Governor William Bradford issued his first such punishment in 1620—just weeks after the first Thanksgiving.
 |
| Screw thy pagan holiday. |
(Bill O'Reilly wants to remind you that these secular-progressive Puritans are trying to deny the religious legacy of this country).Other colonies were not as authoritarian as the Puritans, of course, and various other more liberal denominations held some sort of Christmas celebration in southern and mid-Atlantic colonies. But these were neither obligatory nor necessarily festive affairs. Thomas Jefferson rarely, if ever, even referenced Christmas while George Washington often spent the holiday shooting animals and/or locking his servants into oppressive indentures. And because Christmas celebrations were so strongly associated with the English and Germans, by the time of the American Revolution, the entire practice fell out of favor in the United States. Well into the 1800s, then, many Protestants rarely even took notice of Christmas.
In reality, our sentimentalized “Christmas” is less a traditionally sacred Christian holiday than it is an invention of nineteenth-century authors like Charles Dickens or Washington Irving who managed to blend disparate elements of German (the tree), Dutch (the cookie), British (the card), and American (predictably, the fat guy in a stupid outfit) culture together to create the illusion of a coherent “tradition.” This particular narrative of Christmas would become popularized particularly in the second-half of the century because it fit so neatly into dominant cultural trends of the Victorian era: a newfound recognition and celebration of the notion of “childhood” and an increasing emphasis on mass consumption. The merging of these two ideals could be no better embodied than in the figure of Santa Claus:
 |
| Santa was apparently more of a creepy opium-freak when Thomas Nast created him. |
As Protestants began increasingly to observe and celebrate the new holiday, some ministers began to actively promote gift-giving on Christmas (instead of the more traditional New Year's Day) in order to make the religious holiday more esteemed than its secular counterpart. But other religious leaders have continued, even into the present, to express ambivalence, if not outright hostility, toward a holiday that would be far more accurately described by Daniel Boorstin as "the national festival of consumption" than an actual religious observance. And, by and large, that is really what Christmas is: it is a seemingly unending period between Thanksgiving and New Year's in which Americans are turned into raving lunatics, foaming at the mouth while frantically seeking out cheap consumer goods in ostentatious worship of capitalism and Bing Crosby music:
We can mock these people all we want and, to an extent, rightly so. But it may be worth reflecting on our own complicity in perpetuating an atmosphere in which this behavior makes any sort of sense. Christmas, as it is generally practiced in postwar America, works to solidify our increasingly pathological obsession with filling some hollow void with "stuff." Regardless of the financial burden that may ensue, the measure of a parent becomes their ability to procure some stupid new fad in order to fulfill a desire that was largely imposed upon their children through effective advertising. And the myth of Santa helps neatly obfuscate the production of the goods we buy: have you ever stopped to think that “Santa's elves” are often actually just children working in slave labor conditions out of our sight?
 |
| Merry Christmas. |
Debbie Downer, maybe, but it might be something worth actually stopping to think about before we supposedly celebrate "Christian charity."
But let’s return momentarily to the “War on Christmas” for a moment. The phrase “Happy Holidays” is, most likely, just as old as the greeting “Merry Christmas,” and was certainly in widespread use by the 1950s—long before the age of multiculturalism, tolerance, and “political correctness.” Even still, as American society has diversified over the past sixty years, it has become increasingly difficult and problematic to assume a Christian audience. And other December celebrations (Hannukah and Kwanzaa) have gained increased recognition as holidays no more constructed, and no less American, than Christmas.
In short, “Happy Holidays” became both a phrase of inclusion and a method of marketing to a wider audience. It is most certainly not the denial of a “sacred” Christian holiday nor of some uniform American religious tradition. After all, the “War on Christmas” is much more of a longstanding American tradition than Christmas itself. If you want to say "Merry Christmas," go for it, but the persistent attempts to make it compulsory (or to criticize those who prefer something else) are not only ahistorical, they are part of a larger agenda to recreate an imagined version of an homogeneous “Christian America” that never really existed in the first place.
In this vein, Christopher Hitchens has famously, and I think convincingly, argued that Christmas turns the country into a quasi-totalitarian state:
"As in such dismal banana republics, the dreary, sinister thing is that the official propaganda is inescapable. You go to a train station or an airport, and the image and the music of the Dear Leader are everywhere. You go to a more private place, such as a doctor's office or a store or a restaurant, and the identical tinny, maddening, repetitive ululations are to be heard. So, unless you are fortunate, are the same cheap and mass-produced images and pictures, from snowmen to cribs to reindeer. It becomes more than usually odious to switch on the radio and the television, because certain officially determined "themes" have been programmed into the system. Most objectionable of all, the fanatics force your children to observe the Dear Leader's birthday, and so (this being the especial hallmark of the totalitarian state) you cannot bar your own private door to the hectoring, incessant noise, but must have it literally brought home to you by your offspring."
I don’t want entirely to be a Grinch here (only mostly). Christmas can also be a good time of family, of celebration, of charity, and so on. But what does it say about modern society that we need to set out a particular time of the year (besieged with compulsory conspicuous consumption) in order to do all those things?
Linus can go to hell--Charlie Brown got it right, man:
During college, I took a course with a professor who asked us to come to her house, high above Portland, for Passover. While a few of us climbed the Columbia River Valley in a rickety station wagon, one of my classmates warned the rest of us that her husband was something of a “barbarian”: “you half expect him to be ripping into a mutton chop while he’s talking to you,” he explained.
The description turned out to be a bit overdramatic, but the husband was nonetheless a rather intense thickly-bearded figure who suddenly engaged us in a heated debate about the impending peril of Islamic terrorism in the United States. He convinced none of us, of course, but concluded his remarks with the ominous suggestion that once someone blew up Pioneer Square in downtown Portland, we would all change our tune.
We scoffed at the notion, of course. For anyone unfamiliar with Portland, I once ate a sandwich in Pioneer Square with someone behind me playing an acoustic version of “Sexual Healing” while two teenage girls made out in front of a sign-wearing preacher shouting about the evils of homosexuality while being shadowboxed by a homeless person who was standing immediately to the left of a goth kid playing the kazoo and doing a jig. So, really, who would bother scheming to blow up a place normally trafficked by hackysack hippies and pitbull-carrying drifters?
 |
| Like this. |
The description turned out to be a bit overdramatic, but the husband was nonetheless a rather intense thickly-bearded figure who suddenly engaged us in a heated debate about the impending peril of Islamic terrorism in the United States. He convinced none of us, of course, but concluded his remarks with the ominous suggestion that once someone blew up Pioneer Square in downtown Portland, we would all change our tune.
We scoffed at the notion, of course. For anyone unfamiliar with Portland, I once ate a sandwich in Pioneer Square with someone behind me playing an acoustic version of “Sexual Healing” while two teenage girls made out in front of a sign-wearing preacher shouting about the evils of homosexuality while being shadowboxed by a homeless person who was standing immediately to the left of a goth kid playing the kazoo and doing a jig. So, really, who would bother scheming to blow up a place normally trafficked by hackysack hippies and pitbull-carrying drifters?
Well, someone just did. But I’m not sure whether it was Mohamed Mohamud or the FBI.
Mohamud, a 19-year-old Somali-American and Oregon State student, was arrested by the FBI on Friday for allegedly plotting to set off a car bomb at the annual Christmas tree-lighting ceremony in Pioneer Square. (Which brings up the most surprising aspect of this entire story: thousands of people attend a tree lighting ceremony in the heathen Portland?). According to the feds, Mohamud had a stated desire to harm women and children and attempted to remotely detonate a car bomb during the ceremony. He was subsequently taken into custody, kicking and screaming, and shouting “Allahu akbar.” So, violent terrorist thwarted, point to the feds, right?
Well, maybe—but not so fast. Glen Greenwald suggests in Salon, I think rather convincingly, that there is cause for more skepticism regarding the facts of the case and it seems altogether possible that “the FBI -- as they've done many times in the past -- found some very young, impressionable, disaffected, hapless, aimless, inept loner; created a plot it then persuaded/manipulated/entrapped him to join, essentially turning him into a Terrorist; and then patted itself on the back once it arrested him for having thwarted a ‘Terrorist plot’ which, from start to finish, was entirely the FBI's own concoction.”
I certainly have no interest in defending Mohamud who, when given the means, legitimately thought he was detonating a bomb that would obliterate two blocks and potentially kill thousands of Portlanders. He is clearly a warped individual and an attempted terrorist. But it does seem worth asking not only whether Mohamud would have posed any kind of legitimate threat without the help and prodding of the feds, but also the extent to which the FBI simply created a terrorist out of a disaffected teenager filled only with delusional fantasies and bluster until he was given the means to carry them out by the government. The circumstances of the case, I think, bring further into question whether the methods the FBI uses are actually protecting the United States from legitimate terror threats or simply concocting them in a self-perpetuating cycle.
From news reports probing Mohamud’s background, it seems clear that he was an impressionable and disaffected—probably mentally unstable—teenager who had become emotionally troubled after the divorce of his parents. The FBI, in fact, only began to monitor Mohamud after his father, an engineer at Intel, contacted them that he was concerned about his son’s growing extremism. Mohamud was, it seems, in many ways just a troubled teen who involved himself not only in fantasies of violence, but also in sex, alcohol, and partying at Oregon State. But if his father turned to the FBI for some sort of intervention or help, he was obviously mistaken, as it would instead result in a sting operation that further encouraged his son toward terrorism.
According to the FBI affidavit, the sting began in earnest when the feds intercepted a seemingly innocuous email exchange between Mohamud and a man living in the northwest frontier province of Pakistan, which was suspicious solely because it is a region where “Islamic militants frequently reside.” The December 3 email read: "salamz bro. it's me, i made it 2 OMRA, [praise be to god] if u wanna come, theres a bro that will contact you about the proper paperwork u need 2 come... i cant go online 4 a while,, i hope 2 see u soon"
Although “OMRA” would typically refer to a pilgrimage in Mecca, the agent concluded that they must be speaking “in code to avoid detection,” and that the above email was therefore an invitation for Mohamud to join in terrorist activities. Mohamud then replied to the email that “yes that would be wonderful, just tell me what I need to do [God willing]. always wanted to see the ka’bah.” But Mohamud hit a dead end when his attempts to contact another party that would help him reach Mecca/Pakistan fell through. So he secured a fishing job in Alaska—but he was prevented from boarding his flight, because he had been placed on the “No Fly List.”
Instead, an undercover FBI agent contacted Mohamud and arranged a meeting where he was asked what he would be willing to do “for the cause.” Thus, at this point the FBI had been tipped off by a concerned father looking to help his unstable son filled with bluster and impotent rage, saw him discussing a visit to either Mecca or Pakistan, found him too incompetent or disengaged to follow through even with that, but now surrounded him with a “friend” who further pushed him toward jihad.
Given a variety of choices on how to help “the cause,” Mohamud expressed interest in becoming “operational” and, after being instructed to think of a target, suggested Pioneer Square in Portland. The undercover officer offered him praise, saying that “he loved his idea.” The agents then helped him plan the attack (saying that they “were impressed” with his work), gave him money to buy materials for bombs and to pay his rent, and actually built a bomb for him. After a test of an actual functioning bomb on November 4, they filmed a written statement in which explained his reasoning, and eventually helped him to detonate a fake bomb on the 26th. As Greenwald sums: “he had no history of violence, no apparent criminal record, had never been to a training camp in Afghanistan, Pakistan or anywhere else, and -- before meeting the FBI -- had never taken a single step toward harming anyone. Does that sound like some menacing sleeper Terrorist to you?”
Yet, the U.S. attorney in Oregon suggested that "this defendant's chilling determination is a stark reminder that there are people -- even here in Oregon -- who are determined to kill Americans,” while the FBI suggested a statement released by the Department of Justice that even though the bomb was fake “the threat was very real.” But was the threat “very real” until the FBI became involved?
The methods used by the FBI in this case closely mirror those used in numerous others, including the arrest of the “Newburgh Four” in 2009, accused of plotting to bomb New York synagogues. In that case, as Ted Conover explains in Slate, the FBI informant offered congregants of the local mosque $25,000 and other gifts if they would help him pursue jihad. The four unemployed and impoverished ex-cons, one of which was described as a paranoid schizophrenic who collected his urine in jars, were seduced in this case entirely by an offer of $250,000 and a BMW—the informant himself wrote that the men were participating “for the money. … They're not even thinking about the cause.”
Beyond legal questions of entrapment, the actual utility of invading often impoverished ethnic communities with promises of money in exchange for committing acts of terrorism seems, at best questionable. One ex-FBI agent and terrorism expert complained to Businessweek: “We’re interested in catching terrorists, not people who have mental problems and wonder what it would be like to blow up the Sears tower but they can’t get out of bed in the morning.”
In fact, the circumstances surrounding the Mohamud case immediately reminded me of the Indian-born British salesman Hemant Lakhani, who was convicted of providing material support to terrorists when he sold a stinger missile to the FBI. As Petra Bartosiewicz explained on This American Life, however, Lakhani was an “amazingly incompetent illegal arms dealer” and a “lair, shameless braggart, and a snob” who not only claimed to the FBI that he could obtain a missile, but equally improbably that he could secure a submarine and plutonium. When Lakhani proved unable to supply the FBI informant with the missile he guaranteed, the government actually provided the missile to him so that he could sell it back to the FBI. Lakhani was not so much a terrorist-in-waiting as he was an immoral liar with a pathological need to be liked who was provided by the FBI with both the means and motive to commit an act he had no philosophical commitment to.
Conover suggests this strategy is like “sending lots of little devils out into Muslim communities and getting them to sit on people's shoulders and whisper in their ears” and points out that there is no shortage of disturbed (or even seemingly normal) Americans who could be convinced to commit violent crimes given enough enticement. The government would certainly have its hands full if it conducted a sting operation of every teenage boy with violent fantasies and a willingness to act upon them if given encouragement, rewards, and means. So it is worth asking whether the government’s tactics actually do anything to prevent actual terrorism or whether it simply allows them first to create, and then to chase, ghosts—thereby inflating the perceived risk of terror.
Meanwhile, the Corvallis mosque attended by Mohamud was firebombed by an arsonist. Greenwald concludes: "So the FBI did not stop any actual Terrorist plots, but they may have helped inspire one."
Earlier this summer, I discussed how Glenn Beck repeatedly abuses and distorts both the Civil Rights Movement and the ideas of Martin Luther King to facilitate a particular conservative vision of “colorblindness,” which effectively inverts the history of American racism: progressives and racial minorities thus “oppress” middle-class whites in their legislative and cultural attempts to correct historical injustices [see Laura, "Dr."]. Beck likes to argue that he is “reclaiming” history, but this view is deeply ahistorical and his claims about King ignore a wealth of historical evidence to the contrary. His bastardization of American history is, of course, by no means limited to misapplying the “I Have a Dream” speech.
In a recent New Yorker article and on NPR’s Fresh Air, the eminent historian Sean Wilentz convincingly locates Beck’s historical interpretations squarely in the psychotic paranoia of the 1950s. Beck’s historical interpretations, and much of his worldview, hews unnervingly close to the ideas of the far-right, cold war-era John Birch Society and its founder Robert Welch—anticommunists so crazy they thought goddamn Dwight Eisenhower was a shill for global communism. In Beck’s bizzaro-world, Woodrow Wilson becomes a borderline demonic figure who “despised what America was” and helped bring totalitarian fascism to the United States. Wilentz, like Jon Stewart humorously demonstrated earlier this year, also notes Beck’s tendency to turn his own conspiratorial interpretations of otherwise innocuous iconography into irrefutable evidence of his own insane argument:
In one segment last year, he produced a drawing of fasces—which he described, anachronistically, as “the Roman symbol of Fascism”—and then a picture of an old Mercury dime, with fasces on the reverse side. “Who brought this dime in? It happened in 1916—Woodrow Wilson was the President,” he said. “We’ve been on the road to Fascism for a while.”
Perhaps most intriguingly, Wilentz also highlights the recently created “Beck University” where (for the low, low price of $6.29 per month!) subscribers can “learn real American history” from “experts” including conservative activists, business leaders, and professors of little credibility within the mainstream historical community. These first-rate scholars include noted anti-Semite and founder of the organization WallBuilders, “Professor” David Barton, whose own works have proven central to recent attempts to rewrite the “Founding Fathers” as devout Christians promoting a quasi-theocratic state.
Joined by unrenowned scholar Peter Lillback, whose organization promotes the “Judeo-Christian roots” of the United States, Beck presents a frenetic and jumbled history that subtly blends Mormon ideas about American Indians with a providential understanding of American history, all in order to argue that the central principle behind liberalism is Manifest Destiny. In the middle of jumping around like a monkey searching for “patterns,” and rambling incoherently, Beck celebrates the “good relationship” George Washington and the founders had with American Indians (Washington was dubbed “town destroyer” by the Iroquois, mind you) while highlighting the long-discredited eighteenth-century idea that Indians constituted the Lost Tribes of Israel.
In a recent New Yorker article and on NPR’s Fresh Air, the eminent historian Sean Wilentz convincingly locates Beck’s historical interpretations squarely in the psychotic paranoia of the 1950s. Beck’s historical interpretations, and much of his worldview, hews unnervingly close to the ideas of the far-right, cold war-era John Birch Society and its founder Robert Welch—anticommunists so crazy they thought goddamn Dwight Eisenhower was a shill for global communism. In Beck’s bizzaro-world, Woodrow Wilson becomes a borderline demonic figure who “despised what America was” and helped bring totalitarian fascism to the United States. Wilentz, like Jon Stewart humorously demonstrated earlier this year, also notes Beck’s tendency to turn his own conspiratorial interpretations of otherwise innocuous iconography into irrefutable evidence of his own insane argument:
In one segment last year, he produced a drawing of fasces—which he described, anachronistically, as “the Roman symbol of Fascism”—and then a picture of an old Mercury dime, with fasces on the reverse side. “Who brought this dime in? It happened in 1916—Woodrow Wilson was the President,” he said. “We’ve been on the road to Fascism for a while.”
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| Conservative Libertarian | ||||
| ||||
Perhaps most intriguingly, Wilentz also highlights the recently created “Beck University” where (for the low, low price of $6.29 per month!) subscribers can “learn real American history” from “experts” including conservative activists, business leaders, and professors of little credibility within the mainstream historical community. These first-rate scholars include noted anti-Semite and founder of the organization WallBuilders, “Professor” David Barton, whose own works have proven central to recent attempts to rewrite the “Founding Fathers” as devout Christians promoting a quasi-theocratic state.
Videos from Beck University and from his Fox News show suggest that, for as critical as Wilentz is, he may nonetheless overstate the coherence of Beck’s arguments, which actually blend Mormon theology and nineteenth-century historical traditions with the conspiratorial worldview of the Birchers. For instance, the introductory lecture on “America’s Founding Principles” entitled “Divine Providence vs. Manifest Destiny” (go ahead, try to figure out what the hell he is talking about half the time):
Joined by unrenowned scholar Peter Lillback, whose organization promotes the “Judeo-Christian roots” of the United States, Beck presents a frenetic and jumbled history that subtly blends Mormon ideas about American Indians with a providential understanding of American history, all in order to argue that the central principle behind liberalism is Manifest Destiny. In the middle of jumping around like a monkey searching for “patterns,” and rambling incoherently, Beck celebrates the “good relationship” George Washington and the founders had with American Indians (Washington was dubbed “town destroyer” by the Iroquois, mind you) while highlighting the long-discredited eighteenth-century idea that Indians constituted the Lost Tribes of Israel.
The crux of the argument, however, is that where the Founding Fathers believed in a notion of humble “divine providence,” which placed the future of the nation in the hands of God, the rise of Jacksonian Democracy (and the expansion of the federal government) promoted a secular vision of America that emphasized the will of man. And it was at this point that the founders’ “pure” vision of a perfect society (politically-, economically-, and socially-dominated by rich, white, male slaveholders) became corrupted by no less than Satan himself! Therefore, Beck actually claims that it was not until mid-nineteenth-century that white Americans began to mistreat Indians.
All of this allows him, in a completely nonsensical and demagogic way, to draw a simplistic straight line between Indian Removal and nineteenth-century Progressivism, Wilson, Nazi eugenics, FDR, LBJ, and Obama:
It’s incoherent and garbled, but it’s also a remarkable worldview that builds fabrication and simplification atop tiny morsels of truth, all in an attempt to rectify the United States’ history of violence with American nationalism: it is all liberals fault—they are the real racists.
I think the lesson is simple: a mind is a terrible thing to develop without help.
Fox News’ pre-eminent demagogue Glenn Beck has been taking flack for leading today what he billed as a “Restoring Honor” march on Washington because it coincides with the anniversary of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. Beck has recently claimed that this was a coincidence and that he has no real intent to make a link between his rally and the Civil Rights Movement. This is certainly possible and, since the event was billed as a non-political rally in support of the American military, there is no real reason to doubt him.Well, except, that Beck has repeatedly invoked King and the memory of the Civil Rights Movement in support of his own political points and, indeed, previously suggested that today’s rally was “a moment, quite honestly, that I think we reclaim the Civil Rights Movement. It’s been so distorted and so turned upside down… it’s an abomination.”
In a July article and video, Beck rhetorically asked “Who’s distorting the Civil Rights Movement?” and proceeded to demonstrate what we already knew: it was him all along! To Beck, the liberal distortion of the movement was twofold. First, liberals portray King as a critic of capitalism and, in our current political climate, that would make him a socialist radical (and Muslim? He did after all profess to be a Christian! Suspicious). As an example, Beck cites NAACP chairman Julian Bond, who notes that “we don’t remember the King who was the critic of capitalism… who talked ceaselessly about taking care of the masses and not just dealing with the people at the top of the ladder.” Beck’s second point of disgust is with the notion that King’s success, and that of moderate organizations like the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), was actually dependent on the ability of more radical elements of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements to apply intense pressure when needed.
So let’s discuss. By the end of his life, King had begun to turn his attention toward issues of economic inequality in the North and American imperialism abroad. We like to focus on the beautiful imagery and vision of the “I Have a Dream” speech, but perhaps it would be useful to dwell for a moment on a later speech that may actually be his best. Before an audience of clergy in New York City on April 4, 1967, King delivered a speech titled “Beyond Vietnam” that strongly criticized the war in Vietnam, American imperialism, and (gasp) capitalism itself:
A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our present policies. On the one hand, we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life's roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be changed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life's highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth with righteous indignation. It will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say, "This is not just." It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America and say, "This is not just." The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war, "This way of settling differences is not just." This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.
Thus, King helped organize the “Poor People’s Campaign” in late 1967, arguing that “We believe the highest patriotism demands the ending of the war and the opening of a bloodless war to final victory over racism and poverty.” The campaign requested $30 billion (in 1967 mind you) be put toward eradicating poverty and (gasp again) guaranteeing an annual income to citizens. Indeed, in one speech, King elaborated that “we are saying that something is wrong…with capitalism… There must be a better distribution of wealth and maybe America must move toward a Democratic Socialism.” It is a truly twisted irony that Beck would hold a rally that tries to “reclaim” American honor by celebrating military aggression and decrying taxes in the name of King. There seems little doubt that if King were alive today, Beck and his ilk would be decrying him as an un-American socialist who “we need to take our country back" from.
As for Beck’s second concern, that the successes of the movement was due in part to the violence and radicalism of other groups like SNCC and the Black Panthers, this is also generally accepted by historians for an obvious reason: King’s demands seemed much more reasonable when your city was on fire. King was an ardent supporter of nonviolence, of course, but he also came to recognize that “I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today, my own government.”
Historian Jacquelyn Dowd Hall famously argued that the narrow vision of the Civil Rights Movement that “color-blind conservatives” like Beck advocate is an attempt to portray colorblindness as “the movement’s singular objective, the principle for which King and the Brown decision… stood.” This allows them to overlook continued racism and persistent structural inequalities, arguing instead that the Civil Rights Movement was a complete success and “in the absence of overtly discriminatory laws… African Americans thereafter bore the onus of their own failure or success. If stark group inequalities persisted, black attitudes, behavior, and family structures were to blame.” And so for such conservatives it was now civil rights activists who made racism an issue and it is, thus, whites who were the victims of government policies.
Hall argues that “the Civil Rights Movement” of the 1950s and 1960s did not occur in a vacuum. If one moves beyond this time period in either direction, it becomes clear that it was a period of relatively moderate goals and successes. The earliest organized resistance to white racism came, in fact, from black nationalists and American communists—a fact largely forgotten because of the Cold War. Thus, we forget that it was communists who came to the defense of the Scottsboro Boys. We forget that Bayard Rustin, King’s most trusted advisor who was nearly as central to the successes of the movement as King himself, was both gay and a socialist. Long before King, it was communists who were advocating and marching for the economic and social equality of African Americans and human rights. And so too did King toward the end of his career and the civil rights demonstrators that followed him.
So while the successes of “the Civil Rights Movement” were unquestionably tremendous, and the sacrifices heroic, historians increasingly understand that they were also limited. They destroyed the most overt, legalized forms of racism—gaining equal access to public services or private accommodations (much to Rand Paul’s chagrin). But the struggle to gain economic or social equality that predated King, that he espoused, and that followed him continues.
DR. LAURA: Black guys use it all the time. Turn on HBO and listen to a black comic, and all you hear is nigger, nigger, nigger. I don’t get it. If anybody without enough melanin says it, it’s a horrible thing. But when black people say it, it’s affectionate…
CALLER: “Is it OK to say that word? Is it ever OK to say that word?”
DR. LAURA: “It depends how it's said. Black guys talking to each other seem to think it's okay.”
CALLER: “But you're not black, they're not black, my husband is white.”
DR. LAURA: “Oh, I see, so a word is restricted to race. Got it. Can't do much about that.”
CALLER: “I can't believe someone like you is on the radio spewing out the n-word, and I hope everybody heard it.”
DR. LAURA: “I didn't spew out the n-word!”
CALLER: “You said ‘nigger, nigger, nigger,’ and I hope everybody heard it.”
DR. LAURA: “Yes they did, and I'll say it again: nigger, nigger, nigger is what you hear on HBO."
-Dr. Laura Schlessinger, August 10, 2010
I made the mistake a few days ago of turning the channel to CNN only to find Dr. Laura Schlessinger discussing with Larry King her recent, repeated use of the "n-word" on the radio and her subsequent decision to end her show. She explained her decision this way:
“Well, I’m here to say that my contract is up for my radio show at the end of the year and I have made the decision not to do radio anymore. The reason is: I want to regain my First Amendment rights. I want to be able to say what’s on my mind, and in my heart, what I think is helpful and useful without somebody getting angry, some special interest group deciding this is a time to silence a voice of dissent, and attack affiliates and attack sponsors.”
Voice of dissent? How noble! Against what, exactly?
The most immediate problem with this statement, of course, is her utter failure to comprehend the First Amendment. The First Amendment does not grant you the right to say whatever you want (even if it’s in your mind and in your heart!) in a public forum without any repercussions whatsoever or prevent your show/sponsors from being boycotted by groups or individuals. Any such policy would, in fact…wait, for it… violate the First Amendment, which does prevent the government from restricting your right to free speech in a public forum. So, Dr. Laura’s hunt for her alleged “First Amendment rights” is likely to be as meaningful and fruitful as O.J.’s ongoing search for the “real killer.”
The most immediate problem with this statement, of course, is her utter failure to comprehend the First Amendment. The First Amendment does not grant you the right to say whatever you want (even if it’s in your mind and in your heart!) in a public forum without any repercussions whatsoever or prevent your show/sponsors from being boycotted by groups or individuals. Any such policy would, in fact…wait, for it… violate the First Amendment, which does prevent the government from restricting your right to free speech in a public forum. So, Dr. Laura’s hunt for her alleged “First Amendment rights” is likely to be as meaningful and fruitful as O.J.’s ongoing search for the “real killer.”
Unsurprisingly, no one demonstrates a complete lack of understanding the First Amendment more than the former Governor of Alaska and Vice Presidential Candidate (think about that for just a moment... that's enough), Sarah Palin, who chimed in with the eloquent tweet:
“Dr.Laura:don't retreat...reload! (Steps aside bc her 1st Amend.rights ceased 2exist thx 2activists trying 2silence"isn't American,not fair")
Remember, folks, it’s neither American nor fair to openly criticize racism.
More maddening, however, is Schlessinger’s refusal to understand basic American history. And so it is worth going through a brief refresher:
Modern scientists and social theorists understand race as a social construction lacking any biological basis. Historians, too, have found repeatedly that what we have come to call “race” did not, in fact, exist in the earliest days of the American colonies. Colonial Virginia, for instance, originally had both white and black unfree laborers, who often served as indentured servants. There is, in fact, a famous record of one African indentured servant fulfilling the terms of his contract, acquiring land, and owning servants of his own.
Over time, however, this labor model became problematic. Land was scarce and servants fulfilling their indenture demanded more and more of it. The end result, as Edmund Morgan demonstrated decades ago, was rebellion. The elite responded to the rebellion with be a series of slave codes that would increasingly codify slavery with blackness and visa versa. Poor whites would now identify with the ruling class precisely because they, simply by being white, were “free” as opposed to blacks who were necessarily enslaved.
Enter the Declaration of Independence: “we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” The hypocrisy of this sentiment was not lost on the founding generation. Jefferson, in particular, struggled with the inherent contradiction between authoring the mellifluous phrase and owning (and impregnating) slaves. And so it is here, ironically, in the climate of the revolution that racism comes into being. It was the need to justify bondage in a nation that proclaimed universal liberty. If African Americans were said to be inherently inferior, their inferior economic and social position could be justified. And so emerged during this time an industry of scientific and Biblical justifications for slavery and racism.
The word “nigger” served an integral part of this process. By the nineteenth-century, the word had become both entirely pejorative and pervasive. As law professor Randall Kennedy summarizes, the word would come to accompany “innumerable lynchings, beatings, acts of arson, and other racially motivated attacks upon blacks. It has also been featured in countless jokes and cartoons that both reflect and encourage the disparagement of blacks. It is the signature phrase of racial prejudice.” It was a term used not only to disparage African Americans, but to mark them as a separate and distinct from whites—indeed, from humanity itself—and therefore unworthy of freedom. The word would outlast slavery, becoming central to life not only in the Jim Crow South but, as David Roediger has shown in The Wages of Whiteness, in northern cities as well, where working-class whites needed constantly reinforce their own whiteness.
So Dr. Laura, like many white people before and after her, misses the deep historical meaning inextricably attached to a white person using the word—not because African Americans and “liberals” want to keep race alive after the Civil Rights Movement "killed it"—but because race “exists” as a result of four-hundred years of American racism that simply cannot be erased and is not dead. African Americans use the word (“on HBO” or otherwise) in an ironic way, in an attempt to re-appropriate the word and shift its meaning away from denigration and toward one of camaraderie and support. Certainly, not all African Americans support using the word in this context or think about it with this kind of intentionality, but that is where the root of this impulse lies. The real question in this whole debacle is why any white person would, knowing this history, ever want to use the word in the first place.
So Dr. Laura, like many white people before and after her, misses the deep historical meaning inextricably attached to a white person using the word—not because African Americans and “liberals” want to keep race alive after the Civil Rights Movement "killed it"—but because race “exists” as a result of four-hundred years of American racism that simply cannot be erased and is not dead. African Americans use the word (“on HBO” or otherwise) in an ironic way, in an attempt to re-appropriate the word and shift its meaning away from denigration and toward one of camaraderie and support. Certainly, not all African Americans support using the word in this context or think about it with this kind of intentionality, but that is where the root of this impulse lies. The real question in this whole debacle is why any white person would, knowing this history, ever want to use the word in the first place.
But the entire debate is a microcosm of a larger phenomenon that seems to have taken contemporary American politics by storm: why do so many white people all of a sudden feel oppressed, like they are victims of "reverse racism"? Why is Glenn Beck convinced, seemingly without any basis at all, that Barack Obama has a “deep-seated hatred for white people or white culture”? Why do off-the-cuff and out-of-context remarks by Shirley Sherrod or Sonia Sotomayor become enormous political scandals and, apparently, evidence that white people are the real victims of racial discrimination? Why is the inability to say the deeply hurtful pejoratives with long histories of violence attached to them without angering people suddenly a violation of basic rights? What the fuck is up with this guy? White people’s recent obsession with, and politicization of, their own alleged oppression is one of the most interesting, perplexing, and problematic trends in recent American history and it needs an explanation.
Posts
