Category Archives: Race

Nobody can insult BOTH blacks and whites like Robert Ford

Well, here we go again. The AP story has already been picked up by The Seattle Times and The Houston Chronicle, just for starters:

COLUMBIA, S.C. — An African-American lawmaker in South Carolina said Tuesday that stricter illegal immigration laws would hurt the state because blacks and whites don’t work as hard as Hispanics.

State Sen. Robert Ford made his remarks during a Senate committee debate over an Arizona-style immigration law, eliciting a smattering of nervous laughter in the chamber after he said “brothers” don’t work as hard as Mexicans. He continued that his “blue-eyed brothers” don’t either.

Once his ancestors were freed from slavery, he said, they didn’t want to do any more hard work, so they were replaced by Chinese and Japanese.

“We need these workers here. A lot of people aren’t going to do certain type of work in this country,” said Ford, D-Charleston. “The brothers are going to find ways to take a break. Ever since this country was built, we’ve had somebody do the work for us.”

He recalled to senators that four workers in the country illegally showed up on his lawn and finished mowing, edging and other work in 30 minutes that would take others much longer, and only wanted $10 for the job. He went on to say he recommended the workers to his neighbors, and one local lawn care businessman lost work — a story one senator remarked was hurting, not helping, his case.

Both the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the National Association for the Advancement of White People — no wait; that second one should be the GOP — are less than pleased by the remarks. The latter is even less pleased than the former.

For my part, the senator from Comic Relief provokes several thoughts:

He just really says what he thinks, doesn’t he? I think he’s bucking for the Fritz Hollings Appalling Outburts Award, but he’s trying too hard. (And he’s not nearly as funny.)
After those immigrants did all that hard work on his land for a pittance, did they break out in a stirring rendition of “Cielito Lindo,” to let the boss man know how happy they were? That’s about all that’s missing from that anecdote, to make it complete.
Illegal immigrants have a warm-enough time of it with all the enemies they have in SC politics. They really, really don’t need a friend like Robert Ford.
Of blacks and whites, he said “Everybody in America finds ways to take a break.” Maybe it’s time that Sen. Ford took a permanent break from service in our Legislature.

Robert Ford, of course, has been causing both blacks and whites to roll their eyes for years. Remember his proposal to keep the Confederate flag atop the State House, but add to it a Black Liberation Flag? Nothing like that for unifying our state — a flag for the white folks (or some of them) and one to keep the black folks happy, too. What joy. (As he put it, “They would keep their flag, we would get a flag and we would keep our mouths shut.”) Oh, and how about when he and fellow senator Glenn McConnell did their act where Robert would wear a dashiki and Glenn one of his many Confederate uniforms? Those crazy cutups.

Want diversity? Then you should have elected the white guy. Ironic, ain’t it?

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Well, I’ll probably get some heat for that headline, from irony-deprived people who get as put off by it as I did when I heard about the “Don’t blame me; I voted for the white guy” bumper stickers after the 2008 election.

But I couldn’t resist; there’s just so much ironic goofiness inherent in the complaints that Nikki “Haley’s Cabinet Appointments Lack Diversity.” As the official Democratic Party release says:

COLUMBIA– South Carolina Democrats criticized Governor Nikki Haley for turning a blind eye to diversity in the wake of her final cabinet appointment. Haley, who this morning appointed Duane Parrish to lead South Carolina’s Department of Parks, Recreation, and Tourism, only appointed one African-American candidate in forming her cabinet. Worse still, says the party, that appointee– Columbia attorney Lynne Rogers—will have her role seriously diminished if the Governor’s plan to consolidate the agency Rogers will lead with another agency is successful.

“Shame on Nikki Haley,”said South Carolina Democratic Party Chair Carol Fowler. “The faces of this state’s government ought to bear some resemblance to the faces of the South Carolinians they will govern. African-Americans make up nearly a third of South Carolina’s population, but Governor Haley has willfully ignored them in forming her government, and she”s fighting for an agency merger proposal that will only further marginalize a high percentage of her constituents. We deserve a Governor who takes all South Carolinians into consideration when she makes big decisions, and we need a government that reflects all South Carolinians.”

See how that was just chock full of the automatic, obligatory, self-righteous, ritualistic phrases? The kinds of phrases of which we used to say at the newspaper, in the days when we were on the old Atex mainframe system, “She must have that on a Save/Get key.”

Of course, you want to say to people who complain about such things, If you wanted someone who gave a damn about your complaint, you should have voted for Vincent Sheheen. But that’s the thing, of course: All the people complaining DID vote for Vincent Sheheen. (Or if they didn’t, they’ve got some ‘splainin’ to do.) In fact, that’s the real problem they have here, not the demographic makeup of Nikki’s Cabinet.

Poor Duane Parrish. As the last appointee, HE’s the guy whose appointment announcement gets overshadowed by the hand-wringing

Duane Parrish: A White Guy Too Far?

over “diversity.” It’s not his fault, he was just a White Guy Too Far.

There’s a subtext here, and that’s the part that appeals to my sense of the absurd. While Carol Fowler and the Legislative Black Caucus know better, and shouldn’t be a bit surprised (and are not), there are other innocent practitioners of Identity Politics out there who actually thought it meant something — as a milestone for all women and minorities — that an Indian-American woman was elected governor. You heard all the claptrap about how “historic” her inauguration was and all a couple of weeks back.

As you know, it completely befuddles me that people can believe in this identity stuff — that a woman can get excited for another woman’s success because she IS a woman and she thinks that means something to her and to all women. Or the same thing with black folks, or Sikhs, or what have you. I don’t understand it because, well, we white guys have no such delusions, near as I can tell. Oh, sure, there are atavistic racists who get all bent out of shape when another white guy gets done wrong, or when they imagine such a thing has happened. But I don’t understand that, either, and near as I can tell, 99 percent of us just really don’t feel any identification with each other. One of us does well, and we understand that THAT GUY did well. Good for him, but what good does that do ME? One of us gets dumped on, and we think, Too bad for that guy, but that’s his problem. (Insensitive jerks, ain’t we?)

Or perhaps I’m projecting here. Perhaps I’m making the same mistake that the Identity Politickers make, in thinking there is such a thing as a characteristic way of looking at the world particular to this or that demographic. (Hmmm. Do you think?)

The thing is, Nikki Haley got elected because she was the Republican. And she got the Republican nomination because she had done the most to charm the Tea Party, and this was their year. Period.

And here’s the ultimate irony in this: Nikki Haley, the great Symbol of Women’s Success, is highly unlikely to sit up nights worrying about her administration “lacking diversity.” For one thing, she’s not ideologically inclined to do so. Then there’s the fact that, frankly, she gets a pass because, well, she’s a chick. And a minority. (In fact, she’s SUCH a minority that it’s not even fair. Her minority status leaves black folks and Hispanics in the dust, looking almost like a majority. She’s just et up with moral advantage in the identity politics department.)

Oh, she’d probably rather have her Cabinet praised for “looking like South Carolina” than not — everybody likes a pat on the back — but she can get by without it, I expect.

You want somebody who’s going to sit up nights worrying because Leon Howard was offended at having to shake all those white people’s hands (see the quote; I’m not making this up), get yourself a white guy. Doesn’t have to be Vincent Sheheen, although he’s a very nice and thoughtful white guy, and they’re the most susceptible. But even your less sensitive white guys are likely to worry about “lack of diversity” — or at least, worry about looking like they worry about it. To some extent.

But Nikki? She’s immune. You want to make somebody feel bad, go pick on a white oppressor.

Is celebrating secession offensive? Yeah. Duh. And so much more than that…

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Today I retweeted something that I got from Chris Haire, who got it from @skirtCharleston:

someone shouted “you lie” at mayor riley when he said secession was caused by a defense of slavery at sesquicentennial event this am.

Did that actually happen? Apparently so:

Charleston Mayor Joe Riley was interrupted by an audience member who yelled out, “You’re a liar!” as Riley talked about the direct relationship between slavery and secession during the unveiling of a historical marker Monday.

About 100 people crowded along a Meeting Street sidewalk at the site of the former Institute Hall — where South Carolinians signed the Ordinance of Secession exactly 150 years before.

“That the cause of this disastrous secession was an expressed need to protect the inhumane and immoral institution of slavery is undeniable,” Riley said, prompting the outburst. “The statement of causes mentions slavery 31 times.”…

Where else in the world, I ask you, would such a simple, mild and OBVIOUS statement (few historical documents make fewer bones about motives than the document Mayor Joe alludes to) elicit such a response? Wherever it is, I don’t want to go there. We’ve got our hands full dealing with our homegrown madness.

Earlier, I got this come-on to an online survey:

POLL – Celebrating Secession: Do you find it offensive to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the signing of the…http://bit.ly/dNLi1h

Sigh. OK, I’ll answer the question which doesn’t seem worth asking: Yes. Duh. The operative word being “celebrate.”

As for the word “offensive,” well, that seems rather inadequate. I suppose in our PC times, it’s the highest opprobrium that most folks in the MSM seem capable of coming up with. “Appalling” would work. “Insupportable” would, too. “Unconscionable” would be another. Then there’s always “embarrassing.”

My point is not that someone somewhere — say, to oversimplify, the descendants of slaves — would be “offended.” That’s too easily dismissed by too many. (As the surly whites who resent blacks’ resentment over slavery would point out, everybody’s offended by something. They would say this as though such moral equivalence were valid, as though black folks’ being touchy about celebrations of secession were like my being offended by Reality TV.) My point is that the very notion that anyone would even conceive of celebrating — rather than “commemorating,” or “marking,” or “mourning,” or “ritualistically regretting” — the very worst moment in South Carolina history, is a slap in the face to anyone who hopes in general for the human species (one would hope it could make some progress) or specifically for South Carolina.

It’s awful enough that this one act stands as the single indisputably biggest impact that South Carolina has ever had on U.S., or world, history. But what does one say about a people, a population, that — 150 years after this Greatest Error of All Time, which led directly to our bloodiest war and to a century and a half of South Carolina trailing the rest of the world economically — they would think it cute, or fun, or a lark, or what have you, to mark the episode by dressing up and dancing the Virginia Reel?

I mean, seriously, what is WRONG with such a people, such an organism, that would celebrate something so harmful to itself, much less to others?

Lonnie Randolph of the NAACP calls it “nothing more than a celebration of slavery.” Well, yeah. Duh again. But that pretty much goes without saying. The point I’d like to add to the obvious is that it is also a celebration of stupidity, of dysfunction, of never, ever learning.

In fact, what we’ve done, from the time of Wade Hampton to the time of Glenn McConnell, is devolve. We’ve slipped backwards. The guys who signed the Ordinance of Secession were acting in their rational self-interest, something even the merchants of the North probably understood. Be morally appalled at that if you’re so inclined (and most people living in the West in this century would be), but it made some kind of sense. But for anyone today to look back on that act and celebrate it, seek to identify with it, get jollies from dressing up and in any way trying to re-enact that occurrence, makes NO sense of any kind, beyond a sort of self-destructive perversity.

And don’t give me that about the act of secession being an assertion of freedom-loving SC whites throwing off the oppressive gummint yoke, because it just proves my point. That attitude — that “Goldang it, but ain’t nobody gonna tell me how to live MAH LAHF” or make me pay taxes or whatever — is probably the single pathological manifestation most responsible for the fact that we have been unable to get it together in this state and climb out from under the shadow of the conflict that we insisted upon precipitating. The far more refined forms of this — Sanfordism, and other ways of asserting that we do NOT need to work together as a society to solve common problems, because we are free individuals who don’t need each other — have done just as much to hold us back as the old racist creeds of Tillman and the like.

It is, indeed, a pathology. And parties that “celebrate” secession are a manifestation of it.

It’s not just that he’s black, because he isn’t

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On Election Day, The State ran a Eugene Robinson column connecting the Tea Party ire to the fact that the president is, well, black. He was quite moderate and reasonable about it, taking pains to say that “It’s not racist to criticize President Obama, it’s not racist to have conservative views, and it’s not racist to join the Tea Party.” This was followed, as you might expect, by a significant “But…”

And I think he makes a fair, if not airtight, case for the argument that the Tea Party would not be as big a phenomenon as it is if this president were not noticeably different from every president we’ve had before. I think that’s true. And I think for a lot of people, his alleged blackness forms a part of it. But that’s only because most Americans, black and white, seem to buy into the idea, promoted by the president himself, that he is, indeed, black.

But not I. As you know, I’ve never considered him to be black. I set out my reasoning in that double-length column in October 2008, “Barack Like Me” (in which I argued that Obama had as much in common with me as he does the average black American). Rather than revisit every word of it, I’ll give you one short reason why he is not “black” in the sense that it is used as a sociopolitical designation in this country: Not ONE of his ancestors was brought to this country as a slave. Not one. This puts him entirely outside the American narrative of race.

Aside from that, he was not raised as a black American. Blackness was something he personally decided to embrace as a teenager looking for an identity, as kids — particularly kids with childhoods as unrooted as his — tend to do.

And because of all that, I think Robinson gets it slightly wrong in his conclusion:

I ask myself what’s so different about Obama, and the answer is pretty obvious: He’s black. For whatever reason, I think this makes some people unsettled, anxious, even suspicious – witness the willingness of so many to believe absurd conspiracy theories about Obama’s birthplace, his religion and even his absent father’s supposed Svengali-like influence from the grave.

Obama has made mistakes that rightly cost him political support. But I can’t help believing that the Tea Party’s rise was partly due to circumstances beyond his control – that he’s different from other presidents, and that the difference is his race.

I come up with a different answer when I ask myself that same question — “what’s so different about Obama”? Sure, his being the child of an absent African father and a white mother makes him different from any other POTUS, ever. But so do several other rather glaring factors that may be related to his alleged blackness, but which could exist completely independently of the ambiguous color of his skin. Such as:

His name. “Barack Hussein Obama.” It’s extremely foreign. Set aside the connection with Islam and Arabic, and all the freight those carry at this point in history (such as the uncanny closeness to the name “Osama”), for a moment. Just in terms of being different, it’s easily light years beyond the name of anyone else who has even come close to occupying the Oval Office. The most exotic name of any previous president, by far, was “Roosevelt.” I mean, “Millard Fillmore” was goofy-sounding, but it sounded like an English-speaker. And I don’t think it was a coincidence that the first Catholic to receive a major party nomination had the vanilla/whitebread name “Al Smith.”
His father was a foreigner, regardless of his race. He was a man who spent almost none of his life in this country. He came here briefly, fathered a child, and went home. Show me the parallel to that in the biographies of former presidents.
While he never really knew his father (he had to learn about him at a distance, the way we learn about figures in history), he did know his stepfather, who was Indonesian. Young Barry spent a goodly portion of his childhood in Indonesia. In my earlier column I drew a parallel to my own childhood sojourn in South America, but I was there undeniably as an American. Barry Obama lived in SE Asia as an Indonesian, or as close to it as someone of Caucasian/African heritage could.
The fact that, to the extent that he is connected to African roots, it is a heritage that is totally divorced from most presidents’ sense of connection to Europe. I didn’t fully realize that until the Churchill bust episode, which caused some Brit to note something that hadn’t fully occurred to me: This is the first president the modern UK has had to deal with who doesn’t have the Special Relationship hard-wired into his sense of self, if not his genes. In fact, quite the contrary: Unlike any previous president (except maybe Kennedy, who spent his adult life living down his father’s pro-German sympathies leading up to WWII), Obama’s grandfather actually experienced political oppression at the hands of British colonialists.
His unearthly cool. His intellectual detachment, the sense he projects that he takes nothing personally. Weirdly, this takes a trait usually associated, in most stereotypical assumptions, with Northern Europeans, and stretches it until it screams. He looks at problems the way a clinical observer does. Probably more maddeningly to his detractors, he looks at his fellow Americans that way — as though he is not one of them; he is outside; he has something of the air of an entomologist studying beetles with a magnifying glass.

Bottom line, I think that last trait probably contributes most to the alienation many feel toward him. They sense that detachment, and they find it off-putting, and their minds grope for explanations, and they see all the other different things about him. That last one is one with which I can identify to some extent. I think one reason I’m a journalist (as are a lot of military brats) is that I moved around a lot as a kid, and was never quite of the place where I lived, and tended to look at a given place and its people with the detachment of an outsider. It wasn’t until I moved here to the place of my birth in my 30s (and I was only born here; I grew up everywhere else) that I embraced fully the identity of being a South Carolinian, but as a conscious act of will, rather like Obama’s decision to be “black.” I have a certain claim to it — mostly genetic (my family tree is three-fourths South Carolinian) — just as Obama has a genetic claim to blackness, but it’s nothing like the SC identification of someone who has lived, say, in Cayce his whole life.

As you can see, I still feel an affinity for Barack Obama, as I did in 2008. He has my sympathy, and since he IS my president, I hope he is successful as president — even though I supported McCain. And I in no way excuse the extreme, personal hostility to him among many of the voters who voted the Tea Party way on Tuesday. But I do find myself trying to understand it, based upon available facts. And I think the factors I listed above are at least as relevant as the color of his skin, if not more so.

I would discuss this, but I don’t have time

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The Juan Williams mess led to a long and provocative thread about normal fears and irrational prejudices, and what we should feel free to express about certain situations in modern life without getting fired for it.

And at some point, I posted the following in that thread, and it was so long I decided to make it into a separate post, even though, once I post it, I really need to move on to other stuff… Anyway, what I said was”

You know, there’s a whole conversation I’d be interested to have here about the way a healthy human brain works that takes this out of the realm of political correctness-vs.-Angry White Males, which is about as deep as we usually go.

But in the last week of an election, when I’m having trouble blogging at all, much less keeping up with all the election-related things I need to be writing about… I don’t have time to set out all my thoughts on the subject.

But to sort of give a hint…

What I’m thinking is this: There are certain things that we decry today, in the name of being a pluralistic society under the rule of law, that are really just commonsense survival strategies, things programmed into us by eons of evolution.

For instance, we sneer at people for being uneasy in certain situations — say, among a group of young males of a different culture or subculture. And we are right to sneer, to a certain extent, because we are enlightened modern people.

But, if our ancestors weren’t uneasy and ready to fight or flee in such a situation, they wouldn’t have lived to reproduce, and we wouldn’t be here. Thousands of years ago, people who felt all warm and fuzzy and wanted to celebrate multiculturalism when in the company of a bunch of guys from the rival tribe got eaten for dinner, and as a result, those people are NOT our ancestors. We inherited our genes from the edgy, suspicious, cranky people — the racists and nativists of their day.

Take that to the next level, and we recognize that such tendencies are atavistic, and that it’s actually advantageous in our modern market economy governed by liberal democracies to be at ease with folks from the other “tribes.” In fact, the more you can work constructively with people who are different, the more successful you will be at trade, etc.

So quite rightly we sneer at those who haven’t made the socio-evolutionary adjustment. They are not going to get the best mates, etc., because chicks don’t dig a guy who’s always itching for a fight. So they’re on the way out, right?

However… the world hasn’t entirely changed as much as we think it has. There are still certain dangers, and the key is to have the right senses to know when you need to be all cool and open and relaxed, and when you need to be suspicious as hell, and ready to take evasive or combative action.

This requires an even higher state of sophistication. Someone who is always suspicious of people who are different is one kind of fool. Someone who is NEVER suspicious of people who are different (and I’m thinking more of people with radically different world views — not Democrats vs. Republicans, but REALLY different — more than I am people wearing funny robes) is another kind of fool.

The key, ultimately, is not to be any kind of fool. The key is to be a thoughtful, flexible survivor who gets along great with the Middle-eastern-looking guy in the airport queue or the Spanish-speakers in the cereals aisle at Walmart, but who is ready to spring into action to deal with the Middle-eastern-looking guy in seat 13A who’s doing something weird with the smoking sole of his shoe (or the Aryan guy doing the same, but my point is that you don’t give the Arab pass in such a situation just to prove how broad-minded you are), or the Spanish-speaking guy wielding an AK-47 over a drug deal…

This may seem common sense, but there are areas in which we will see conflicts between sound common sense and our notions of rigid fairness in a liberal democracy. For instance, I submit that an intelligent person who deals with the world as it is will engage in a certain amount of profiling. I mean, what is profiling, anyway, but a gestalten summation of what you’ve learned about the world in your life, applied to present and future situations? The ability to generalize, and act upon generalizations — without overdoing it — are key life skills.

There are certain traits that put you on guard and make you particularly vigilant under particular circumstances, or you are a fool. If you’re in an airport and you see a group of 20-something Mediterranean-looking males (and young males from ANY culture always bear more watching than anyone else — sorry, guys, but y’all have a long rap sheet) unaccompanied by women or children or old men, and they’re muttering and fidgeting with something in their bags… you’re not very bright if you don’t think, “This bears watching.”

Now of course, knowing this, if I’m a terrorist organization, I’m going to break up that pattern as much as I can. (I’ll have them travel separately, wear western clothes, coach them not to seem furtive, etc. I’ll recruit middle-aged women if I can, although they generally have far too much sense.) So if you’re watching this scene, and you are intelligent, you’re bound to think, “These guys look SO suspicious that they must be innocent, because terrorists aren’t that stupid…” Well, yeah, they can be. Let me submit the evidence of the guy who set his underpants on fire… So there’s such a thing as overthinking the situation. I mean, how bright is a guy who wants to blow himself up to make a point? People who do that ALSO don’t reproduce, so evolution militates against it…

Anyway, I’d go on and on about this, and examine all the implications, and endeavor to challenge the assumptions of people of all political persuasions… but I don’t have time this week.

Area man says he’s not Alvin Greene

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My apologies to The Onion for using their “Area Man” gag, but since they stole it from those of us who actually used that lame, unimaginative, oddly comical construction many times without irony in the rush of getting a paper out every day, I guess I’m entitled.

Darrin Thomas

Anyway, even though this is from Rotary before last, I still wanted to share with you the story that Darrin Thomas shared with us when he did Health & Happiness Sept. 13.

Here’s the audio in case you’d like to listen to it.

Here’s a summary: First, he skilfully misdirected us by making us think this was another case of his being mistaken for Steve Benjamin. He’s had a real problem with that, and having confused white folks (at least, I assume it’s always white folks) repeatedly for that OTHER black man in a suit, we thought that was what this was about.

But it wasn’t.

It began with a trip to the supermarket, during which he noticed that an elderly woman standing near the turnip greens was staring at him with disdain — a look he hadn’t seen since he was in parochial school. He turned his attention to inspecting the produce, but when he looked up again, there she was, still staring at him “with this awful look.”

Finally, he decided to inquire. He said “Ma’am, have I done something wrong?”

She shook her head and said loudly, “You’re an embarrassment to our state!”

Flabbergasted, he said, “Pardon me?”

She repeated that he was an embarrassment to the state, and to everyone who had ever worn a military uniform.

He said, “Ma’am, I don’t understand, and I think you’ve mistaken me for someone else.” By this time, several people had gathered around to witness the exchange.

Then the old woman said, “I’m no Republican, but I hope and pray that Jim DeMint destroys you…”

He took a moment to regain his composure, then said “Ma’am, I’m not Alvin Greene.”

She replied, “Yes, you are. [This next part is hard to hear because of the laughter of Rotarians, but I think she goes on to say…] I’ve seen you on TV many times. I know who you are.”

He denied it again, and said, “I can prove it to you. I’m not Alvin Greene.”

She said, “I don’t want to hear it. Get away from me!”

He was stunned, embarrassed and frustrated. He concludes: “Unfortunately, my family won’t eat this week, because I left the entire basket, and simply walked out…” He then conducted a tutorial on “How to distinguish Darrin Thomas from Alvin Greene:”

“I was never in the military.” The closest he got was when he wore a Boy Scout uniform.
“My idea for economic development would never include the creation of an action figure in my likeness.”
“While I did many things to procure dates while I was a student at the University of South Carolina, showing a young lady pornography was not one of them.”
If he were unemployed, yet had $10,000 in the bank, “Please know I would not invest in a campaign.”
“Thanks to my English teacher in high school, Darrin Thomas speaks utilizing complete sentences.”

He got a big round of applause. He deserves it, for being able to laugh at this.

Prominent Indian-American politicians in the South — all 2 of them

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Salon has a piece on how our own Nikki Haley and Bobby Jindal work to carve out a place for themselves in the GOP of the South. An excerpt:

There’s no doubt that the religious conversions of Haley and Jindal, the two most prominent Indian-American politicians, have powerful personal and spiritual roots. But it’s also inarguable that being Christians with Anglicized names has made it easier for them to create bonds with the overwhelmingly white and deeply religious voters who dominate Republican politics in the South.

That basic imperative, to project an identity that voters aren’t threatened by, is one that all minority candidates in all regions of the country can relate to. But for Indian-Americans, who are only now stepping into American politics in sizable numbers, figuring out how to do so is still a work in progress…

Find the whole piece here.

“We Coloreds,” or, How do you get kicked out of the Tea Party?

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By now, you’ve probably heard that Mark Williams, the Tea Party guy I quoted back here, has been kicked out of the National Tea Party Federation for the satirical letter he wrote, which I will provide here in its entirety when I can find a link. Until then, here’s what several news organizations have reported of it:

In the voice of slaves, Williams wrote: “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.

“We Coloreds 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!”

He went on to say blacks don’t want taxes cut because “how will we Colored People ever get a wide screen TV in every room if non-coloreds get to keep what they earn?”

This, of course, raises a number of questions, beginning with “What? You can get kicked out of the Tea Party? How does that work?” I didn’t know there was anybody in Tea Party who had authority over anybody else in the Tea Party. And indeed, this seems to be a battle between different factions in the movement, which seems to have as many iterations as the competing bands of communists in the Russian revolution.

Interesting how, in the four days since a letter writer in The State said that the “millions” of Tea Partiers “never have been documented to have said or done anything racist,” one Tea Partier alone has provided us with two instances that might seem to call that assertion into just a tad of doubt.

Why does it have to be a “hate crime?”

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OK, I’ve ignored it and ignored it, but now that there’s going to be a march tomorrow, I have to ask:

Why does it have to be a “hate crime?”

I mean, set aside the usual grim joke, as in: You mean, as opposed to those love crimes in which someone is shot and then dragged behind a truck for 11 miles?

And set aside the weirdness of the emergence of a group calling itself the New Black Panther Party, which hearkens back to a day long before the term “hate crime” was invented. It seems… anachronistic, out of sync.

I’m just asking, why does it have to have the political element of being called a “hate crime”? Why not just prosecute the perpetrating to the nth degree? I mean, if this guy’s guilty, he’s at least going to spend the rest of his life in prison, right?

As you know, one of the few things I agree with libertarians about is that in THIS country, there should be no such thing as a “hate crime.” The idea of punishing the political intent behind a crime — essentially, punishing thought, however represensible — is utterly and completely unAmerican. The only way thought or intent should come into the prosecution calculation is in trying to determine whether the perpetrator meant to do what he did, and understood what he was doing.

And yes, I know the answer to the question I pose in my headline above; I just consider it to be insufficient. The answer to “why must it be a hate crime” is that it’s deeply important to a lot of people to feel singled out to be victims of heinous crimes on the basis of accidents of demography to know that society disapproves of such mistreatment. But the legitimate way for society to show that is by fully punishing the actions, not by outlawing the abominable attitudes.

Punish the crime. Not the fact that the person who did it is a hateful bastard. That’s for God to deal with, not the state.

The Tea Party and racism

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Was struck by this letter in The State this morning:

Francee Levin (“State right to fly USC flag,” Monday), the NAACP and others who mischaracterize the Tea Party movement need to stop listening to the liberal media and maybe attend a Tea Party rally for themselves. I’ve attended several at the State House, and the group includes people from all ethnic groups and walks of life who cannot sit by and witness the destruction of our great country by the present administration.

The movement is made up of millions of everyday Americans who love their country and want to see it restored to what the Founding Fathers created, and never have been documented to have said or done anything racist or violent.

Violent? No, thank goodness. Not yet, anyway. But racist? Depends on what you mean.

When I was at the Tea Party rally where I shot the video of Sheri Few tearing into that “socialist” Anton Gunn, she went on a long tale about how far back to the foundation of the country her kinfolk go, and it was so much like a my-family-came-over-on-the-Mayflower speech, only with an anti-government political flavor, that it both bored me and made me feel a tad uncomfortable. You know, like “I’m a REAL American, and have the pedigree to prove it.” I’ll see if I caught any of that on video… And at that same rally there was also some vituperation toward illegal immigrants — which many of you will hasten to explain was because they’re illegal, not because they are brown people who speak Spanish.

So no — I haven’t heard anything from Tea Party speakers that sounded like anything like what Ben Tillman might have said in advocating lynching. So pat yourselves on the backs there, if you’re so inclined. But I’ve heard plenty of stuff along the lines of what nativists say when they have their party manners on.

And then there was this report that I saw today:

A day after leaders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, met to pass a resolution that condemns the Tea Party, a grass-roots anti-tax political movement, for tolerating racism among its members, CNN contributor Roland Martin invited a Tea Party Express spokesman onto The Situation Room With Wolf Blitzer. Mark Williams, “asked to tell racists ‘you’re not welcome’ in the tea party,” the Huffington Post reported, “replied ‘Racists have their own movement. It’s called the NAACP.'” On the show, which aired Wednesday night, Williams accused Martin of driving racist people to Tea Party events by talking about the issue consistently on the air, by convincing them that Tea Party events are where they will “find a happy home.” “You’re not going to lie on CNN. I never said that,” Martin responded. “I have said consistently, the Tea Party people have an absolute right to assemble, to protest. But what I have said, there is no room in that movement for racists. And what I’ve said is, you should come out and say you’re not welcome here.” That’s when Williams broke in to call the NAACP a racist organization, adding that members are “a bunch of old fossils looking to make a buck off skin color.” “That’s nonsense,” Martin responded before Blitzer broke in to end the heated debate. The Huffington Post has video of the exchange on its Web site.

Make of that what you will.

Greene media juggernaut cranks up (snicker!)

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Two things to share…

First, this photo, which may or may not be legitimate; I have no idea. It was brought to my attention by Scott English, Mark Sanford’s chief of staff, via Twitter. He got it from the Washington Examiner. PhotoShop or reality? Either way, it’s a primo example of the current rage in political comedy, the item that allows us all to sneer at Alvin Greene. (Speaking of PhotoShop: I not only cropped the picture before posting it here; I also lightened it up and increased the contrast. We have standards here at bradwarthen.com.) The knee-slapping cutline that came with the picture:

This sign is from US 521, near Greene’s hometown, and hotbed of support, in Manning, SC. No signs for Republican Sen. Jim DeMint were spotted anywhere near the area, suggesting that Greene has opened an imposing lead in the early-advertising race.

Yuk, yuk, chortle, snort.

Which brings me to my second point: At what point does mocking Alvin Greene simply becoming mocking a man for being poor, black and unemployed and from a small town in South Carolina? At what point do the Republicans who are LOVING this, or the mortified Democrats who hide their faces in shame that THIS is their nominee, or smart-ass bloggers who post satirical photos (real or fake; irresponsible bloggers just don’t care, do they?) get called on the carpet for the so-far socially acceptable practice of running down Alvin Greene?

Food for thought, there…

Maybe Nikki will teach Democrats a lesson

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Thought I’d start a separate discussion based on a subthread back on the post about Nikki Haley on the cover of Newsweek.

Phillip, reaching for the bright side of the national MSM’s superficial coronation of Nikki because she’s an Indian-American woman, wrote:

Maybe this is all for a larger good. Even if I disagree with almost everything Haley or Tim Scott stand for, if this means the GOP is now abandoning the “Southern Strategy” of the Helms-Thurmond-Atwater variety, that can only be a healthy thing, for the party and for the country (and region).

Another way of putting it is that soon, racists and bigots in the South will have no one to vote for. That can only mean there’s fewer and fewer of them, and that, electorally speaking, they matter less and less.

And Kathryn chimed in, “Nice thought, Phillip–from your mouth to our ears!”

This little burst of liberal feelgoodism set me off in a way that again illustrates how impatient I am with both liberals and conservatives, even when they are respected friends such as Phillip and Kathryn:

Nice thought, but it hardly makes up for the hard reality. I’m moved to quote the last line of The Sun Also Rises: “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”

You want to hear a dark spin on Phillip’s rosy scenario? It’s all well and good for racism to have nowhere to go, and it’s fine for you to moralize about those awful racist Republicans becoming better. But here’s the other side of that: Maybe after she’s elected and we have another four, if not eight, years of Mark Sanford largely because the national media couldn’t see past being thrilled over an Indian-American woman, liberals in South Carolina (liberals elsewhere won’t notice because they don’t give a damn about SC, except as a source of their occasional amusement) will think, “Maybe this identity politics thing isn’t such a wonderful thing after all.”

Now that would be tremendous. But you know what? I’ve waited through too many 4-year chunks of wasted time in South Carolina to go through another such period just so that Republicans can be more ideologically correct and Democrats can wise up a little. It’s not worth it. Change these things about the parties, and other objectionable idiosyncrasies will simply expand to take their places, because parties are schools for foolishness.

This positive name recognition in Newsweek and elsewhere, which doesn’t go more than a micrometer deep (an Indian-American woman! in the South! Swoon. End of story) is going to make her unstoppable — until the narrative changes in some way.

If the South Carolina MSM will do its job and ask the hard questions (OK, Ms. Transparency, where are those PUBLIC e-mails, which you are hiding behind a special exemption from FOI laws that lawmakers carved out for themselves? Any more $40,000 deals to buy your “good contacts” that you haven’t seen fit to disclose?), maybe the national media, the media that people in SC are much more pervasively exposed to, will notice. Maybe. Maybe. Isn’t it pretty to think so?

The boycott will NEVER (and should not) get the flag down

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On a previous post, there was an exchange between the two Michaels: Michael Rodgers, who believes passionately as I do that the Confederate flag should not be flying on our State House grounds, and “Michael P.,” who seems to disagree.

The exchange had to do with the NAACP’s boycott of South Carolina over the flag. Michael Rodgers had asserted (in his defense, as but one of five reasons, the other four being perfectly legitimate) that the boycott was a reason to take the flag down. With THAT, I had to respectfully disagree.

We MUST remove the flag from the grounds. But in order to accomplish it, we must first ignore the NAACP’s efforts to FORCE the state to do so, and get others to ignore it as well. It’s a necessary precondition to getting to the point that we do the right thing.

It is my firm belief that the absurd, ineffective NAACP boycott is one of the things keeping the flag up. It plays to the cranky white neo-Confederate’s sense of persecution. And it plays to the genetic predisposition of white South Carolinians (including those who could easily be persuaded to put the flag away otherwise) to never, EVER let anyone MAKE them do something.

I have that genetic predisposition, so I understand it. Allow me to explain: If flying the flag at the State House is the right thing to do, then NO amount of economic pressure should EVER induce us to take it down. Coercion should be resisted at every point along the line. If flying the flag is right, we could keep flying it even if the boycott were successful, even if it starved us.

The thing is, it is NOT right to fly the flag. But since the NAACP gets all the ink and has positioned itself in the mindless media (which is always all about a FIGHT rather than reason) as THE opposition to flying the flag, there is no way most white South Carolinians are going to go along with someone who is trying (however unsuccessfully) to HURT them into making them do its will. That fact, that the NAACP is doing its damnedest to try to hurt SC, obscures the wrongness of the flag for the white majority.

We’re talking about the white MAJORITY instead of the wacky neo-Confederate activists. The majority that can take the flag or leave it alone, that neither weeps for the Lost Cause nor sits up nights fretting about the social injustice of flying the flag in the faces of black people who are also citizens of our state.

The majority, in short, that needs to be won over. These folks don’t want to ally themselves necessarily with the people who play Confederate dress-up, but they don’t want to side with the people trying to hurt SC. And unfortunately, as long as the media continue to paint the issue as one off conflict between the extremes, as a mandatory choice between those options, the average person who just doesn’t want to spend time thinking about it wants to stay out of the whole thing, would prefer it not be brought up at all.

For those people — and we’re talking about at least a plurality of people in this state, defined as having the above-described attitude — there is an all-too-convenient default position: Embrace the “compromise” that in the minds of intellectually lazy people “settled” the issue.

And we’re never going to be able to deal with that problem as long as the NAACP continues to wage its farcical boycott. Unfortunately, I see little chance of the NAACP dropping it. It is an organization that, sadly, has become defined by conflict. Drop the conflict, and too many people in the group’s leadership would feel that they’d lost their raison d’etre.

So we have a HUGE challenge before us — changing the conversation so that it is NOT about those people on the two sides of that conflict caricature.

We need to move South Carolina to a more mature place. In fact, I’ve never seen removing the flag as the goal. I see the flag going away as a sure SIGN that the real goal has been achieved. And the goal is a South Carolina that has decided, in its own collective heart and mind, that it has outgrown such foolishness. That we are bright enough to understand that relics of history — particularly such painful history — belong in museums, and should not be given present life at the center of our public, common existence. And that we are one people, with common interests and respect for one another, having outgrown the desire to wave defiance in each other’s faces.

THAT’S the goal, growing up as a people. Once we do that, the flag will become a footnote of history.

Truer words than Jake’s never spoken in SC

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Well, I’ve gotta hand it to Jake Knotts — he stood up as what he is and spared no words about it: He is a redneck. And he was right to be proud of the supposed ephithet. A farmer suntan is a mark of hard work, something of which a simple kind of man should be quietly proud. Or blusteringly proud, depending on his inclinations.

In saying that, he touched on something — a minor, side issue, really — I tried to explain in my column about why we VERY RELUCTANTLY endorsed him against Mark Sanford’s candidate in 2008. The decision nearly killed Cindi Scoppe from sheer mortification, but there was one silver lining in it for me: I had always felt a tiny bit of middle-class guilt over always being against the rednecks (on video poker, on the lottery, on the Flag, and so on), and sometimes doing it in a way that betrayed class snobbery on my part. I figured, endorse this rough, brutish son of the soil against the Club for Growth snobs just once, and for the next 20 years I wouldn’t have to feel that guilt again. Yes, I’m being a little facetious, but also a little bit serious.

Anyway, you can’t deny (unless you are a Republican Party functionary, in which case you will deny it most vehemently) the truth of what Jake said about the hypocrites of his party, who defend Nikki from his brutishness because she’s their gal, and their likely standard-bearer in the fall. Unlike Henry McMaster, Jake will not humbly join that train; he remains what he is, with all the good and bad that entails.

What is Jake right about?

He’s right when he says that if he’d only called Barack Obama a “raghead,” the Lexington County Republican Party would not have indignantly censured him and sought his resignation. Calling the president a “raghead” would be merely a comical slip, compared to the deliberate demonization of the president through such devices as Henry’s “Vultures” ad. If Jake had only been talking about Obama, it would merely have put him on the ragged edge of what is increasingly his party’s mainstream (as the mainstream is more and more infiltrated by Tea Party extremism). Oh, Carol Fowler would have fired off an indignant statement. The Black Caucus may have drafted a fiery resolution that would have died a lonely death on the House floor. But within the Republican Party, only a deafening silence. The righteous fury we’re hearing is coming from advocates for Katrina Shealy and Nikki Haley. It’s coming from the Sanford wing of the party, which is seeing the chance to achieve what it could not in eight years of holding the governor’s office — seize control of the party.

He’s ABSOLUTELY right when he alludes to the uncomfortable truth about the newly politically correct GOP. It deserves to be carved into granite somewhere over at the State House:

“If all of us rednecks leave the Republican Party, the party is going to have one hell of a void.”

Indeed. Where would the S.C. GOP be without rednecks? In the minority, that’s where. That’s assuming they went back to the Democratic Party where they came from.

I was just over at the State House myself, and fell into conversation with Dwight Drake, and I happened to ask him — now that he’s out of it — how he thinks Vincent-vs.-Nikki contest will shake out.

He said that of course one must start with the obvious — that this is a majority Republican state (actually, a plurality-Republican state, but why quibble?) … which caused me to interrupt him to say, “Which it wouldn’t be if all the rednecks left, as Jake said.” And he readily agreed.

Of course, he would agree, being a Democrat. But if Republicans were totally honest, they would agree, too. There is no question that the balance of power in the South shifted from the Democrats to the Republicans as Strom Thurmond and George Wallace led legions of rednecks to abandon the Democratic Party. No, not everyone who switched parties was a redneck; some were mere pragmatists who saw there was a heap of white people in their districts and if they wanted to be elected, they needed to go with the GOP. But that would not be the case if not for the rednecks. However much of the GOP vote may be thus described — 15 percent, 30 percent, whatever — it’s enough to mean there are more Republicans than Democrats.

And while your more high-minded sort of Republican — the kind who like to imagine themselves as the sort who 50 years ago would have been Republican, when in the South it was not much more than a debating society making up a demographic roughly the same size as the Unitarians (the kind who are feeling SO broad-minded because they may have a nonEuro, something that would excite relatively little comment among Dems) — may protest loudly at the notion, on some operational level, consciously or unconsciously, every Republican with the pragmatic sense to win a primary knows this. Occasionally we see overt manifestations of it, such as in 1994 when the GOP unashamedly boosted their primary turnout by including a mock “referendum” question on the Confederate flag. Or when, having taken over the House as a result of that election, the new majority made it one of its first orders of business to put the flying of the flag a matter of state law, so that no mere governor could take it down.

Lord knows that other pathetic gang the Democrats has enough to be embarrassed over, but this is the big dirty secret of the Republican Party. Huh. Some secret. Everybody knows it.

The Republican Party can talk all it wants to about conservatism and “small government,” yadda-yadda, but we all know that it has political control in these parts because of the rednecks in its ranks. That’s just the way it is.

C’est moi, l’ancien éditorialiste

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Remember when I was interviewed last month by Philippe Boulet-Gercourt, the U.S. Bureau Chief for Le Nouvel Observateur, France’s largest weekly newsmagazine? Well, I was. And a few days ago I wrote to Philippe asking if his piece had run. He wrote back to say yes, a couple of weeks ago, and to share the link.

Here, of course, is my favorite part:

Mais «je ne crois pas que Joe Wilson soit raciste, confie Brad Warthen, ancien éditorialiste du «State», le quotidien local. C’est plutôt une réaction très américaine contre le gouvernement, une tradition encore plus forte chez les Blancs de Caroline du Sud, cette idée que personne ne doit pouvoir nous dire ce que l’on doit faire». La diabolisation d’Obama, en somme, ne serait qu’une variante du vieux procès intenté aux démocrates : «Clinton était une fripouille, il ne s’intéressait qu’à lui, juge Rich Bolen, le républicain de Lexington. Obama, lui, est très idéologique, il est un socialiste de conviction. C’est bien plus dangereux.»

Now personally, I don’t recollect having said all that there Paris talk, but I reckon I did. Seriously, from what I can make out of it (and Philippe was right, although I can’t speak French at all, my background in Spanish and Latin enables me to make out, roughly, what is being said in written French — it’s the pronunciation that foxes me), Philippe quoted me correctly.

As for being an ancien éditorialiste — well yeah, I have a few gray hairs, but come on. It’s interesting the way the same word will come to us through Norman influences and come to mean something quite different. Idioms are cool, but confusing.

Goys will be goys

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There is a saying that negroes like watermelon because…

No, that doesn’t quite capture it, does it? By comparison, it’s pretty innocuous. After all, you could end the sentence, “everyone does.” What’s the harm in liking watermelon? Rather insensitive, not the sort of thing you’d go around saying if you had half a brain and cared anything about other people’s feelings, but it’s not in the same league with Edwin O. Merwin Jr. and James S. Ulmer Jr. invoking the myth of the rich, avaricious Jew, a stereotype that helped feed the resentments that led to the Holocaust.

No, for an analogy, you’d have to reach to something that actually resulted in the murders of black people, something like, “There is a saying that black men lust after white women because…”

Where did the GOP find these guys? In case you missed it, these two geniuses Merwin and Ulmer — Republican Party chairmen in Bamberg and Orangeburg counties, respectively — wrote the following in an opinion piece published in The (Orangeburg) Times and Democrat:

There is a saying that the Jews who are wealthy got that way not by watching dollars, but instead by taking care of the pennies and the dollars taking care of themselves. By not using earmarks to fund projects for South Carolina and instead using actual bills, DeMint is watching our nation’s pennies and trying to preserve our country’s wealth and our economy’s viability to give all an opportunity to succeed.

I find myself wondering, What saying? Who says it?

These guys actually could make a guy sympathetic toward earmarks, which one assumes was not their aim.

Karen Floyd says they’ve apologized, and that’s that. What do y’all think?

Trying to explain Joe Wilson to France

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This morning I had a very pleasant breakfast at the usual place with Philippe Boulet-Gercourt, the U.S. Bureau Chief for Le Nouvel Observateur, France’s largest weekly newsmagazine. I forgot to take a picture of him, but I found the video above from 2008 (I think), in which I think he’s telling the folks back home that Obama was going to win the election. That’s what “Obama va gagner” means, right? Alas, I have no French, although I’ve always felt that I understand Segolene Royal perfectly. Fortunately, Philippe’s English is superb.

It was my first encounter with a French journalist since I shot this video of Cyprien d’Haese shooting video of me back in 2008, in a supremely Marshall McLuhan moment. If you’ll recall, I was interviewed by a lot of national and foreign journalists in the weeks and months leading up to the presidential primaries here. (You may also recall that a lot of them came to me because of my blog, not because I was editorial page editor of the state’s largest newspaper. Philippe, of course, also contacted me because of the blog, although he was aware of my former association, and expressed his kind concern for my joblessness.)

He had come to Columbia from New York, which has been his home for 14 years, to ask about “this summer uprising among the conservatives, peaking with the Joe Wilson incident,” as he had put it in his e-mail.

Well, to begin with, I disputed his premise. I don’t think there has been a resurgence of conservatives or of the Republican Party, which is still groping for its identity in the wake of last year’s election. What we’ve seen in the case of Joe Wilson — the outpouring of support, monetary and otherwise, after the moment in which he embarrassed the 2nd District — was merely the concentration of political elements that are always there, and are neither stronger nor weaker because of what Joe has said and done. Just as outrage over Joe’s outburst has expressed itself (unfortunately) in an outpouring (I’m trying to see how many words with the prefix “out-” I can use in this sentence) of material support for the unimpressive Rob Miller, the incident was a magnet for the forces of political polarization, in South Carolina and across the country.

What I tried to do is provide historical and sociological context for the fact that Joe Wilson is the natural representative for the 2nd District, and will probably be re-elected (unless someone a lot stronger than Rob Miller emerges and miraculously overcomes his huge warchest). It’s not about Obama (although resistance to the “expansion of government” that he represents is a factor) and it’s not about race (although the fact that districts are gerrymandered to make the 2nd unnaturally white, and the 6th unnaturally black, helps define the districts and their representatives).

In other words, I said a lot of stuff that I said back in this post.

We spoke about a number of other topics as well, some related, some not:

He asked about the reaction in South Carolina to Obama’s election. I told him that obviously, the Democratic minority — which had been energized to an unprecedented degree in the primary, having higher turnout than the Republicans for the first time in many years — was jubilant. The reaction among the Republican minority was more like resignation. Republicans had known that McCain would win South Carolina, but Obama would win the election. I explained that McCain’s win here did not express a rejection of Obama (as some Democrats have chosen to misinterpret), but simply political business as usual — it would have been shocking had the Republican, any Republican, not won against any national Democrat. I spoke, as I explained to him, from the unusual perspective of someone who liked both Obama and McCain very much, but voted for McCain. I think I drew the distinction fairly well between what I think and what various subsets of Republicans and Democrats in South Carolina think…

That got us on the topic of McCain-Bush in 2000, because as I explained to Philippe, I was destined to support McCain even over someone I liked as much as Obama, because I had waited eight years for the opportunity to make up for what happened here in 2000. Philippe agreed that the world would have been a better place had McCain been elected then, but I gather that he subscribes to the conventional wisdom (held by many of you here on the blog) that the McCain of 2008 was much diminished.

Philippe understood 2000, but as a Frenchman, he had trouble understanding how the country re-elected Bush in 2004 (And let me quickly say, for those of you who may be quick to bridle at the French, that Philippe was very gentlemanly about this, the very soul of politeness). So I explained to him how I came to write an endorsement of Bush again in 2004 — a very negative endorsement which indicted him for being wrong about many things, but in the end an endorsement. There was a long explanation of that, and a short one. Here’s the short one: John Kerry. And Philippe understood why a newspaper that generally reflects its state (close to three-fourths of those we endorsed during my tenure won their general election contests) would find it hard to endorse Kerry, once I put it that way. (As those of you who pay attention know, under my leadership The State endorsed slightly more Democrats than Republicans overall, but never broke its string of endorsing Republicans for the presidency, although we came close in 2008.)

Anyway, when we finished our long breakfast (I hadn’t eaten much because I was talking too much, drinking coffee all the while) I gave him a brief “tour” of the Midlands as seen from the 25th floor of Columbia’s tallest building, then gave him numbers for several other sources who might be helpful. He particularly was interested in folks from Joe’s Lexington County base, as well as some political science types, so I referred him to:

Rep. Kenny Bingham, the S.C. House Majority Leader who recently held a “Welcome Home” event for Joe Wilson at his (Kenny’s) home.
Rep. Nikki Haley, who until recently was the designated Mark Sanford candidate for governor, before she had occasion to distance herself.
Sen. Nikki Setzler (I gave him all the Lexington County Nikkis I knew), who could describe the county’s politics from the perspective of the minority party.
Blease Graham, the USC political science professor who recently retired but remained plugged in and knowledgeable. (Philippe remarked upon Blease’s unusual name, which started me on a tangent about his ancestor Cole Blease, Ben Tillman, N.G. Gonzales, etc.)
Walter Edgar, the author of the definitive history of our state.
Neal Thigpen, the longtime political scientist at Francis Marion University who tends to comment from a Republican perspective.
Jack Bass, the ex-journalist and political commentator known for his biography of Strom Thurmond and for his liberal Democratic point of view.

I also suggested he stop in at the Gervais Street Starbucks for a downtown Columbia perspective, and the Sunset Restaurant in West Columbia.

I look forward to reading his article, although I might have to get some of y’all to help me with understanding it. With my background in Spanish and two years of Latin I can generally understand French better when written than spoken, but I still might need some help…

Ammo!

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It was either late 2008 or the start of 2009 when a co-worker at The State mentioned that he’d had trouble laying his hands on buckshot, and that the shopkeepers he’d talked to said this started to happen at about the time of the election. It’s been so long that I forget whether he said that it was just before the election or just after that the run on ammunition started. But I do remember he said you could get birdshot; the problem was with the deadlier stuff that you’d need to take down a deer — or a man.

It was sometime after that that I noticed at a local Wal-Mart that the case where ammunition of all kinds was locked behind glass was mostly empty. Looking more closely, I saw none of the usual pistol stuff (.38-cal., 9 mm). In fact, all I saw was shotgun shells with the smaller sort of shot.

I filed this away as interesting, even ominous. And I figured I would write something about it once it became better documented and the fact was established. I assumed I’d see news stories about it soon. (As you know, in my former position I had nothing to do with news or decisions on what to cover; I was kept as separate from that as I was from advertising. Like you, I saw things in the paper when I saw them.) Then I forgot about it. I was pretty busy in those days.

So when I saw it on the front page of The State today, I sort of went “Wow,” on a couple of levels. First, that it took this long to make news, and second, that there was still a shortage.

Back when I first heard about it, I didn’t know what I wanted to say about it. Some things popped into my head, of course. One of the first was my memory of being in South Carolina when Martin Luther King Jr. was killed. I remember knowing at least one very nice white person who had never owned a gun before going out and buying one, because of fear of what might happen next. And I heard of others. I didn’t want to think this was related to that, but it did pop into my head.

Another was that Barack Obama had inspired some fairly weird Internet conspiracy theories. You know, like the one that he’s not really a citizen. I hadn’t attached importance to that — after all, the man was elected — but it popped into my head that there was something going on in the dank underbelly of the American psyche. Everything might be fine on the conscious level, but maybe some things were brewing down in the more reptilian parts of our collective brain.

But I set it aside. We had lots of other stuff to think about, what with the economy collapsing around us, and all the debates over what to do about it. The stimulus, for instance, was about as unemotional and bloodless, colorless subject as you were likely to find; it was not something to inspire dark dreams of violence.

Now that the ammunition story is documented and verified and duly reported, it comes at a time when we have additional information, and this colors our perception. We’ve seen that a lot of people are really, REALLY emotional about this president and his policies. I mean, we’ve had a lot of heated debates about health care in this country in the past, but even when it involved the polarizing figure of Hillary Clinton, people didn’t get THIS stirred up. Harry and Louise and the rest of the insurance industry’s allies simply deep-sixed reform, and it went away for 15 years.

But the last couple of months have been … weird. You might expect a guy like me, who has griped for years about our health care situation and finds himself paying $600 a month for COBRA, with the prospect of it going up to $1,200 or even $1,500 very soon) would be emotional about it, but I’m Lake Placid compared to the people who DON’T WANT reform. “Death panels.” Old folks absurdly Obama Joker Poster Popping Up In Los Angeles demanding that the gummint stay out of their Medicare. People showing up in crowds with automatic weapons. An otherwise mild-mannered congressman yelling “You lie!” at the president during what I thought was a fairly ho-hum speech. Then there’s the truly disturbing “Joker” posters. (I thought Democrats really went overboard with hating Bush, but this plumbed new depths.)

Against that background, a run on ammunition sounds really ominous.

The sunniest interpretation you can put on this phenomenon is that when the economy is collapsing, people naturally fear our devolving into a state of nature, and naturally want to arm themselves. Under that interpretation, we’d have run out of ammo whether Obama or McCain had been elected.

But there’s this other thing going on, and it has to do with some fairly unpleasant things rattling around in our collective subconscious. Some people have tried to give it a simple name, saying it’s about race. But it’s more complicated than that. Just as scary and ugly perhaps, and entangled somehow with race, but more complicated.

And frankly, I’m still not sure what to think of it.

Let me tell you about Joe Wilson…

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A lot of folks are presuming to explain Joe Wilson, based on the impression he made last week in his Tourette’s Moment (or the far worse impression he’s made since then trying to leverage the moment to his political advantage). Some, such as bloggers from the left, are explaining it as just the sort of thing you expect from those idiot Republicans. Voices on the right, meanwhile, hail Joe as the guy who was saying What Real Americans Think (which you know has gotta be making Sarah Palin jealous, because what else has she got now that she’s not governor any more?). Maureen Dowd, after saying she was “loath” to resort to such oversimplification, chalked it up to racism, asserting that what Joe really meant was “You lie, boy!”

Well now, there’s something to that if you’re making a general statement about the Republican Party in the South. There was a time when to be a Republican in the South meant you were either a reformer who couldn’t bring himself to join the Old Boy network that was the Democratic Party, or black. But then Strom Thurmond, inspired by Lyndon Johnson’s embrace of civil rights, defected to the GOP in 1964. It took awhile for a lot of white voters to follow him. But then some of the folks who followed George Wallace in his independent run in 1968 just didn’t go back. Some considered themselves independents for awhile, but they eventually drifted into the GOP, and after awhile a certain dynamic was in place whereby more and more white folks got the impression that all the other white folks were going over there, and joined them.

The process wouldn’t be complete in South Carolina until Republican lawmakers persuaded some black Democrats to join forces with them in a reapportionment battle in the 90s. Here’s where things get more complicated than the Dowd explanation. You see, after a certain point (the point to which white Democrats were willing to go), the only way you can create another black-majority district (which will presumably, according to conventional wisdom, elect black candidates) is by creating several surrounding districts that have been bleached free of black voters. Such districts are FAR more likely to elect a white Republican than a Democrat of any color. Anyway, that reapportionment deal led to the election of a few more black members and a LOT more white Republicans, which is how the GOP took over the Legislature.

So yeah, the dynamics that produce a Joe Wilson — or a Jim Clyburn — are just shot through with racial considerations. So you can always say that race is part of the equation in any confrontation such as we saw last week. I haven’t examined the list of people who contributed to Joe Wilson’s campaign coffers last week because he made an ass of himself, but I’m thinking it’s pretty safe to say that it’s somewhat whiter than South Carolina as a whole — and most likely whiter even than the 2nd District.

Does that mean Joe Wilson is a racist? No. The idea would shock him. He would sputter and protest in that out-of-breath way he has when he’s excited, and he would be absolutely sincere. I know Joe Wilson; I’ve known him for more than two decades, and I know that he’d mean it when he said that he’d never judge the president or anyone else by the color of his skin. Joe Wilson is a guy who goes out of his way to be nice to everybody.

No, there’s another explanation for why a guy like Joe Wilson gets elected, and why huge numbers of white folks will flock to his side when the Nancy Pelosis of the world are looking daggers at him. It’s a phenomenon that runs in parallel to the narrative of race in our state’s history, one that is so interwoven with it that whenever it appears, people look right past it and see only the racial aspect, black and white being less subtle than what I’m talking about.

White South Carolinians, as a group, exhibit a trait that is not at all unusual in this nation, but which has shown some of its most extreme expressions in the Palmetto State. It’s the thing that makes a guy put his foot down and declare that no government is going to tell him what to do. This manifests itself in lots of ways. It was surging through the veins of those Citadel cadets firing on Fort Sumter. Yes, you can say that the Civil War (conceived and launched right here in South Carolina) was about race. You can say it was about a minority of wealthy whites wanting to keep black people as their property, and the majority of whites being dumb enough to go along with them on it, even though it was not it their economic interests (or any other kind of interest) to do so. But ask yourself, HOW did the ruling elites get all those other whites to go along with them? By selling them on the idea that the federal government was trying to run their lives. It worked like a charm, and we’ve been reaping the evil result of that madness ever since.

It’s no accident that we have twice elected a governor who has NO accomplishments to point to and who distinguished himself by being the last governor in the union to accept stimulus funds that S.C. taxpayers were (like taxpayers everywhere, if they live long enough) going to have to pay for. Standing against gummint involvement, especially federal gummint involvement, plays well among a significant swath of the electorate here.

But defiance is not a necessary ingredient. If it were, Joe Wilson would not have gotten as far as he has. He’s no stump-thumper (the shouting incident was truly anomalous); you wouldn’t mistake him for Ben Tillman, or even Strom Thurmond. But Joe Wilson is the natural heir of another political phenomenon that Thurmond embodied (and Sanford has raised to an art form): the do-nothing officeholder.

It’s a twist on the Jeffersonian notion that one is safest when the government governs least, a play on the old joke that we’re all safe now because the Legislature’s gone home, etc.

We all know about the highlights, or lowlights, of Strom Thurmond’s career — his Dixiecrat campaign, his infamous filibuster against the Civil Rights Act, his later mellowing on race, etc. Less noticed by the popular imagination is that for most of his multi-generational career, he didn’t do much of anything. In fact, the only legislation I can remember bearing his mark in the years that I was responsible for The State‘s coverage of him was those little health warnings on beer cans and wine bottles. That’s about it. I mean, that’s something, but it’s not much to show for half a century in the Senate.

What Strom Thurmond did was constituent service. He perfected the technique of staying in office by being the voters’ (black voters or white voters, he didn’t care) own personal Godfather in Washington. You got a problem with that big, bad government up there? Talk to your Godfather. Doing personal favors for people was far more important than lawmaking. And this made him politically invulnerable.

Over in the House, the member who best embodied the Thurmond Method — minimum lawmaking, maximum constituent service — was Floyd Spence. Joe Wilson became Spence’s acolyte, his squire, his sincere imitator. It was perfectly natural that he became his successor. Floyd was a nice guy who loved being a congressman but didn’t want to accomplish much in Washington beyond constituent service and a strong military, and Joe fits that description to a T.

The 2nd District has come to expect, even more than any other district in the state, elected representation that Does Nothing on the national scene (beyond fiercely supporting a muscular national defense, of course).

The representative of that district, who is very much the product of that non-governing philosophy, is bound to be at odds with a president who is the product of the Do Something philosophy of government. And you can see how he might get a little carried away with himself in trying to stop the Biggest Thing Barack Obama has tried to get the government to Do.

And yes, you can describe this dichotomy in racial terms. The folks who keep re-electing Jim Clyburn want government to Do As Much As Possible (at least, that’s how he interprets his mandate, and I don’t think he’s wrong), while Joe Wilson’s constituents tend to want the opposite. And those districts were drawn to put as many black voters in Clyburn’s 6th District as possible, thereby leaving the 2nd (and the 3rd and the 4th the 1st, and to some extent the 5th) far whiter than they would be if you drew the lines without regard to race.

I’m just saying there’s a lot more at work than that.

Gates saga gets treatment it so richly deserves

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Credit to Stan Dubinsky for bringing this item in The Boston Globe to our attention:

(A street in Cambridgeham. Most Exalted University Professor HENRY LOUIS GATES, freshly returned from the Land of the Asian Khan, is rattling the door of his keep. Enter a WENCH.)

WENCH: Alarum! Alarum! A thief is about!

GATES: Peace, ye fat guts!

(Enter SHERIFF CROWLEY)

CROWLEY: Stay, now! Who disturbs our peaceful shire?

GATES: I disturb no man. My key unlocketh not.

CROWLEY: Forsooth, thou breakest and enterest.

GATES (entering his castle): I break not for witless constables. Begone!

CROWLEY: Back speaks no man to the Sheriff; I arrest thee!

GATES: Knowest thou whom I am? That I am coy with the Daily Beastmistress, Milady Tina? That I am most down with Lady Oprah, the Queen of afternoon tele-dalliances? That I am sworn liege to Dr. Faust, of whom Marlowe wrote? That I unravelest literary mysteries at the Greatest University Known to Man?

CROWLEY: Of Tufts you speak? Even so, thou art under arrest.

GATES: Thou detaineth me because I am a Moor!

CROWLEY: Some of my best friends are Moors. Your pleas availeth not.

GATES: You shall rue the day you crost my threshold….

… and so forth. ‘Tis a silly tale, but enjoyable withal.