Over at This Week in Black, Elon James White was so flabbergasted by Wilson that he put aside his usually biting humor and just yelled back:
I won’t even get into the “Oh he wouldn’t have done that if it were a WHITE POTUS”, because its so nuts I can’t even deal on a racial level. What makes you think under ANY circumstances that its okay to yell ANYTHING at the President? I don’t care if he said “Yes We Can…run a train on yo mama” you don’t yell something at the Effing POTUS. You sit there and you wait, go on Fox News and talk all the smack you want, but until then STFU.
New York Times columnist, Maureen Dowd, said she resisted the idea that race mattered in all the outcries against Obama, but
Wilson's shocking disrespect for the office of the president--no Democrat ever shouted "liar" at W. when he was hawking a fake case for war in Iraq--convinced me: Some people just can't believe a black man is president and will never accept it.
Susan Jacoby, author of The Age of American Unreason, agreed in the Washington Post's "On Faith" blog:
I'm sure that many of these people carrying posters of Obama with a Hitler mustache are regular, God-fearing churchgoers. During the civil rights movement, most white Protestant churches in the South--those that now make up the Southern Baptist Convention--stood solidly against desegregation. Some of the children of those good churchgoers are as unwilling to accept the legitimacy of a black president as their parents were to accept riding on a bus next to blacks.
NPR's Juan Williams, in his typically calm fashion, said
I think there's a perception that being called a liar during a speech before the joint session of Congress is unprecedented, Renee. It fits with a pattern that lots of black Americans--and I might say it's also on Hispanic radio around the country--perceived as sort of a lack of basic acceptance of the stature that's to be accorded any president, a question of his legitimacy.
(Or see Juan Williams try to explain this point to Sean Hannity, a blowhard who thinks you win an argument by simply talking over everyone else. Hey, Juan, why bother?)
Leon Pitts, Jr., after reading the Southern Poverty Law Center's report on resurgent extremist movements, is alarmed, seeing Joe Wilson as just one symptom of something more frightening, a culture war that is "real and scary."
Well, should we be alarmed? What meaning should we read into Joe Wilson's yelp? One side of me is not so bothered by it. I worked at an academic institution for several years where decorum and a facade of democratic consensus functioned to preserve the status quo, to shield its most stalwart defenders from ideas and criticism too weighty for ossified intellects. The place cried out for some open, unsettling, conversation, rather than all the grousing in private. The same might be said for the formal meetings of the national government, where the rules of conduct (along with the constitutional separation of powers, the purposeful bottlenecks) blunt challenges to the status quo.
And there is a longstanding practice in the US of breaking the informal and formal rules of public conduct to make a political point, to crack the status quo. We call this civil disobedience. Thus it is that that ol' civil disobeyer, Al Sharpton, ended up with a curious take on the "You lie!" affair. Asked by NPR's Scott Simon what he thought of it, Sharpton replied
I thought what he said was offensive to all Americans. It insulted the chamber. You know, as an old protestor, you suffer the consequences of a protest, because that's what he ended up doing no matter how much he was justified. He should have been removed, in my opinion, from the chamber.
It's a curious reply because right after deeming Wilson wrong, Sharpton appears to acknowledge the slight possibility of the legitimacy of Wilson's action, but then calls for an action that would be typical of the defender of the status quo. Civil disobedience is in part about theater, and it increases in effectiveness when the government, or the "upstanding" citizenry, crack down on the disobedient in ways that raise the ire uncommitted but interested public (like all those White TV audiences in the north watching their Southern cousins aim their dogs, water hoses, and worse, at Black protesters).
But here I've just begun to do what many White pundits decrying the role of race have done, make an absurd comparison based on a flimsy syllogism. Joe Wilson broke a rule as protest. Joe was engaged in civil disobedience. Joe was punished (very lightly) for this. Gee, Martin Luther King did the same thing, break rules in acts of civil disobedience. And he and his followers were punished. MLK is now considered a democratic hero and martyr. Joe must be one too, and you liberal lefty socialists who criticize Joe are hypocrites because you don't apply the same standards to MLK.
This reminds me of a former colleague, a self-professed neoconservative, who felt marginalized in the college because so few agreed with his political and religious positions. He felt forced to "the back of the bus." Hmm, as if a White male academic in the early 21st century is in any way comparable to a 1950s Black working class woman in the Jim Crow south. Simply ridiculous, but these kind of trite comparisons are all too common, as is the practice of the beleaguered privileged to project on to their critics their own hypocrisy.
I use the term "privileged" in the sense that there are categories of people who enjoy entitlements that other categories do not, and these entitlements are usually unrecognized; they are so "natural" as to be invisible. I am a White, heterosexual male. As such, I'm entitled to not worry about whether or not people know my sexual preference (I just have to keep it in check). I'm entitled to speak about race and gender in my classes with more authority than my Black female colleagues because I don't have to worry about students saying "Oh, that's just your opinion because of who you are." I'm entitled to not being considered a higher threat to the property of store-owners, or to taxi drivers. I'm entitled to not have to worry about crafting a persona, adopting a tone, that is less threatening to people of different social origins. I'm entitled to equal rights, whereas Blacks, homosexuals, and women want "extra" rights. And so on.
And because this privilege is usually unrecognized, because the privileged don't feel privileged, they may lash out angrily at those who keep bringing up the problems of inequality, discrimination, or prejudice. Worse, still, is if the privileged are accused of contributing to these problems. So we have a slew of White pundits who "express outrage about charges that their attacks on Obama are racist."
As I said in my last posting, I don't think race is the only factor at work here in this debate. But to deny any role for race is simply untenable. That role can obvious, as in the recent Drudge Report, with a headline referencing Joe Wilson, with a picture of President just below, and then to the left, a video with the caption: "WHITE STUDENT BEATEN ON SCHOOL BUS; CROWD CHEERS. . ." Jon Stewart, as he does so often, identified the implicit message:
Now Drudge won't say this because he doesn't like to play that game, but I will. . . .Because Barak Obama is President, it is now open season on White children.
Others are less obvious. The Washington Post columnist and neoconservative übermensch, Charles Krauthammer, repeated, with his own particular flair, the refrain that our Black president isn't really American, nor our legitimate president.
Unbidden, unforced and unpushed by the congressional leadership, Obama gave his most deeply felt vision of America, delivering the boldest social democratic manifesto ever issued by a U.S. president. In American politics, you can't get more left than that speech and still be on the playing field.
Well, first off, it's just plain wrong that Obama was "unbidden" given the crescendo of calls for the President to play a greater role in getting health care reform going, but the message here was Obama doesn't know his place. Apparently, Obama isn't entitled to being presidential. Krauthammer's too smart to resort to usual labels of socialist, and he uses "social democratic manifesto" to place Obama outside the United States, in Europe (maybe, ugh, France) with all that overbearing government; and "manifesto" we all know is a favorite word of marxists. If you didn't get the point so far, Krauthammer tells us the President's so far left he's no longer really with us. So if Obama's so far left he's out of the American park, where does that put those millions of Americans who staunchly support a public option (unlike the President), or, worse, a single-payer universal health care system?
Well, maybe they're in some sort of parallel "third world" universe, because that's where the President thinks he is according to Krauthammer:
Obama imagined that, as Fouad Ajami so brilliantly observed, he had won the kind of banana-republic plebiscite that grants caudillo-like authority to remake everything in one's own image.
So, Obama urges Congress, the most representative part of our national government, to take on the task of healthcare. When Congress was seemingly stuck, he talks to them to urge them some more. But he just doesn't get to do that. He again doesn't know his place. Not only that, his presidency isn't really legitimate to begin with, since a "banana-republic plebiscite" put him into power. He's a mere "caudillo," a foreign term for a foreign guy.
It doesn't matter that the premises underlying Krauthammer’s dreck are dubious. Go to the comments section following the column and you'll see effusive, thunderous praise. Lots of people drink this stuff up. They love their white whine.
No comments:
Post a Comment