-- Stephen Vincent Benét, By the Waters of Babylon
The old people shopped in a panic. When the TV didn't fill them with rage, it scared them half to death.
-- Don DeLillo, White Noise
I think it's safe to say that when Peggy Noonan is making sense, trouble's a-brewin':
If John McCain said, "I got the white vote, baby!" his candidacy would be over. And rising in highest indignation against him would be the old Democratic Party.
To play the race card as Mrs. Clinton has, to highlight and encourage a sense that we are crudely divided as a nation, to make your argument a brute and cynical "the black guy can't win but the white girl can" is -- well, so vulgar, so cynical, so cold, that once again a Clinton is making us turn off the television in case the children walk by.
To be sure, Nooners' epiphanies are no doubt fueled more by instinctive distaste for all things Clinton (and at this point, it's kinda hard to blame her) than by serious commitment to brotherly love. And while McCain might well have sunk himself if he had said what Miss Thang did about the coveted cracker base last week, it's hard to imagine that at least a sizable plurality of conservative commentators wouldn't have resorted to their usual passive-aggressive tropes in his defense.
Still, her essential point is correct, and this cheap cracker-baiting is unacceptable, even if there may be geographic pockets of truth to it. I'd like to think that the media, with their unerring nose for the cheapest, least relevant shit, simply managed to find the angriest goobers they could in limning the peculiar political bent of Appalachia. But every one of them, when pressed on why they could never bring themselves to vote for Obama, either snuffled through the usual nonsense about flag pins 'n' preachers, or were simply more upfront about their racism. Not one of them, as far as I'd seen in the coverage from network news to The Daily Show, could come up with a remotely coherent reason why they couldn't vote for Obama.
Per usual, Taibbi is likely on the right track.
Whereas the Clinton rallies seem to embrace the combative nature of this contest, in the Obama camp one frequently finds people who are deeply troubled by it. "He's been a complete gentleman," says Amala Lane, an Obama volunteer from New York who came down to Pennsylvania for the primary. "This is exactly what Obama is trying to get us beyond: this blue-state/red-state thing."
Listening to Lane — a soft-spoken, white, college-educated intellectual who worked as a teacher overseas — you can see exactly where Obama has gone wrong. In Pennsylvania and elsewhere, Obama polled well among people exactly like this: liberals and college graduates. In the Full Metal Jacket paradigm, faggots and sailors. Earlier in the campaign, the Obama camp was so busy stewing over Bill Clinton's comparison of Obama's South Carolina win to Jesse Jackson's and worrying about being painted as a "black candidate" that they forgot to worry about being painted as something even worse, in American political terms: the candidate of liberal intellectuals.
With all his verbose deflections of Hillary's attacks and unconcealed annoyance over silly nonissues like his failure to wear a flag lapel pin, Obama inadvertently painted himself into a corner as a know-it-all, a pointy-head who would rather yammer in polysyllables and talk to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad than wear the fucking American flag on his chest — as Hillary, meanwhile, was promising to "obliterate" Iran and in the process roping in hordes of nondescript suburbanites who'll crawl through the mud for "Madam President" while marching to classic rock tunes like the "Horst Wessel Song." Clinton's genius was in seeing that it was possible to play the liberal/intellectual-baiting game not only with Republicans but with Democrats — and that by forcing her opponent to take the high road, she could scour the fish-rich waters of the low road.
Ironic, isn't it, that someone who endured political taunts of "wonkism" and "elitism", of implicit traitorousness and intellectual arrogance, for all those years, resorts to precisely the same tactics in her increasingly futile effort to claw her way to the middle? All that time we listened to them whinge about how unfairly they'd been maligned and hunted, and their shithead friends rushed to the barricades to pen unreadable books in their defense -- and they took the first opportunity to become exactly what they despise. Shee-it, about all that's missing from this one is a clandestine ratfucking of Larry Hagman.
To a great extent, the concern over the Clintons' tactics throwing the election over to Poor Ol' Straight Talk are overblown at this juncture. Most of the disappointed Hillarians will, despite their current plaints, get over themselves and vote for Obama. The ones who don't were never going to, and probably wouldn't have really voted for a girl either. Really, pathological hangups and projected psychological difficulties tend to run in patterns; people who have problems with negroes also have problems with females. Probably something to do with fetal alcohol syndrome.
And speaking of fetal alcohol syndrome, Clownhall takes a stab at spelling out What Bubba Wants (other than a blood relative to sodomize):
The "guns, God and gays" trope has haunted Democrats, and Republicans have enjoyed dusting it off when needed to rile the locals. It's an easy play.
Well, sure. What are they supposed to do, explain that their approach to the government basically consists of upward wealth transfers and taking foreign policy suggestions from think-tanks populated by ideological inbreeders, that it's essentially a practical joke? If the Republicans ever took their thumb off the scale, the whole counter would flip over.
But so-called "ordinary Americans" aren't so easily manipulated and they don't need interpreters. They can spot a poser a mile off and they have a hound's nose for snootiness. They've got no truck with people who condescend nor tolerance for that down-the-nose glance from people who don't know the things they know.
Riiiiight. That's why they voted for George W. Bush, twice. That's why they bought the schtick of a lobbyist/actor who tooled around Tennessee in a pick'emup truck. Well, not so much around the state. More like from the parking lot where he left his Lexus, out to the stump in Sixtoe Gulch where he'd tug his overalls for twenty minutes, tell them that everything they think they know is gospel truth, and promise to make Junior Samples his Secretary of State. Yeah, there's just no foolin' these folks.
I mean, really. These people clearly couldn't spot a poser if he showed up in a muscle shirt and started playing Achy Breaky Heart. There's no easier mark on the planet than a hostile rube who refuses to learn or discuss anything he didn't pick up on the third go-round of second grade.
I'm sure this schtick has been around since the first ensi of Eridu told the townsfolk that his rival and the rival's god were claiming to better than them and their god. No better way to get a dumbass' back up than to tell them that someone thinks they're better'n you, whether or not they actually said that, and regardless of whether it's true in the first place. Prob'ly fags anyways.
That dumb fucking cow they showed on The Daily Show earlier tonight, rambling about how she couldn't trust someone from another race runnin' this here country? Fuck her, and fuck the dipshit crackers that think like that. Fuck 'em right in the neck. There are people who better than that, but apparently they don't make as good copy for the intrepid reporter trying to put together his never-been-done-before What's Whitey's Deal With Obama? ofay news item.
Some Americans do feel antipathy toward "people who aren't like them," but that antipathy isn't about racial or ethnic differences.
Sure it is. Oh, you can add cultural differences into that mix as well, but it's a pretty clear pattern that many of us in all parts of the country have seen in play, frequently by our own family members. (Thankfully, I can't think of anyone in my family who's quite that bad, and even the ones who do complain are more of the Archie Bunker, blowing off steam but always voting Democrat(ic) anyway type.) As J. Billington Bulworth astutely pointed out, rich people stay well on top by pitting poor white people against poor black people.
The folks who are getting suckered into registering their ignorance and xenophobia on national teevee as part of a defense-contractor-owned "news program" might do well to follow the overall food chain, consider their own place in it, and kindly sit down and shut their fucking cakeholes until they have managed to read something without pictures or glossy paper, that may disabuse them of their toxic stupidity. Really, it's okay to not want to vote for Barack Obama, but do us all a favor and come up with a marginally responsible reason.
Remember kids, he's not just a black guy with a white mom, he's a white guy with a black dad. Both things are equally true, but when either enters into the decision-making process, the point is already lost.
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