Obama the Target

Two noteworthy voices spoke up this week about the character of the animosity toward Barack Obama. First, last Sunday, Maureen Dowd of the New York Times wrote an op-ed column that addressed itself to that animosity, what lies behind all the sound and fury. Today it was former president Jimmy Carter who spoke out about the presence of racism in the current hysteria in town meetings and even congress.
Dowd called her column “Boy, Oh, Boy,” and she deserves credit for calling a spade a spade (pun intended.) I was so impressed with the hard look she took at the implication of Joe Wilson’s shout of “You Lie,” that I sent the piece to several friends to read. I felt it was about time thinking people face the fact that raw racism is once more bubbling up to the surface and we need to examine it and where it might lead. She called her column what she did because she contends that what Wilson was really saying was “You lie, boy!” She then goes on to point out that South Carolina has long been the hotbed of Confederate zeal and pride; the Old South still exist in the minds of many South Carolinians. It has been a state always on the front lines of backward thinking, just look at Strom Thurmond, Senator DeMint, and Joe Wilson, not to mention their misbehaving Governor. DeMint was one of the featured speakers at the rally in Washington last Saturday. Retrograde vision seems endemic in South Carolina. But Joe Wilson has little to worry about in his district which is solidly Republican and white. T-shirts and car tags are selling like hotcakes with “You Lie! “ boldly set forth for all to see. Wilson was very upset when the story broke about Strom Thurmond, the veritable archetype of the Old Segregationist South, confirmed he had a daughter with a black woman in his employ. Wilson thought it brought shame to the state and white people.
The rally last Saturday was billed as a protest over the Administration Health care Bill; but one look at the signs and posters people showed up with indicated the real purpose of the rally was a hate-fest aimed at our first black president. One sign that seemed very popular was “PUT OBAMA IN THE GRAVE WITH KENNEDY.”Other signs linked him with Hitler, Stalin, Lenin, and Castro. Another favorite was the image of Obama as the comic book image of the Joker, especially in the Heath Ledger interpretation—with the slashed mouth. It was all frothing-at-the-mouth expressionism, the trash thoughts of very angry and unhappy people. It was full of nasty comments and threats of violence. The organizers of the rally—corporate operatives using corporate money, like Freedomworks, which is headed by ex-congressman Dick Armey—tried to sell the gathering as positive, but you’d have to be an idiot to see it that way.
Dowd thinks, and Jimmy Carter agreed with her, that a sizable segment of the South has never accepted the Civil Rights Law and Integration and have been laying in the weeds waiting for an opportunity redress the “wrongs” that have been imposed on the South. They are folks who just can’t accept the idea of a black man in the Oval Office. It just ain’t right, and the fact he is a well-spoken, educated, and uppity black man makes all the worse. There seems to be no reasoning with these folks. Accompanying this racial discontent is silly talk about succession from the Union, first mentioned by the Governor of Texas several months ago.
The important thing about Carter speaking up, is the fact it was Carter, an ex-president from the South, someone who is deeply Southern and knows what he is talking about. He said outright that the animosity toward Obama is clearly based on the fact he is a black man. He said there are some people in the South and elsewhere who believe that a black man can’t have the right stuff to be president of this nation. The right stuff is white stuff—period! Black people, it is said, aren’t equipped to do the job. Since the comments come from Mr. Carter, who is respected around the world, they should carry some weight.
I got an email from my brother yesterday who lives in the Midwest. He’s retired now but part of his job was to go down to Nashville where his company had another factory. While he was there he saw a reenactment of the Battle of Lookout Mountain, a battle of the Civil War that the South lost. However, in the reenactment the outcome was different: this time the South won. This is how they work to redress past wrongs—replace reality with fantasy.