Dead White Men

I'm trying to find a language appropriate to the subjects that I care about, ethics, spirituality, and politics, not so much the politics of Republican vs. Democrat or Hillary vs. Obama as the practices America has to adopt in order to become a more ethical, honorable, and effective nation after years of squandering its powers and treating its founding principles like toilet paper. It was our President who was heard, in a moment of unscripted exasperation, to characterize the Constitution as "a piece of paper" and I assume that toilet paper was what he had in mind, no other kind being as disposable.

When I started this blog, I hoped to steer clear of the presidential election and the candidates, partly because I'm sick of ranting about them to my wife and friends and partly because there are so many blogs that discuss them more cogently and imaginatively than I can. For all I know, Hillary Clinton might end up being a better president than Barack Obama, and John McCain may be a better human being than either of them, though one who's allied himself with some of the worst human beings in the United States, gone in hock to them up to his jowls. These are percentages I'm not interested in playing.

What I'm interested in is the reasons people are voting the way they are and what those reasons say about our national character. More and more, the current presidential election looks like it will hinge on race. This hasn't happened so blatantly since 1988, when Lee Atwater secured the presidency for George H.W. Bush by showing Americans a picture of a black man who'd raped and murdered a white woman. In 2008 a black man (only half black, really, but evidently blackness is potent enough to negate whatever else it happens to be mixed with; in Louisiana well into the last century all it took was an eighth part of black blood) is actually running for president, which makes waving a picture unnecessary. While some Obamaphobes have swallowed the fiction that he's a secret Muslim and others charge him with being the 'disciple' of the 'black nationalist' Christian reverend Jeremiah Wright-- and a few monumentally stupid ones believe he's both-- libels aren't really necessary. People are voting against Barack Obama because he's black. They're phoning in death threats to his campaign offices because he's black. When Mike Huckabee makes a joke about Barack Obama rolling out of a chair because someone has aimed a gun at him, he is joking about shooting a black man. If he had made a similar joke about George Bush, he would've been tackled by Secret Service agents, had a hood yanked over his head, and been packed on a plane for Guantanamo.

Maybe it's better that our racism be outed this way. Therapists say that the patient doesn't get better until his pathology comes out in the open, and Catholics are required to confess before they receive holy communion. The people who hate Obama the most aren't just white; they tend to be poor and poorly-educated, and while that demographic may not do too badly under a President Clinton, it's precisely the one that will suffer the most if the next president is John McCain. The factories that employ those voters will keep shutting down, and the jobs they end up in will find every way they can to screw them out of a decent wage, with no interference from the government. Those voters will keep on going without decent medical care, afraid to see a doctor if they get sick, maybe unable to find ones who'll see them. The schools where they send their children will go on not teaching them. The war those children fight in-- in the absence of other children, who have other priorities-- will go on, too, and more of the children will die in it. And maybe that will be justice, because just once those citizens were offered a clear choice between voting their prejudices and voting their interests, and they chose to vote their prejudices. There's a certain integrity in voting your prejudices. If I had the same visceral unreasoning dislike of black men I might make the same choice. I have such a dislike for other sorts of people and couldn't bring myself to vote for one of them if he were to promise me free health care and the salvation of the polar bear.

But of course it's not just the poor and uneducated who will suffer. If the last ten years have taught us anything, it's that the class that works with symbols is as disposable-- as out-sourceable-- as the one that works with its hands. I am of that class, and I imagine you are too, and I feel my disposability every day. We can no longer dissociate ourselves from the others. This is so not because Jesus instructed us to love our neighbors as or because Shantideva knows that they are ourselves. It is so because what happens to those unhappy, small-minded people will happen to us. And maybe, if you believe in a distributive justice in which good is rewarded with goodness and evil with evil, we too will deserve whatever we get:

For my people is foolish, they have not known me. . . they are wise to do evil, but to do good they have no knowledge.
I beheld the earth, and, lo, it was without form and void; and the heavens, and they had no light.
I beheld the mountains, and, lo, they trembled, and all the hills moved lightly.
I beheld, and, lo, there was no man, and all the birds of the heavens were fled.
I beheld, and, lo, the fruitful place was a wilderness, and all the cities thereof were broken down.

That's not Jeremiah Wright. That's Jeremiah.