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.

The Whitewashed Sepulchre

There was a brief period in American public discourse when white people, and not just liberals, actually acknowledged their racism. I'd say it lasted from the 1960s to 1980 and the election of Ronald Reagan. After that white people were exempt from such unpleasant exercises of introspection. Reagan himself could openly campaign against "welfare queens," a crocodilian segregationist like Strom Thurmond could be rehabilitated as a cuddly mainstream politician (and his habit of groping the clerical help passed off as 'an eye for the ladies'), but they were no longer accused of being racists. African-Americans who said otherwise were themselves charged with playing the race card.

This whitewashing coincided with a dramatic rise in the power and influence of fundamentalist, evangelical churches led by figures like Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Ted Haggard, and John Hagee. Some of those churches, whose ministry and congregations were predominantly white, had provided segregation with much of its theological armor. Or, to slightly alter the metaphor, they had been the keep into which whites could retreat after the Episcopalians, the Methodists, and even some Baptists went over to the enemy. That was part of the reason for their popularity.

Another reason for their popularity had to do with the way they defined sin, or rather, with where they located it. Like their Puritan precursors, the old fundamentalist congregations were haunted by the presentiment of personal guilt and the prospect of personal damnation. Their ministers glared down from the pulpit and railed at the failings of the men and women sitting in the pews below. They scolded them for sloth and adultery, drinking, gambling, blasphemy, worldliness. Going to those churches was like walking into the woodshed where your father waited with a handful of switches and made you select the one he would thrash you with. It couldn't have been pleasant. And, of course, outsiders made fun of you for your masochistic scrupulosity. Think of the way the media made fun of Jimmy Carter for admitting that he had committed adultery in his heart.

But the new breed of fundamentalists were unconcerned by the sins of their congregations. The sins that galvanized them were taking place elsewhere-- in abortion clinics and college classrooms, in gay bars, in the courts. Who cared about adultery? The preachers stopped scolding their flocks. They congratulated them. And the flocks congratulated themselves. From time to time, they might be reminded that they were sinners and hang their heads. But a moment later the sermon would swing back to homosexuals and the ACLU, and everyone would be happy again.

Racism is as common as any other sin, and as ugly, and it must be owned the way other sins are before it can be rooted out or made less noxious. But this can never happen in a church that locates sin elsewhere. To the members of such a churches, the only racists are people like Al Sharpton and the Reverend Wright.

Bucky Done Gun II

You can tell that a group of people has been designated to suffer when one of its members can be killed by police, not while committing crimes but while engaged in legal activities-- say, returning home from a bachelor party on the night before his wedding-- and none of the officers involved is found guilty. Try to imagine how a white community would react if one of its children was shot dead under similar circumstances, with a similar outcome. Try to imagine its reaction if such killings took place every few years and the outcome were always the same. Given the facts of the Bell case and the timing of the judge's verdict, the media finger-wagging over Jeremiah Wright is almost comically hypocritical. Never mind if the U.S. government conspired to give black people AIDS. It-- and, more demonstrably, state and local governments, including that of the most liberal city in the U.S.-- have fostered a climate in which it is permissable for cops to kill unarmed black men, if not by law then in fact. No conspiracy is necessary. All that's required is that the victims die and that there be no consequences.

In The Book of Calamities, I write that crime always entails a destruction of equality-- not social equality, necessarily, but the creaturely equality of beings who are universally subject to pain and death. "When one man kills another man, he declares that he is big and the other is small, is nothing. If the victim’s wife and children are forced to witness this, they too are made nothing. When a chemical plant discharges poison gas that wipes out a village, all its people are made nothing, and their annihilation is compounded when the officers of the chemical company are allowed to live on without consequence." (Trachtenberg, 175) This is true of judicial killings as well.

Few whites want to admit that racism still exists in this country. Part of the reason the Obama campaign inspired so much early excitement was because his victories seemed to signal that it had been definitively banished. So you can understand the shock and indignation that greeted revelations of Wright's sermons. In asserting that a racial double-standard still existed, and that African-Americans were angry about it, Wright challenged America's hopeful vision of itself. What happened next was that the black man was accused of racism, while Obama was accused of silently condoning racism because he had refused to denounce the reverend or storm out of his congregation. The candidate's ensuing speech on race was groundbreaking because it was the first time since the King era that a mainstream public figure had addressed the elephant in the living room. There are moments in history when the elephant is named, and they always raise the hope that it will then be driven outside where it belongs. But a number of individuals and organizations, beginning with the Clintons and including the Republican party and much of the news media, have made sure that the elephant remains in the living room. For the moment it is still visible in all its size and ponderousness, but already people are denying its presence or blaming that presence on cranky figures like Wright. But of course all of us are spattered with elephant shit.

See: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/04/opinion/04rich.html?hp