For me Clint Eastwood's raving at the chair at the Republican Convention in 2012 was a perfect encapsulation of the racism which was and still is the Republican party and media's treatment of Barack Obama. Everything from the use of his father's Kenyan ancestry, his father's Islamic ancestry, his name, the birther non-issue and lie, the attempt of media venues from the sewer of FOX to NPR's Cokie Roberts* to exoticize his real birth place, as if Hawaii isn't one of the Nifty Fifty United States, something that fifth graders who learn RAY CHARLES' song know is a lie
but which the great American media tried to use against Barack Hussein Obama as it took it upon itself to disunite Hawaii to disqualify one of its sons from election as president of the United States.
And the Republican Racism Machine wasn't done, not by a long shot. The disrespect as ignorant, vacuous racist slimers such as Rush Limbaugh and Donald Trump denied his intellectual brilliance demonstrated in an exemplary record of academic achievement, of intellectual engagement. And for me, most of all today, having read that truly inspiring article-interview of President Obama by Jeffrey Goldberg his capacity for questioning and doubting one of the most destructive and stupid foreign and military policies which is an article of faith in official Washington, his practice of one of the highest of intellectual powers human beings are endowed with, the capacity of self-questioning and reconsideration of our conclusions based on an engagement of morality and reality COMING TO THE CONCLUSION THAT EVEN THOUGH IT WILL CAUSE US TO LOOSE FACE WE MUST CHANGE OUR MIND AND COURSE OF ACTION.
There has been, in opposing Barack Obama's public career every strategy of racist white supremacy used over and over again. The active attempt of Republicans in the House and Senate to overturn the will of The People to make him a non-president by blocking his appointments, blocking his action, refusing to pass laws that he would sign into law, the attempts by them to turn his eight-years in office into a cipher in terms of achievements, turning a man who is, in fact, one of the most capable of men ever elected to the office, into a non-president, one who will go down in history as a footnote instead of one of great achievements. As I said, read the article linked to above to see the potential that their conscious campaign of whipping up racism against Barack Obama has deprived this country of.
I could go on and on documenting how the Republican Party, the Republican judiciary, the Republican media, de jure and de facto, have promoted and used racism against Barack Obama, calling on the worst in the American People to try to destroy the first Black president of the United States for the basest of motives.
For me, all of that is summed up in Clint Eastwood's racist, condescending rant which reduced President Barack Obama into an empty chair on a stage for him to rail at to the delight of the Republican racists in the audience, those who were too stupid to understand how truly disgusting and appalling that was - the few who may have feared that it had gone too far and had given away their game perhaps excepted. They had little to fear from the corporate media, they had been as much a part of the years long campaign of racist diminution of trying to turn the term of the twice elected President Barack Obama into an empty presidency, not only turning him into a non-person but acting to overturn the will of The People who had elected him to lead a government of, by and for The People.
What Clint Eastwood is too stupid to understand is that stunt was a revelation of him, the real him, that a dozen "Bird" movies won't ever erase. It was also an exposure of a party and a corporate oligarchy which will never do more than scab over, only to tear open again at any time.
And what they still don't understand is that Clint Eastwood, at the Republican Convention, to the delight of the combined racists there, demonstrated, beyond the possibility of rational denial, that there is a very real difference between the party that didn't pull the ranting old white man off with a hook ... that it is, in fact, entirely different from the Democratic Party which enthusiastically elected Barack Obama to one of the most powerful positions of trust in the world. A party which has, now, nominated the first woman who has a real chance of being president and against whom the Republicans and their media are mounting every strategy and mechanism and tool of misogyny to defeat her.
* I'd forgotten I'd written this almost eight years ago.
Hearing the “exotic” line recited by Cokie Roberts last Monday has to rank up there with Sally Quinn on marital propriety. There is no one more exotic than Cokie Roberts, whose family left New Orleans, a perfectly normal city, to morph into the most alien life form, the DC insider. Her brother’s a DC lobbyist, her husband, another DC media pod person. The talking heads are service droid mannequins more believable as Sci-fi Channel filler than as sources of information about life in the United States.
One of the more important aspects of this campaign of racism is whether or not white people, especially those in “the heartland”, will be played for chumps as the Republican racial strategy wishes them to be. You would think that people who live in the mid-west would be tired of that role, especially as many of them are fully as progressive and sophisticated as anyone who works on either coast. I’ve known many people from states that start with an I who are more enlightened than any member of insider Washington and New York City. I’d be hard pressed to think of a mid-westerner I’ve known who isn’t more aware of real life than anyone who gets asked to yack on the cabloids. People in the mid-west aren’t consigned by fate to assume roles in perpetual I-Hop commercials. They should punch anyone who tries to force them into that square in the mush and in the only way they will stop it, by overturning the corporate establishment that creates these roles for them.
Obama’s campaign must point out how insulting and condescending those Republican campaigns are to the people who live in the fabled “heartland”. I’ll bet there are millions of white mid-westerners who are just waiting for evidence that they are not eternally consigned to the role constructed for them by snobs in the media and publishing elites over the past century*.
The announcement by the Census Bureau that the United States will be white minority about the middle of the century makes me wonder if it isn’t part of the effort by the Bush Regime to scare white people. But that’s one of the problems with this kind of thing, once you get used to seeing it used, you get suspicious of everything. Doesn’t mean your suspicions are wrong, unfortunately.
Update: Stupy, get some remedial reading help. What you can do about your propensity to misrepresent, I don't know what you can do about that.
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