20 January 2008...11:21 pm
Race and Sex Baiting and Jackie Robinson
Dear Progressives (and if you’re not a progressive, just piss off now, because this isn’t for you):
The madness has already begun. As I’ve written, Barack Obama’s win in Iowa showed us that the color of a man’s skin need not be the determining factor (or even an important factor) in this presidential season.
And Hillary Clinton’s win in New Hampshire showed us just how ugly it could get if we make pudenda the determining factor in that selfsame season.
And I’m here to tell you that if you succumb, if you give in to PeeCee battles over trivialities, and don’t focus on the humans and the issues, you WILL lose.
You got that?
The Republicans and the Haters and Klansmen, the Limbaughs and the Hewitts and the Hannitys will EAT YOU ALIVE, babies. They will do anything that they can to divide and conquer, and if YOU give in, you will lose. You will fail. The Democratic coalition will be sundered and the troglodytes will, once more, carry the day with an unholy brew of misogyny, misanthropy, racism, sexism, baiting and hating.
You GOT that?
I hope to hell you do.
You CANNOT allow them to throw you off your game. You cannot allow the mainstream, moronic and casually sadistic media gin up endless race and sex baiting articles to draw you in. You cannot take part in this phony debate. Here is what I’m talking about:
January 20, 2008
Women turn on ‘traitor’ Oprah Winfrey for backing Barack ObamaOprah fans leave a barrage of negative messages on her official website in response to the talk show host’s support of Obama
Bill Clinton claims vote rigging | Hillary wins Nevada | US elections blog | Clinton/Obama swap poison | McCain wins SC
AMERICA’S favourite television presenter is paying a painful price for her intervention in the US presidential campaign last month. Oprah Winfrey has been dubbed a “traitor” by some of her female fans for supporting Barack Obama instead of Hillary Clinton.
Winfrey’s website, Oprah.com, has been flooded with a barrage of abuse since the queen of daytime chat shows joined Obama on a tour of Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina in mid-December.
Her intervention was widely credited with broadening Obama’s national appeal - especially among women - and with helping him to an upset victory over Clinton in the first vote of the election year in Iowa.
Yet a backlash by Clinton supporters appears to have prompted a rethink by Winfrey, the African-American media titan who is routinely described as the most influential woman on television.
She did not reappear in the final days before the New Hampshire primary - which Obama lost to Clinton - and has been absent from the most recent campaigning in South Carolina, which votes next weekend….
Yet Obama’s rivals suspect that Winfrey has been startled by the virulent reaction to her previous campaign appearance.
It started with a message on her website entitled “Oprah is a traitor” and rapidly expanded to include several discussions that attracted hundreds of comments….
It should be noted that the The Sunday Times is owned by Über-demon Rupert Murdoch. And that may well be important. Here’s one of the sidebars:
VIDEO
Hillary ClintonThe best heckles, gaffes and fiery speeches from the campaign trail
* Flight attendant Hillary
* Mr Clinton loses his cool
* Obama: I’m no Muslim
* Huckabee: gates of hell
* Clinton: Martin Luther King
* Thompson: Iran virgins
* B. Clinton: fairy tale Obama
* Clinton: iron my shirt
* Clinton’s teary moment
And it ought to be noted that the cited “Oprah is a traitor” post may well have been the work of a GOP agent provocateur. And this is a damned good time to brush up on just WHAT that term means. Wikipedia:
An agent provocateur (plural: agents provocateur [sic -- the plural according to Merriam Webster is agents provocateurs - HW], French for “inciting agent”) is a person who secretly disrupts a group’s activities from within the group. Agents provocateurs typically represent the interests of another group, or are agents directly assigned to provoke unrest, violence, debate, or argument by or within a group while acting as a member of the group.
[...] Agents provocateurs are also used against political opponents. Here, it has been documented that provocateurs deliberately carry out or seek to incite counter-productive and/or ineffective acts, in order to foster public disdain for the group and provide a pretext for aggression against the group; and to worsen the punishments its members are liable for (see Red-baiting). Terrorists and fringe political groups on both the right and left sometimes act as agents provocateurs when they seek to provoke government repression that they hope will alienate their potential constituency from the government in question, and thus increase support for themselves (as the opponents of the government in question). In this sense, provocation may be combined with endorsement terrorism.
Historically, Agents provocateurs activities have been one operational tactic of labor spies who may also be hired to infiltrate, monitor, disrupt, and/or subvert union activities.
Now, put on your thinking cap: What is it that the GOP, at least since Nixon, is known for?
Karl Rove, Lucienne Goldberg, Donald Segretti, Ed Rollins, Lyn Nofziger et al have made a living via dirty tricks, and if you don’t think that this year– with the elephant in the room being the Elephant up against the wall for malfeasance and malgovernance — that they’re NOT going to pull every dirty trick out of the bag, use every sleazy tactic and slimy strategem … well, does your mommy know that you’re playing with her computer?
(This blog is for adults, so log off now. I don’t want you getting in trouble.)
They are out to DESTROY you, progressives. Do you GET that?
And they are licking their chops like Klansmen at a lynching.
The simile is not casually chosen. People will live or die on the outcome of this election, not the least of which being the hundred thousand plus troops in limbo in the Middle East because of a “president” who is congenitally incapable of admitting that he’s ever made a mistake. And, hundreds of thousands of human beings are already dead.* This is serious stuff.
[* HINT: it's a number greater than the population of any one of these US cities proper (minus suburbs), according to the U.S. Census bureau:
Austin city, TX, Baltimore city, MD, Memphis city, TN, Milwaukee city, WI, Boston city, MA, Washington city, DC, El Paso city, TX, Seattle city, WA, Denver city, CO, Nashville-Davidson (balance), TN, Charlotte city, NC, Fort Worth city, TX, Portland city, OR, Oklahoma City city, OK, Tucson city, AZ, New Orleans city, LA, Las Vegas city, NV, Cleveland city, OH, Long Beach city, CA, or Albuquerque city, NM.
Just pick one, and kill every man woman and child in the metropolitan limits, and that'll be how many people have died in Iraq as a result of our criminal invasion: criminal in attacking without provocation, criminal in finding that there were no WMD's, criminal in remaining for five years, criminal in looting the treasury to hand out money to Bush cronies, etc. etc. etc.]
They literally wrested the election out of our hands in 2000 (with help from a shameful U.S. Supreme Court, whose “black” and “first woman” justices gleefully aided and abetted that theft by trampling on the Constitution, you might recall). They will not give up their stolen power willingly. They will hold on to it, and covet it as jealously as Gollum craved the Ring. And they will stop at NOTHING. (Not even small plane crashes, perhaps.)
They KNOW what can roil the progressive waters: it’s the N-word versus the C-word.
Hell, they can even start a fight by throwing one or both terms out into the street and watching us fight. It’s like the rotten little teenager who knows that he can throw your town into weeks of paroxysms just by taking a $1.69 can of black spray paint and painting a swastika on the local synagogue or the N-word on a local black church.
Which is what it usually turns out to be.
But that didn’t stop the week of breast-beating, the charges, the counter-charges, the tearful interfaith combined prayer meeting and the heated denunciations by Politically Keereckt politicians of all stripes. The newspaper editorials. The letters to the editor, and, perhaps, the candlelight march.
All for $1.69.
It is the moral equivalent of arson, but, unlike arson, it depends on the willing collaboration of the “building” being set ablaze for its effectiveness. We are that building.
Now, if an alienated, dumbass teenager can stir up that kind of response, what do you think that the professional agents provocateurs, the hate-meisters of the Modern GOP* (* a misspelling of KKK, for you cannot harness hate to your purposes without being yourself seduced by hate) will do? Huh?
That’s right.
Here’s the Sunday Times (UK) again:
So hostile has the response been that some suspect dirty tricks. “All the rude and hateful messages on here can’t be from Oprah fans,” another visitor noted. “Someone’s campaign (wonder who?) is sabotaging the message boards.”
And here are the first two comments on the Sunday Times (British) newspaper’s feedback page:
Have your sayI am furious at Oprah for endorsing Obama. I would have had more respect for her if she ran for president herself.
Deborah , Long Island, NY
I feel it is time to have a woman in office. And I agree that Oprah failed her women fans big time……..We women need to stand together, this country has been managed by men long enough.
Robyn, Middletown, OH
Now, I want to tell you a story that might help you in the months ahead. I hope to christ you take it to heart, because it doesn’t take a prophet to see where things will go if you DON’T.
Once upon a time, in a similar historic moment, Branch Rickey of the Brooklyn Dodgers told Jackie Robinson in 1947:
“Jackie, we’ve got no army. There’s virtually nobody on our side. No owner, no umpires, very few newspapermen. And I’m afraid that many fans may be hostile. We’ll be in a tough position. We can win only if we can convince the world that I am doing this because you’re a great ballplayer, and a fine gentleman.” (from The Official Site of Jackie Robinson)
Robinson had to prove that he could single-handedly integrate Major League Baseball, and in doing that, he had to put up with EVERY bigot and loudmouth in the National League. He was spat on. He was jeered. He was treated in the most humiliating and degrading manners that opposing teams and their fans could think of. Wikipedia:
Throughout the season, Robinson experienced harassment at the hands of both players and fans. He was verbally abused by both his own teammates and by members of opposing teams. Some Dodger players insinuated they would sit out rather than play alongside Robinson. The brewing mutiny ended when Dodger management took a stand for Robinson. Manager Leo Durocher informed the team, “I don’t care if the guy is yellow or black, or if he has stripes like a fuckin’ zebra. I’m the manager of this team, and I say he plays. What’s more, I say he can make us all rich. And if any of you can’t use the money, I’ll see that you are all traded.” When other teams, notably the Cardinals, threatened to strike if Robinson played, NL President Ford Frick let it be known that they would be suspended.
On April 22, 1947, during a game between the Dodgers and Philadelphia Phillies, Phillies players called Jackie a “nigger” from their dugout, and yelled that he should “go back to the cotton fields.” Rickey would later recall that the Phillies’ manager, Ben Chapman, “did more than anybody to unite the Dodgers. When he poured out that string of unconscionable abuse, he solidified and united thirty men.” Baseball Commissioner Happy Chandler admonished the Phillies and asked Chapman to pose for photographs with Robinson as a conciliatory gesture….
And he bit his tongue and stifled his rage. He took his “revenge” by winning, and that the Dodgers did. In 1955, with several players now on the Dodgers, and black players showing up on rosters all over the league, the Brooklyn Dodgers — led by Jackie Robinson — won their first and only World Series against the Yankees — whose fans had been among the worst offenders.
Two months later, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a bus. Coincidence? Perhaps. But the fact is that Jackie Robinson integrated Major League baseball by keeping his cool. Martin Luther King kept the civil rights movement non-violent. And now progressives need to adopt some of the spirit of Jackie Robinson.
Take your satisfaction from beating them at the ballot box. Not in the alleys, and not in blogosphere debates. Don’t rise to the bait. Don’t let the agents provocateurs get a rise out of you. Because we stand on the cusp of a new day in American politics. And we cannot allow racism and sexism to get in the way of that. (Racism and sexism in reverse, too, by the by.)
If Jackie Robinson could take all that (and much more) and keep his head for the greater cause, then so too can you take much less baiting in service of the Greater Good. And, after November, you can call ‘em all the names you want — if that is your inclination.
As all good lions know: First you make the kill. THEN you divvy up the zebra.
We need to bite our tongues and bide our time — and remember that baiting us is ALL that they really have, so they’ll be desperate to use it. Guaranteed. And Republicans ARE master baiters, never forget that.
Finally, Frank Rich noted in today’s New York Times:
CONTEMPLATING the Clinton-Obama racial war, some Republicans were so excited you’d have thought Ronald Reagan had risen from the dead to slap around a welfare deadbeat.
Never mind that the G.O.P. is running on empty, with no ideas beyond the incessant repetition of Reagan’s name. A battle over race-and-gender identity politics among the Democrats, with its acrid scent from the 1960s, might be just the spark for a Republican comeback. (As long as the G.O.P.’s own identity politics, over religion, don’t flare up.)
Alas, these hopes faded on Tuesday night. First, the debating Democrats declared a truce, however fragile, in their racial brawl….
Yes, but he’s right: they don’t have anything. Anything, that is, but the race and sex cards, so look for GOP operatives to leave as much grafitti with their $1.69 spraycans as they possibly can. Progressives can and WILL win, if they can exercise some of the discipline of Jackie Robinson: refuse to rise to the bait. Refuse to be drawn in to long internecine warfare over these issues. We must make common cause, or they will divide us, and defeat us. And that is all that they have.
Just remember that imaginary line from the great Anti-Capra film that’s been played in Hell every Christmas since 2000, “It’s a Horrible Life”:
Every time you rise to the bait, Karl Rove drowns another puppy.
Courage.
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