Yes, We Klan!

It is curious that physical courage should
be so common in the world and moral
courage so rare. ~ Mark Twain

Ku Klux Klan parade, Washington D.C. 1925
It used to seem impossible that this could have happened the
first time. Now it seems entirely possible it could happen again.

Si Si Kleagle.

It is perhaps a defining irony of the moment that as the bigotry, the racism, the sexism, ageism, xenophobia and other hatreds of “the other” have increased exponentially in volume and virulence, those self-same bigots have increasingly given themselves a pass on the issue.

Here’s another irony in all of this: those that scream loudest about the sanctity of private property, and yowl into the supersonic octaves where dogs will lie writing in pain when loggers or drillers or mountaintop removers are prevented by “environmental wackos” these are the selfsame harpies shrieking their song of hatred at the proposed Muslim Community Center in Manhattan.

You notice that I didn’t call it the “Ground Zero Mosque.”

Because that begs the question in a particularly pernicious “Frank Lunz”-style manner. You know, like “Death Tax.”

We’re not going to reject the politics of hate until we reject the language of hate that they spew and flood like lava from Mauna Kea.

A man who carries a cat by the tail learns
something he can learn in no other way.
— Mark Twain

I need to back up. Dick Cavett —  who was born in the county of my conception, Buffalo County, Nebraska –did not take Horace Greeley’s advice, and, unlike myself, ended up on the East Coast, specifically in New York City. (Cue Alicia Keyes.)

As a venerable and respected member of that hirsute community, Cavett wrote an Op-Ed published online by the New York Times last night (which doesn’t mean that Cavett wrote the headline. See “Mysteries of the Universe Revealed #412: Headlines,” 9 Dec 09.):

Real Americans, Please Stand Up

All this talk about the mosque reminds me of two things I heard growing up in Nebraska.

I had a 6th grade teacher who referred to American Indians as “sneaky redskins” and our enemies in the Pacific as “dirty Japs.” This abated somewhat after I asked one day in class, “Mrs. G., do you think our parents would like to know that you teach race prejudice?” She faded three shades.

The rest of that year was difficult.

As a war kid, I also heard an uncle of mine endorse a sentiment attributed to our Admiral “Bull” Halsey: “If I met a pregnant Japanese woman, I’d kick her in the belly.”

These are not proud moments in my heritage. But now, I’m genuinely ashamed of us. How sad this whole mosque business is. It doesn’t take much, it seems, to lift the lid and let our home-grown racism and bigotry overflow. We have collectively taken a pratfall on a moral whoopee cushion….

And the sad part of this is that you can’t find it on the Memeorandum front page. You can find yowls of hate aimed AT Cavett’s Op-Ed, but for our Festival Of Hate, it’s a teensy footnote, four layers down the Outline of an ocean of venom:

FreeThinkerNY / Weasel Zippers:
True Face of Imam Rauf to be Revealed by Newly Discovered Audio Tapes… This fraud’s mask must be torn off. The American people must be made aware of the truth about the “moderate” Ground Zero Mosque organizers that Leftists are so vociferously supporting … Via the great champion of freedom, Pamela Geller @Atlas Shrugs…

Discussion: Outside the Beltway and Nice Deb

RELATED:
Ace / minx.cc:
Unmosqued: Steve Emerson Unearths Tapes of “Moderate Bridge-Building” Imam Rauf

Pamela Geller / Atlas Shrugs:
Imam Rauf’s Newly Discovered Explosive Audio Tapes

–Discussion:
William Teach / Right Wing News: Snap! Dick Cavett Weighs In On 9/11 Debris Field Mosque

Which is a symptom of how bad it’s gotten.

But I didn’t bring up Buffalo County, Nebraska whimsically or casually. Dick Cavett seems steeped in a very strong prohibition that you find there: You don’t brag about your accomplishments. And I appreciate that. But sometimes, the reality of the lesson is lost if the significant details aren’t filled in. As Walter Brennan was wont to say, “No brag; just fact.”

I’ll try to fill in the missing portion of Cavett’s story, the piece obscured by all the rational, moral, ethical moderate arguments that he puts forth his op-ed.

Dick Cavett had moral courage, I’ll grant him that. It’s not easy to stand up to your elementary school teacher. When I was in Nellie Iles [sometimes "Isles"] Elementary, Third Grade, Laramie, Wyoming, the most feared teacher in the school was Mrs. Johnson, who frequently launched into tirades of exquisite ugliness.

[* Nellie Iles Elementary is, evidently, gone the way of the passenger pigeon. It seems to have had an asbestos problem. Oh joy.]

‘Nellie Iles’ was originally built as the ‘South Side School’ in 1920 in Laramie,
Wyoming Photo: PTA and the school band posed in front of the school , 1923

One day, after slogging through the New Year’s snows, selling Boy Scout Jamboree tickets (which Cub Scouts were roped into, since it was THE big fundraiser of the year), Mrs. Johnson became angry that someone had knocked on her door trying to sell those tickets, concluding with it’s illegal, it violates the Green River Law.

I didn’t know exactly what the Green River Law was, but I KNEW that we weren’t engaged in anything illegal. Every muscle in my body clenched. After an agonizing eternity,I challenged her. I walked up to her desk and said (I recall it as if it were on a Bluetooth HD DVD): “Why don’t you mind your business?”

I meant to say “Why don’t you mind your OWN business,” but I was so scared that the word dropped out somewhere between my third-grade brain and my third-grade tongue.

Long story short: After a day of torture, the Principal and my Parents met with the Teacher in the Principal’s office, while I sat, helplessly in the school secretary’s office, noticing all the little colored dingbats that festooned her calendar, marking every possible holiday known to Humankind.

The verdict?

Why DIDN’T she mind her own business? She was required to RETRACT her statement to the class. We still didn’t know what the Green River Law was. (Hint: it restricts door-to-door peddlers in communities all over the US.) And I was admonished not to mention the uncomfortable truth to my classmates that I had been right and she had been horribly wrong — lest the good order and discipline of Nellie Iles, and, yea, verily, the entire Albany County School District One be shaken to its foundations (can’t be having a third-grade kid being more morally correct than the Authority, the Teacher).

It is instructive to see the forces of dumbassitude through history. In May 1936
the South Side School was renamed “Nellie Iles” after a beloved teacher and
principal. This was her home in 1936 (U of Wyo. Digital Collection). But the
Laramie City Council and the School Board inexplicably spell it “Nellie Isles”
– which are a non-existent chain of islands – as a quick Google Search
will prove.   All that AND asbestos!

She was (administratively reprimanded, but the kids weren’t told that) and I spent the final winter and spring of 1965 as the object of Mrs. J0hnson’s sadistic retribution. I toughed it out by being more stubborn than her, but I still don’t like to think of  it.

And at the end of that year, Mrs. Johnson retired*. (I didn’t find this out until years later)

I was a tough little sonofabitch.

[* Note: Her error was that the 1931 anti-peddler law, the "Green River Ordinance," first passed in Green River, Wyoming, did not and does NOT apply to charities. She was old enough to remember its passage.]

So, I understand a little about the moral courage Dick Cavett is talking about. It takes an act of sheer fearlessness in the face of overwhelming social inhibitions to speak up in the face of dangerous wrongness. The tension in that room must have been thick enough to cut with a knife.

But what I don’t think Cavett understands is how rare that is. ALL of us who ever stood up to City Hall even when the consensus was — as reflected in the eyes of my Third Grade classmates’ WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING? SHUT UP! — the Morally Courageous have to stand up.

You see, the part that Cavett leaves out of his story is the LOOK in the eyes of the students. Whether they agree with you or not, you have stepped into Berserker Territory, and they ALL side with the Teacher that YOU need to shut up and stop causing trouble. Conformity was more important that correctness (even in the face of a monstrous charge), and even the other Cub Scout in the room looked at me with an admixture of horror and  naked fear.

We forget that there is a long history of NOT speaking up at critical moments when monsters seize the reins of power and the streets run with the blood of their political enemies. Speaking up is not easy. Remaining silent is easy.

I had, and Dick Cavett had, that peculiar capacity that Mark Twain notes as a rarity: to ignore the pleading eyes of the assembled class and speak out ANYway. But in the face of the kerfluffers’ Twist-O-Rama, one thing means another and DON’T SPEAK OUT!

Transported to a surreal landscape, a young girl
kills the first woman she meets and then teams up with
three complete strangers to kill again.

– Marin Co. California newspaper
TV listing for “The Wizard of Oz”

I haven’t explicitly talked about the Muslim Center controversy, because I imagined that it was just another attack of the Rightie Kerfluffers — like today’s “Wikileaks Founder accused of RAPE!” kerfuffle that collapsed even as it was rising to the top of the Memeorandum front page.* That happens a LOT these days: a story is screeched into the Blogosmear™ and the kerfluffers apply that acid wash of instant analysis that invariably proves whatever the latest Reichtie talking point happens to be. Then the story collapses, and there is never so much as an Emily Litella “Never mind!”

[* Look! Even as I was writing this, the kerfluffery began to implode.]

Litella: “What’s all this I hear about Soviet Jewelry?”

The problem is that this particular firestorm hasn’t gone away, and increasingly forms the fabric of the upcoming election — a barbaric background noise that only a cynic would characterize as the conscious, intentional (and, therefore, evil in the precise sense of the word) program of certain political forces who WANT the November election to be about the lowest prejudices and hatreds in the Dark Side of the American soul.

The Bonfire of the Hannitys, other words.

Well, call me a cynic.

The historical parallel to the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s couldn’t be more clear.

And the conflation of unfocused hate probably isn’t accidental. “Illegal aliens,” become “Mexicans.” “Muslims” becomes BOTH Arabs and Blacks. Think of those famous Islamic Terrorists like Muhammed Ali (who was given seven kinds of hell for converting to Islam and changing his name from Cassius Clay). Or Kareem Abdul Jabbar (not as bad, but ditto, changing from Lew Alcindor). Or the phony “Black Panthers” kerfluffing that collapsed like a startled soufflé a couple weeks ago, when it became apparent that nothing had happened, and the same two seconds of film weren’t structurally sound enough to bear the weight of all that hatred. Or the attempted conflation of Shirley Sherrod’s husband with the original Black Panthers via his ‘Sixties work for the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee.*

[* The SNCC was, if you will recall, opposed by the KKK, sometimes fatally.]

Rocket Ismael. Ahmad Rashad. Shaquille O’Neill. Mike Tyson. And, of course, Louis Farrakhan has been the “go-to” guy whenever any white commentator wants to invoke “reverse racism.” He was Jeremiah Wright before Jeremiah Wright — who attended Lyndon Baines Johnson when surgery was performed on the then-president at Bethesda Naval Hospital in 1966 – was cruelly sacrificed to the racist mob, after a lifetime of service to his community and his country.

Too bad Wright isn’t a Muslim. Think of how happy that would make the hate-conflationists. Black=Muslim=Terrorist=Illegal Alien=Mexican=Other.

Like the hatriot I will quote below, they spend years “studying” Islam to hate it. To fear its deadly scimitar across one’s throat. To see its dread spectre behind every tree and every Bush.

Or consider this from “Fox Nation” on August 10th …

NFL Player Puts Islam Above Team

Once again we see Islam being brought into the workplace. Today we learn that Minnesota Vikings safety Husain Abdullah, has decided that fasting and playing at a lower level, is more important than giving it his all for the team.

Even while sprinting in the heat and humidity during drills, sometimes in full pads, Abdullah is adamant about his faith. He will not allow himself so much as a cup of water until the sun sets and before it rises.

“I’m putting nothing before God, nothing before my religion,” Abdullah said. “This is something I choose to do, not something I have to do. So I’m always going to fast.

Read The Full Article

Yes, FauxNation[al disgrace] links to some blogger to give it plausible deniability. You know, that “First Amendment” freedom to promote racist xenophobia. The link is to some blog that prominently features “lan astelem” in the sidebar. What does that mean? From that noted expert on Arabic, Michelle Malkin:

Michelle Malkin » 9/11 pledge: “I will not submit”

Sep 11, 2006 … The above phrase in Arabic is “lan astaslem.” It means “I will not surrender/I will not submit.”

Read the guy’s bio, down on the right sidebar. He has this little ALL CAPS statement in the left sidebar, up top:

PLEASE HELP ME CONTINUE TO EXPOSE THE THREAT OF SHARIA IN THE WEST

This is the mindless bigotry, the hive-cleansing viciousness of the Spanish Inquisition, of the Salem Witch Trials, not a thing that anyone sane would shed blood over, but bloodshed is the inevitable outcome, should we NOT speak up.

Not all Muslims speak Arabic. Not all American Muslims are Black. But somehow it is all being conflated into that toxic brew that came to dominate American politics from its inception in the bad economy of WWI and its aftermath, beginning in 1915 into the mid-1920s.

That same brew that later immolated German politics beginning in the late 1920s.

It can be argued that economic good times doused the fire in the USA, and that the Depression fueled the conflagration in Germany. Either way, Klannish politics depends on unfocused anger and resentment, usually highest in times of economic distress.

Anger is a natural and understandable human reaction to economic hard times, and we ARE in economic hard times right now. It is tragically ironic that the self-same forces that brought on the wasteland of the present day’s dismal economic landscape are the forces feeding and exploiting the mindless scapegoating that the anger is being directed against.

See if this rings a bell:

McVeigh was the middle child in a blue-collar family in rural New York state, and he expressed an interest in guns from an early age. He graduated from high school in June 1986 and spent a short period at a local business college. Around this time he first read The Turner Diaries (1978), an antigovernment, neo-Nazi tract written by William Pierce. The book, which details the truck-bombing of the Washington, D.C., headquarters of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), fueled McVeigh’s paranoia about a government plot to repeal the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which guarantees the right “to keep and bear arms.”

The second coming of the Ku Klux Klan was notable for its anti-immigrant hatred, expressed against all minorities, notably including Catholics. It was billed as Ultra-religious, and Über-American … er, ALL-American. They billed themselves as super-patriots, promoters of Pure, Wholesome Americanism:

William J. Simmons founded the second Ku Klux Klan in 1915.

Three events in 1915 acted as catalysts to the revival of the Klan:

• The film The Birth of a Nation was released, mythologizing and glorifying the first Klan.
• Leo Frank was lynched near Atlanta after the Georgia governor commuted his death sentence to life in prison. Frank had been convicted in 1913 and sentenced to death for the rape and murder of a young white factory worker named Mary Phagan, in a trial marked by intimidation of the jury and media frenzy. His legal appeals had been exhausted.
• The second Ku Klux Klan was founded by William J. Simmons at Stone Mountain, outside Atlanta. It added to the original anti-black ideology with a new anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic, prohibitionist and antisemitic agenda. Most of the founders were from an Atlanta-area organization calling itself the Knights of Mary Phagan, which had organized around Leo Frank’s trial. The new organization emulated the fictionalized version of the Klan presented in The Birth of a Nation.

We need to consider the case of the noted Jihadi Terrorist Cat Stevens, who was apprehended by the FBI attempting to fly to Nashville to talk to Dolly Parton about working on his first new album in decades.

Cat Stevens aka Yusuf Islam in 2008

The hysteria over Cat Stevens in English tabloids continues to this day. Evidently a charity Yusuf had worked with was “linked” to some “terrorist” activity and he made an ill-chosen statement regarding the Fatwa issued against Salman Rushdie.

You know: guilt-by-association and the destruction of human lives to further political policy debhates [sic] — which is what all our public discussion has degenerated into these days. Nobody pretends that political discourse isn’t as toxic and poisonous as the Hydra’s blood these daze.

Nobody with access to sight, sound, smell, taste or touch, that is.

And now a seemingly decent man, an American is being slurred and smeared and all the while the yowlers are screeching that they’re not “racists.” Haw haw haw.

guess they got their wish

The degree of self-referential self-regard and the “absurdity” of the charge were never so much in evidence as on last night’s Faux Nooz™  ”Red Eye,” where Ann Coulter sat in on the orgy of self-righteous kerfluffing, working the controversies of the day as earnestly as the most enthusiastic fluffer ever fluffed.

But we come back to Dick Cavett: it’s not enough to be rational. It’s not enough to be ethical, or moral, or intelligent, or to state self-evident truths to the large audience of sympathetic ears. No: this is a time for moral courage, for “Real Americans” to “Stand Up” and be counted.

Rev. Jeremiah Wright and President Bill Clinton at 1998 White House Prayer Breakfast

We have to actively seek them out, and denounce their hatred, their religious intolerance, their vicious arrogation of our national conversation. Speaking out meaningfully isn’t a passive activity.

But that’s a scary prospect.

And, like in third grade, when the fear in those 29 pairs of eyes screaming silently “DON’T DO IT” was a palpable, physical presence and pressure, it won’t be easy to speak truth to madness.

But it’s got to be done.

Or we will surely be overwhelmed by those whose battle cry is “Yes We Klan!”

(Moral) Courage.