This times infinity plus eleventy squared
I’m posting Tim Wise’s latest screed in full because it’s just that good.
*NOTE: PLEASE RE-READ THE TITLE OF THIS ESSAY BEFORE GOING FURTHER. NOTICE, IT IS AIMED AT THE WHITE RIGHT. NOT ALL WHITE PEOPLE. ANYONE WHO THINKS THIS ESSAY IS “ANTI-WHITE PEOPLE,” AS OPPOSED TO THAT SEGMENT OF THE WHITE COMMUNITY THAT IS RIGHT WING, CANNOT READ PLAIN ENGLISH. PLEASE TRY AGAIN.*
_____For all y’all rich folks, enjoy that champagne, or whatever fancy ass Scotch you drink.
And for y’all a bit lower on the economic scale, enjoy your Pabst Blue Ribbon, or whatever shitty ass beer you favor.
Whatever the case, and whatever your economic station, know this…
You need to drink up.
And quickly.
And heavily.
Because your time is limited.
Real damned limited.
So party while you can, but mind the increasingly loud clock ticking away in the corners of your consciousness.
The clock that reminds you how little time you and yours have left.
Not much more now.
Tick, tock.
Tick, tock.
Tick.
Tock.
I know, you think you’ve taken “your country back” with this election — and of course you have always thought it was yours for the taking, cuz that’s what we white folks are bred to believe, that it’s ours, and how dare anyone else say otherwise — but you are wrong.
You have won a small battle in a larger war the meaning of which you do not remotely understand.
‘Cuz there is nothing even slightly original about you.
There have always been those who wanted to take the country back.
There were those who, in past years, wanted to take the country back to a time of enslavement and indentured servitude.
But they lost.
There were those who wanted to take us back to a time when children could be made to work in mines and factories, when workers had no legal rights to speak of, when the skies in every major city were heavy with industrial soot that would gather on sidewalks and windowsills like volcanic ash.
But they lost.
There were those who wanted to take us back to a time when women could not vote, or attend any but a few colleges, or get loans in their own names, or start their own businesses.
But they lost.
There were those who wanted to take us back to a time when blacks “had no rights that the white man was bound to respect,” – this being the official opinion of the Supreme Court before those awful days of judicial activism, now decried by the likes of you – and when people of color could legally be kept from voting solely because of race, or holding certain jobs, or living in certain neighborhoods, or run out of other towns altogether when the sun would go down, or be strung up from trees.
But they lost.
And you will lose.
So make a note of it.
Tweet it to yourself.
Put it on your Facebook wall and leave it there so you’ll remember that I told you so.
It is coming, and soon.
This isn’t hubris. It isn’t ideology. It is not wishful thinking.
It is math.
Not even advanced math. Just simple, basic, like 3rd grade math.
The kind of math that proves how your kind — mostly older white folks beholden to an absurd, inaccurate, nostalgic fantasy of what America used to be like — are dying.
You’re like the bad guy in every horror movie ever made, who gets shot five times, or stabbed ten, or blown up twice, and who will eventually pass — even if it takes four sequels to make it happen — but who in the meantime keeps coming back around, grabbing at our ankles as we walk by, we having been mistakenly convinced that you were finally dead this time.
Fair enough, and have at it. But remember how this movie ends.
Our ankles survive.
You do not.
Michael Meyers, Freddie Kreuger, Jason, and that asshole husband in that movie with Julia Roberts who tracks her down after she runs away and changes her identity–they are all done. Even that crazy fucker in Saw is about to be finished off for good. Granted, he’s gonna be popping out in 3-D to scare the kiddies, so he isn’t going quietly. But he’s going, as all bad guys eventually do.
And in the pantheon of American history, conservative old white people have pretty much always been the bad guys, the keepers of the hegemonic and reactionary flame, the folks unwilling to share the category of American with others on equal terms.
Fine, keep it up. It doesn’t matter.
Because you’re on the endangered list.
And unlike, say, the bald eagle or some exotic species of muskrat, you are not worth saving.
In forty years or so, maybe fewer, there won’t be any more white people around who actually remember that Leave it to Beaver, Father Knows Best, Opie-Taylor-Down-at-the-Fishing Hole cornpone bullshit that you hold so near and dear to your heart.
There won’t be any more white folks around who think the 1950s were the good old days, because there won’t be any more white folks around who actually remember them, and so therefore, we’ll be able to teach about them accurately and honestly, without hurting your precious feelings, or those of the so-called “greatest generation” — a bunch whose white contingent was top-heavy with ethical miscreants who helped save the world from fascism only to return home and oppose the ending of it here, by doing nothing to lift a finger on behalf of the civil rights struggle.
It’s OK. Because in about forty years, half the country will be black or brown. And there is nothing you can do about it.
Nothing, Senõr Tancredo.
Nothing, Senõra Angle, or Senõra Brewer, or Senõr Beck.
Loy tiene muy mal, hijo de Puta.
And by then you will have gone all in as a white nationalist movement — hell you’ve all but done that now — thus guaranteeing that the folks of color, and even a decent size minority of us white folks will be able to crush you, election after election, from the Presidency on down to the 8th grade student council.
Like I said, this is math. And numbers don’t lie.
Bottom line, this too shall pass.
So enjoy your tax cuts a while longer.
Go buy whatever you people buy when your taxes get cut: a new car or two, a bigger house, an island. Whatever.
Go back to trading your derivatives, engaging in rampant financial speculation that produces nothing of value, that turns the whole world into your personal casino. Whatever.
Play your hand, and for the love of God play it big. Real big. As in, shoot for the moon big. As in, try to privatize Social Security, and health care, and everything else. Whatever.
At least that way everyone will be able to see what you’re really about.
We’ve been trying to tell them, but nothing beats seeing it with your own eyes, so “Go big or go home,” Bubba.
“Git ‘er Done.”
“Cowboy up,” or whatever other stupid catch phrase strikes your fancy.
Just promise you’ll do more than talk this time.
Please, or as one of your celluloid heroes might put it, “make my day.”
Do whatever you gotta do, but remember that those who are the victims of your greed and indifference take the long view.
They know, but you do not, that justice is not for the sprinters, but rather for the long distance runners who will be hitting their second wind, right about the time that you collapse from exhaustion.
They are like the tortoise to your hare.
They are like the San Francisco Giants, to your New York Yankees: a bunch that loses year after year after year, until they finally win.
You have had this confidence before, remember?
You thought you had secured your position permanently after the overthrow of reconstruction in the wake of the civil war, after the elimination of the New Deal, after the Reagan revolution, after the Republican electoral victory of 1994. And yet, those you thought you had cowed and defeated are still here.
Because those who have lived on the margins, who have been abused, maligned, targeted by austerity measures and budget cuts, subjected to racism, classism, sexism, straight supremacy and every other form of oppression always know more about their abusers than the abusers know about their victims.
They have to study you, to pay careful attention, to adjust their body armor accordingly, and to memorize your sleep patterns.
You, on the other hand, need know nothing whatsoever about them. And this, will surely prove politically fatal to you in the end. For it means you will not know their resolve. Will not fear it, as you should.
It means you will take their greatest strength — perseverance — and make of it a weakness, called losing.
But what you forget, or more to the point never knew, is that those who lose know how to lose, which is to say they know how to lose with dignity.
And those who suffer know how to suffer, which is to say they know how to survive: a skill that is in short supply amid the likes of you.
You, who could not survive the thought of minimal health care reform, or financial regulation, or a marginal tax rate equal to that which you paid just 10 years earlier, perhaps are under the illusion that everyone is as weak as you, as soft as you, as akin to petulant children as you are, as unable to cope with the smallest setback, the slightest challenge to the way you think your country should look and feel, and operate.
But they are not.
And they know how to regroup, and plot, and plan, and they are planning even now — we are — your destruction.
And I do not mean by that your physical destruction. We don’t play those games. We’re not into the whole “Second Amendment remedies, militia, armed resistance” bullshit that your side fetishizes, cuz, see, we don’t have to be. We don’t need guns.
We just have to be patient.
And wait for you to pass into that good night, first politically, and then, well…
Do you hear it?
The sound of your empire dying? Your nation, as you knew it, ending, permanently?
Because I do, and the sound of its demise is beautiful.
So know this.
If you thought this election was payback for 2008, remember…
Payback, thy name is…
Temporary.
Written by Tim Wise.
[Editor’s Note: To learn more about Tim Wise or about the work he does related to white privilege and institutional racism, visit his website, timwise.org. He is one of the most prominent anti-racism activist, writers, and educators. He has spoken in 48 states and on over 400 college campuses. He provides training to teachers, law enforcement officials, media, and corporations on ways to uproot institutional racism.]
lamh32
We’ve been buzzing about this on the Black blogs I frequent for the last couple of days.
I gotta say, that after this I’m half in love with Tim Wise. He has at least one sista (me) who would gladly have his half-white babies…lol!
chopper
lolz. a bit line-by-line for my taste, but i like the attitude.
freelancer
This makes a nice bookend to DougJ’s “Most White People vote for white bigots” post. For what it’s worth, I agree with the data presented in that post. We can say we’re not racists, but push comes to shove, and a lot of white people are instinctively, reflexively white supremacists, or if not that then a mild form of White Exceptionalists. My name’s not Jimmy Pop, but I am a dumb white guy.
sherifffruitfly
All of the various white unity code-mechanisms in our society and our very language have functioned so effectively that Wise is close to the only white person who is willing to say what literally everyone knows: that on the whole, white folks and our bigotry is the primary problem.
rikyrah
Tim Wise is on the money. He just hits all the nerves. they crashed the website.
Angry Black Lady
@lamh32: which blogs are those? i better make sure they are on my RSS feeder. i’ve been swamped at work all week, so i barely know what day it is! i know what time it is, though: wine-thirty.
Comrade Luke
Eh.
Seems like liberals are basically saying “Wait for the white people to die, THEN we’ll see change!”, which is just another way of not having to do anything themselves.
ETA: I should be more specific. I’m talking about the Democratic party, not actual demcorats/liberals, for the most part. Still, I’ve been reading about the “upcoming Democratic majority” for years and it hasn’t made fuck-all of a difference.
Davis X. Machina
“I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land can never be purged away but with blood.”
Original sin, baby. It’s not just for Catholics, you know.
Jimmy Jazz
I have already seen that diary linked as “proof” that “black people are getting ready to kill white people” following the election.
lamh32
@Angry Black Lady:
I don’t know, but I think you are probably aware of Jack and Jill. Rikyrah, one of the “editors” post here fairly often.
The other blogs are little niche blogs, that have a really small group of commenters, and not much dram as the larger ones (and I’d love to keep it that way, so I’m not gonna link to it)
Three-nineteen
I just hope to live long enough to see this happen.
Anya
@Comrade Luke: The teabagger demographic is old, white and bitter. They’re not gonna last long.
Mako
Wow, that was really long and boring. That SF guy did it better-
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2010/11/03/notes110310.DTL&ao=all#ixzz14HW58XjN
Mako
@freelancer:
Dude. People are tribal.
act
Oh yeah, you know how to lose with dignity….how about a little cheese with that whine.
Scamp Dog
I’d like to put a good word in for the 50s. They get remembered as “the good times” because the country as a whole was prospering (even under the dreadful, job-killing, soshialist 90% top income tax bracket). Much of the prosperity went to the lower and middle classes, and even enough went to the Negroes that they could get uppity once the 60s rolled around (clutches pearls, retreats to fainting couch).
Let’s try those 90% tax rates again, and see if we get broad-based prosperity along with it. Then the decade after, maybe we’ll see some more oppressed people fighting for, and even getting, their rights.
NobodySpecial
To quote the great Frank Zappa:
“I’m not black, but there’s a whole lotsa times I wish I could say I’m not white.”
Comrade Luke
@Anya: I agree with that, but I think it’s being taken for granted that non-whites will go – and stay – Democratic.
eastriver
yeah, that’s it. it’s all whitey’s fault. git ‘im.
good plan. done and done.
(brushing dirt off hands)
Capn America
This is really stupid reasoning. Do white right-wingers sometimes make political decisions that the rest of us pay for? Yes. Will the country be better off without them? NO. I would much rather keep our current ethnic composition, with sizable skilled immigration to keep the melting pot sizzling, than suddenly turn us into Mexico, even if that is better electorally for the policies I favor.
Also, ditto on the point that there’s no guarantee that non-whites won’t turn into a mostly right-wing demographic in the future. Just give it time.
leftist
Wise is just stating the obvious.
The Teabaggers saved the Senate for the Democrats. Their open racism brought out the Latino vote.
Bush and Rove had it right in 2000. Split the Latino vote. Why the Republican party seems ready to concede it for good still has me baffled.
kommrade reproductive vigor
@Jimmy Jazz: Shit! I knew there was something I meant to do today.
Ross Hershberger
The most successful long con of all time is the wealthy convincing the ignorant to support their plutocracy. The time will come when that game is up.
OTOH, there’s one born every minute. I wonder what the next con will be.
leftist
@Capn America:
Just look at California.
If it weren’t for the fact that the Republicans alieanted the non-white vote in the 1990s you’d be looking at Governer Whitman and Senator Fiorina.
White people need to get over themselves. Fortunately, most of the younger ones already have.
wilfred
So poor undeducated, working class white people are going to get punished for being the victims of capitalism?
This is the stupidest fucking thing I have read for ages. It shows why people of the left really have little in common with the Democratic Party.
kommrade reproductive vigor
So, no Caucasian right wingers = U.S. becomes Mexico.
As the kids would say: FAIL.
leftist
@wilfred:
They’re punishing themselves.
Capn America
@leftist: I agree, and I would never even consider voting for Whitman or Fiorina, but am I glad that those two white right-wingers exist? Hell yeah, one of them led a website most of us have used at some point or another, and the other climbed her way up the corporate ladder as a secretary (although she crashed and burned as CEO). Those are accomplishments, regardless of what you think of the politics of these individuals. And our nation would be a poorer nation without a lot of these white right-wingers.
leftist
@Capn America:
If you think the world is better off because of Carly Fiorina, I’ve got a HP Pavilion circa 1999 I’d like to sell you.
Corner Stone
I hope he does a better job of communicating in person than this pro forma banality.
Capn America
@kommrade reproductive vigor: Where in my paragraph do I say no Caucasian right-wingers equals us becoming Mexico?
Don’t worry, I get it, reading iz hard.
Mako
No one is gonna take this further? Zappa? .”..suddenly turn us into Mexico?”
Okay then, let’s learn to dance white people-
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOLQkn0VvPcΩ
Kinda wishing for more “Angry” in my Angry Black Lady, but maybe she’s angrier over at her place which is what, something like-
http://www.angryblacklady.com/ ?
Joy
This so reminded me of the daughter of the Iowa Senate Majority leader telling her dad, “you don’t get it. You’ve lost; you’ve already lost. My generation doesn’t care” on the gay marriage ruling there. I’ve thought of that probably twenty or thirty times over the past year. A friend of mine once told me of a saying, “Liberals are always right. They are just right ‘too soon.'” Patience.
leftist
@Capn America:
No. What you did was repeat the typical Teabagger dogwshistle about how too many brown people are throwing the country out of balance.
It’s the usual soft Nazi attack on the immigration reform act of 1964.
The baggers want to take us back to the Immigration act of 1924. Of course the Immigration Act of 1924 also discriminated against the “wrong” kind of white people (Poles, Jews, Italians, etc.) and, personally, I think that 100,000 or so more East European Jews in West Virginia around 1925 or so might have improved that economy of that particular state.
But hey, that’s just me.
Odie Hugh Manatee
Many of these angry old white voters are children of people who went through the depression. Growing up in the 60’s, one thing I learned from my parents was that FDR saved their asses. It was something that was still talked about then, and they were clearly thankful for. I think too many of these kids never heard their parents and relatives talk about FDR or learned the importance of his administration in the economic recovery from the depression. They grew up with the benefits of his work and in their later years they depend on it even more. They want what they can get out of the government while decrying “out of control government spending” and demanding that something be done about it.
Just don’t touch their benefits! They want to go after anything anyone else gets from the government to ensure that they get theirs.
The “Tax Increase” bullshit is proof enough. A majority of the public thinks their taxes went up yet that is not the case. The public also thinks that giving another $700 billion in tax breaks to the rich is a great idea. The best part is that we get to borrow that money and pay interest on it!
You can bet there are a lot of stupid angry old white people who are in agreement with the above.
The only good thing is that they are old.
KDP
I was just reminding myself that social change is incremental. We made a big step forward in 2008; it’s not really surprising that the backlash would be as strong as it has. And, of course, the economy has not helped.
This post left me feeling happy and gratified. I’ve added Mr. Wise to me RSS feed.
Thank you, ABL.
Southern Beale
@leftist:
And as for Whitman, the only time I shopped on eBay (my sister was a huge fan and I decided heck I’ll try it once to see what it’s all about) I realized it was a rip-off: I bid on my item — the only bidder — and then 5 mins before the auction closed someone bid on it at the asking price so I didn’t get it. After the auction closed I got an e-mail from that buyer asking if I was still interested in the item: they’d sell it to me for way more than my original bid but less than what they had paid.
So I knew it was a set-up. It was the owner bidding on their own product because they didn’t want to sell it to me at the price I had bid. They should have asked a higher reserve then.
That just screams conservative rip-off fleece the masses crap to me.
General Stuck
I wish I could be as positive about the outcome this time around as the guy who wrote this, and I largely agree with it for our history to date. I grew up in the south and am well aware of the depths of resentment that resides there, for the civil war and a lot of things since. And they have lost, when push came to shove, but I believe this time, something is different. There is something that goes beyond desperation, almost a commitment, a conscious or unconscious decision having been made.
It was bad enough losing the civil war, but they could live with northern liberal types governing as long as they had input as well, and above all to be lead by their own kind, the white kind. I sense a bowing up of sorts in their small hearts and souls, to not accept other peoples leading and governing them from the top, nor even being outnumbered as citizens. It may play out over a period of years, and they scare enough people to vote for them at least part of the time. But this country is moving forward as the melting pot it began as, and there is nothing that can stop it, that is civilized and democratic. They sense this happening and we see what we have seen since Obama got elected. And it is only the beginning toward a certain reckoning from the certainty that a white majority will not always be in this country.
Don’t get me wrong. I am not saying necessarily there will be a catastrophic civil war under arms. But there will be increased violence, and increased sedition from the right to get their way. I think they have largely given up on long term democracy for this country, unless they can rig it to stay in power, which is what I think was behind the United decision, and they can certainly be defeated again, but the other forces, the good forces in the country will have to quit squabbling amongst themselves like everything is the same as it has always been, because it isn’t and wolves are at the door/
Darkrose
@Capn America:
A website she didn’t have any hand in actually starting.
And given that eMeg poured money into getting Prop 8 passed, the only reason I’d want her to be governor would be because it’d be easy for me to leave a bag of flaming catshit on her doorstep. I loathe that woman, and I’m overjoyed that she not only lost, she got her hypocritical homophobic ass pwned.
Dennis SGMM
Right on!
Fight the power!
Don’t trust anyone over thirty!
And all of the rest of the stupid, powerless, shit we talked back in the Sixties.
wilfred
@leftist:
Bullshit. They are the victims of a class system that has created a perpetual underclass and bequeathed them an unemployment rate of 10%.
This is just more over-determination. Now the poor are deprived even of their own motivation and are subjected to racist projections like this.
The tone of this juvenile post is that of the spurned lover who leaves threatening messages on the answering machine.
greennotGreen
There’s a problem with his “We can wait for the white right-wingers to die” concept.
They may take the world with them.
While the U.S. is farting around with denying science and the noses on our faces, the world is getting warmer. Even if the doomsday scenarios are wrong, hell, even if global warming isn’t happening, the world is not synthesizing oil as fast as we’re burning it, and the U.S. is farting around dreaming about the TV version of the 1950s. Meanwhile, Europe and China are doing cutting edge research in new energy technologies.
In the best possible scenario – the one *without* the planet-killing greenhouse effect – the U.S. will be left in the dust as a second-rate country for decades, maybe centuries to come.
MikeJ
@Joy: There’s a reason why “premature anti-fascist” became a term describing the left.
kommrade reproductive vigor
@Capn America: Explain, if you can, how an absence of white right wingers, will suddenly turn us into Mexico. Here, let me give you what you wrote just in case you forgot:
Do white right-wingers sometimes make political decisions that the rest of us pay for? Yes.
Will the country be better off without them? NO. I would much rather keep our current ethnic composition, with sizable skilled immigration to keep the melting pot sizzling, than suddenly turn us into Mexico
bootsy
There isn’t a single right-winger, white or otherwise, who has ever contributed anything of value to the U.S.A.
Darkrose
@Comrade Luke:
I think it’s more that the Republicans are doing everything they possibly can to make sure that non-whites vote Democratic.
kommrade reproductive vigor
It is possible to be a poor uneducated working class white person without being an evil minded bigot. Honest. I’ve met them.
MikeJ
@kommrade reproductive vigor: I can explain: when another cultural group comes along to hate, the previous group of immigrants are declared white. The Irish weren’t white when they started swarming over here. After a while, they were.
The right’s hatred of Islam is their way of whitening hispanics.
leftist
@wilfred:
Most of the teabaggers aren’t poor.
They’re elderly upper-middle-class people who want to gut the public school system, break the teachers union, and eliminate government programs they themselves benefit from.
They’re not victims. They’re selfish assholes who have more loyalty to their little suburban gated communities than to their country.
In fact, if given a choice between seeing the USA suceed as a mulitcultural nation and seeing the USA fail, they’d rather see it fail.
Old line Republicans had some redeeming qualities.
Most of the teabaggers are just old segregationists or northeastern white ethnics who don’t want to see the New Deal they benefited from benefit their grandchildren.
Mako
@General Stuck:
Oh good, weighing in. Paragraphs, people generally uneasy.
@greennotGreen:
“We’re all doomed. Doomed I tells yah!”, checking in. Thread has potential.
General Stuck
@Mako:
If this means something, I have no idea what it could be.
leftist
@MikeJ:
Yep. The Irish got promoted to “white” in 1924 when they passed the Immigration Act. It allowed unrestricted immigration from Ireland but not from Southern or Eastern Europe. And it banned Japanese immigration altogether.
Mako
@MikeJ:
The right’s hatred of Islam is their way of whitening hispanics.
Interesting, kinda goes against the thread of the article but who can blame you for not reading it, really boring, but interesting idea, I can see a blog article on it.
C Turner Joy
What a load of shit. Color doesn’t matter. There will simply be more shades of corrupt assholes that will grab harder for more. There will always be an underclass and their overlords in this society. It’s built that way.
And to think that when the minorities of today become the majorities of tomorrow that people will suddenly stop with the greed and the rapacious “I got mine, get your own, fucker” attitude is dangerously naive. I must have missed the social utopias that exist across the parts of the globe where there isn’t a white majority.
People suck. They’re avaricious and mean. And as soon as this ruling class is gone another one will rise in its place.
But you keep waiting for that day to come. You keep waiting for your turn. Someone will give it to you, I’m sure. Someday.
Maybe in heaven.
leftist
@Mako:
The problem is that a lot of the Teabaggers actually believe Mexicans are increasingly converting to Islam.
I kid you not. I’ve actually had conversations with them.
“Muslim” is teabag code for “not white.”
Mako
@General Stuck:
No worries, mate. You are uneasy.
Capn's Panties
There is no need, Capn, unless you’re still expecting a check from the Whitman campaign, to keep recycling her talking points.
She had nothing to do with starting eBay, and there was precious little she did during eBay’s whirlwind growth that was remarkable. She merely wore the CEO label. eBay was a first mover and the only real player in its market segment and therefore had an overwhelming advantage over other competitors. Growth was going to come regardless, as long as whoever was at the helm wasn’t an utter imbecile. (Perhaps for her, not being an utter imbecile was the real accomplishment of her eBay tenure!)
One of the stupidest moves she did make as CEO was to spend $4 billion dollars of eBay’s money to buy an internet phone company, which proved to be one of the worst blunders in recent technological history when it was recently revealed that said phone company doesn’t own the rights to its own technology, and is thus largely worthless.
Angry Black Lady
@lamh32: Ha! I like it. And yeah, I lurk at Jack and Jill.
General Stuck
Jill Clayburgh RIP
wilfred
@leftist:
I don’t know any teabaggers. I’m referring to working class white people, who may or may not be teabaggers but are certainly victimized by capitalism.
To me the only struggle that exists is that between classes.
This is what I object to:
No one from the working class would ever write such a thing.
Capn America
@leftist: As someone who is very much the wrong kind of brown, I don’t want to see our immigration policy returned to what it was in the early 1900s. BUT I don’t think 8 million illegal immigrants in this country have the same economic benefit as the millions of legal immigrants. Sorry. I’d much rather see immigration to the US from Europe, the Middle East, South Asia, East Asia, South America than I would from Mexico and Central America. You know why? Because the people from the former group are professionals, people who improve our medical, engineering, and scientific expertise just by coming here. The day laborers from Mexico, not so much. Sure, they do jobs that Americans don’t want to do, but we should have them here only out of necessity and not assume that their rapid population growth is automatically a good thing. At some point, millions of under-educated immigrants who live in their own Spanish-speaking communities will come back to bite us, the same way that never really dealing with massive poverty in Appalachia and the Rust Belt is coming back to bite us.
Dennis SGMM
@leftist:
So there’s no way that they could just be a bunch of old people who at some level realize that they’re frail and vulnerable in ways that they’ve never been before in their lives. And there’s no way that they could even be future shocked on top of the aforementioned to the point that they’re behaving irrationally.
Naw, let’s just call them assholes.
Mako
@leftist:
Dude, you cannot believe the people i have had conversations with, there was this cat from Tennessee, we were hanging out down in Boquias, this was before they shut down the border, I really don’t know why they did that, you’d have to walk days thru the stinking desert even to attempt to cross there and then you’d have to get past the Park Police, and this fella actually argued that bacon was roughage.
leftist
@wilfred:
Well, as a working class white person myself, can just I inform you that you don’t speak for me?
Thanks.
And Tim Wise is addressing the Teabaggers, not working class white liberals.
Working class white people screwed themselves in 1968 when they voted for Wallace. They screwed themselves in 1980 when they voted for Reagan.
Why should people lie about that?
Mnemosyne
@Capn America:
You need to get yourself to Chicago and Boston to take a look at those “professionals” coming over from Poland and Ireland who work here illegally. Unless they were professional lawn-cutters or drywall-hangers in their home countries, they’re no more “professionals” than the illegal workers from Mexico and South America.
waldenpond
Conservatism isn’t going to die off. Minorities will gain market share with growth but that does not equal the legislative strength to kick Goldman out of the govt but good luck with that. So if they succeed, what? Minorities aren’t monolithic. They are more socially conservative (remember the vote on Prop 8 in CA?)
Phoenix
Nice thought. Unfortunately many people will die if we just wait to run out the clock like that. De-funded health care will needlessly kill and cripple people by the thousands. Lack of climate legislation or meaningful energy reforms will create unimaginable carnage over who knows how long. The lack of any kind of educational system, neatly destroys any opportunity for entire generations of kids.
Yeah, the boo-hoo boomers will eventually ride their motorized rascal scooters of privilege into that big Denny’s in the sky, but they’ll leave a staggering amount of destruction behind them. And, especially with climate change, they may easily “win” long after they’ve died of a massive heart attack.
I’d say we need to be less “graceful losers” and much better fighters. The labor movement of the ’30s, civil rights movement, and nearly every other progressive movement in this country that succeeded at anything, wasn’t afraid to get dirty, take risks, and win at all costs.
We tend to move between election cycles like the damage is just contained to 2 or 4 years. As if, sure you won this time, but we’ll get you… Some day. Or if it accumulates, it’s not significant enough to destroy the nation itself. But decades of conservative rule has done massive structural damage to the country and I don’t think it can withstand much more. The rest of the world moves forward and we sit here and piss away lives, resources and time that we don’t really have.
So yeah, it’s a pretty essay. Very moving and all that. But I sure as hell don’t have time to wait around for a demographic shift. And I don’t think we as a nation have that kind of time either.
Angry Black Lady
@Mako: I’m too tired after the election to be angry, and work is exhausting.
leftist
@Capn America:
At some point, millions of under-educated immigrants who live in their own Spanish-speaking communities will come back to bite us
You mean the same way my lower class Polish speaking great grandparents came back to bite me?
Nope. I don’t think so.
The Northeast (dominated by southern and eastern European immigrants) is richer and more liberal than the more Anglo parts of America.
FWIW, if the ruling class didn’t outsource professional jobs to India and China, they’d want more professional immigrants.
You’re aiming at the wrong targets.
Mexicans? The more the merrier. But that’s just my opinion.
Mako
@Capn America:
Do you have a webpage? If not, start one now. Cuz i would like to read that.
leftist
Speaking of Mexican immigrants, after watching how they organized rallies of a 500,000 and a million people in 2006 and breath the life back into May Day, I think they have a lot to teach us.
The white working class would do well to learn how to organize like that.
And Mexicans also live, on the average, two years longer than white people. Maybe we can also learn how to eat the right foods from some of these poor immigrants.
Capn America
@Mnemosyne: well then the same applies to them as to the Mexican illegal immigrants, ie we’re happy to have them but don’t think that they are the future of the nation. The future of the nation is the engineers who come to Boston from China, or the math whizzes who come to Chicago from India.
Linda Featheringill
@kommrade reproductive vigor:
You’re right. All of us get to make decisions. We get to decide if we are going to be kind to others or not. Good and bad come in all flavors: all colors, all economic levels, and all degrees of sanity.
And no matter what racial-socioeconomic-religious-ethnic group you are born in, you get to make that decision. That is free will. And we have it.
Mako
@Angry Black Lady:
I hear you. Kinda screwed yourself with the name, eh? I’m thinking if I ever start a blog it will be something like “Mildly Pissed Off Most Of the Time, Really Angry Sometimes, Most Days Just Getting By… uh… white dude.
blogreeder
This piece by Tim is about the Manilow thing, isn’t it?
You guys lost big time.
Litlebritdifrnt
this made me cry, Literally. It is that good.
Angry Black Lady
@Mako: If you read my “who am i” page, you’d understand the meaning behind the name of the blog. And there are easily 150 angry posts.
I do so enjoy when people make assumptions. It’s fun.
So in answer to your question, no, I didn’t screw myself with the name.
Go ahead and start that blog though. It’s fun and hard work and requires more than the occasional pithy comment.
leftist
@Capn America:
The best way for America to encourage more educated immigrants from Asia would be to STOP ACTING LIKE A FUCKING POLICE STATE. Foreign grad students coming to America are more often than not treated like potential terrorists.
And Mexican immigration and H1Bs are seperate issues. If the US wants to stop outsourcing and bring those Chinese engineers here, fine. But the guy picking fruit isn’t taking the place of some future Nukular engineer.
Capn America
@Mako: lol maybe someday soon, thanks for the compliments.
@leftist: I agree with you on both counts, the Northeast is very liberal and a great place to live partly because of its rich tradition of immigration. And the reason we don’t have so much legal immigration of professionals is because professionals here don’t want to face competition (free trade for thee, not for me).
But let’s say 100 years ago, someone had written an open letter to the Boston Brahmins that their days of oppressing the Polish and Irish were over and that in the future our country would be much more Catholic and better off for it. How would we view this person in retrospect? Would we say “way to stick it to the man, you tell those close-minded Anglos!” or would we say “this sounds kind of douche-y, plus the Catholic influence hasn’t exactly made our politics more liberal”? I think it’s the latter.
General Stuck
@Angry Black Lady:
I did, and look what I got stuck with.
Mnemosyne
@Capn America:
You mean the ones who accept $35,000 a year for a job that used to pay $70,000 a year because that salary sounds pretty good to them, and manage to put engineers and math whizzes with 15 more years of experience out of work?
Immigration is a good thing when done right, but don’t fool yourself into thinking that the only underpaid and exploited workers out there are the ones who come over the border from Mexico. Corporations are using those immigrants from India and China to keep your salary down, and they’ve been allowed to do it since Clinton expanded the H1-B program thanks to the poverty-stricken cries of Silicon Valley who just couldn’t run their billion-dollar companies if they had to pay their programmers market rates.
JenJen
@Mako: That piece is bad-ass! Thanks for linking that.
Mnemosyne
@blogreeder:
I take it that you are independently wealthy and living on your own island in the Caribbean. Because otherwise, you lost big time, too. Good luck putting out your own fires and homeschooling your kids when the massive layoffs of government workers hit your state next year.
Oh, and better take a home first aid course, too, because if the fire station is closed due to budget cuts when your kid starts to choke, you’ll be just as shit out of luck as these parents were.
leftist
@Capn America:
But let’s say 100 years ago, someone had written an open letter to the Boston Brahmins that their days of oppressing the Polish and Irish were over and that in the future our country would be much more Catholic and better off for it. How would we view this person in retrospect?
HL Mencken did just that.
Read his essay “The Anglo Saxon.” He comes right and out and say “look at the south. It proves the inferiority of the Anglo Saxon race.”
We usually remember HL Mencken as a great example of a conservative libertarian.
leftist
“Such devices, of course, never have the countenance of the Anglo-Saxon minority that is authentically superior, and hence self-confident and tolerant. But that minority is pathetically small, and it tends steadily to grow smaller and feebler. The communal laws and the communal mores are made by the folk, and they offer all the proof that is necessary, not only of its general inferiority, but also of its alarmed awareness of that inferiority. The normal American of the ‘pure-blooded’ majority goes to rest every night with an uneasy feeling that there is a burglar under the bed, and he gets up every morning with a sickening fear that his underwear has been stolen. . . .
“His political ideas are crude and shallow. He is almost wholly devoid of esthetic feeling. The most elementary facts about the visible universe alarm him, and incite him to put them down. Educate him, make a professor of him, teach him how to express his soul, and he still remains palpably third-rate. He fears ideas almost more cravenly than he fears men.”
—H.L. Mencken, “Americans,” first published in the Baltimore Evening Sun, July 16, 1923
leftist
“The Anglo-Saxon American[‘s] history is a history of recurrent outbreaks of blind rage against peoples who have begun to worst him. . . . Theoretically launched against some imaginary inferiority in the non-Anglo-Saxon man, either as patriot, as democrat or as Christian, they are actually launched at his general superiority, his greater fitness to survive in the national environment. The effort is always to penalize him for winning in fair fight, to handicap him in such a manner that he will sink to the general level of the Anglo-Saxon population and, if possible, even below it.”
H.L. Mencken
Elie
I was watching ESPN briefly tonight and thought, Wow, this is like our newscasts. The whole frame, tone, characterizes our politics, social information and everything else in between
I was passing by a channel on reality shows, “Housewives… of this and that” and I could check out the mood, the spirit of the thing and recognized this…
I was thinking of the Balinese shadow puppets — way more sophisticated, but used to give people a frame, a system for understanding the forces that controlled their lives..
Let me toss this out as a possible scenario: We are being played by some pretty sophisticated but manipulated media tools.
The passion and craziness of the right and the left are being played out using ritualistic characterizations and personalities to be lightning rods for the passion and motivation to actually act on shit. O’Reilly and Beck and others give vent to millions through vocalizing what they think… less need to act on it — still needs to be watched, but our rightwinged, racist brethren have a voice. Without that, so much more dangerous, even though the tightrope walks incitement from time to time…
The left has its voices kneecapping the progressives and Obama. “Don’t want these lefties getting too big for their britches and thinking change they want can come faster than a certain pace we can deal with up in heah”… so lets just slow this boy on down and toss him an anvil or two — not from the right, where everyone would expect, but from the left — “see, he aint even on top of his own folks”…
The keyboard brigades bang it out and the proles at home watch the teevee reality shows and the mock rage on Hannity, O reilly and Olberman and no one feels they actually need to act on what they are feeling since “These people are saying what I think — I am therefore validated”
This is major kibuki — not real anything… but a vent, an outlet, a pressure release valve
Its a way to bleed off the passion and the motivation to actually DO anything…
Malcolm Gladwell had an article in the New Yorker about the difference between real activism and mobilization for change such as you saw in the civil rights movement, and the phone it in, keyboarding that replaces ACTION.
I believe that is where many of us are, unfortunately. I love blogging and am not against time with it, but it cannot replace putting activist “boots on the ground”. But we have been lulled and the masses are further turned off by the contentious and personal attacks, which turns them away from engaging anything and loops them back to escape — home decor, sports center and more Housewives
We are playing to the Kibuki put before us and while I cannot prove that we have been lulled into these patterns of though a replacement for the true motivation for change, I would recommend that we be highly suspicious of all these predicable, roles and critiques we see played out so obviously and strangely reassuringly — the white, old, poor bigots, the predictably perfectionistic and idealistic lefties who will not support anything but the perfect…
Just too perfect for my taste and too convenient, too able to reassure that there is not need to really examine or take action… its all being said, right?
Bob Loblaw
This was probably not the post to be dropping that line, Tim Wise. Although his emo cred just jumped off the charts.
/guarantees that Tim owns a Che Guevara t-shirt
General Stuck
I like Mexicans, and live amongst them. They work hard as anyone anywhere ever has, and though they may not be highly educated, there are more important qualities to being good citizens than simply education. They are salt of the earth, most of them, with strong commitment to family and faith, and poverty can come in many forms. The worst, I think is poverty of the soul, and the financially poor often are rich that way. A lot of educated, and rich people, despite their money, are fairly poor in that department.
Of course, all people have bad apples amongst them, the worst imo, are the ones in three piece suits that thieve without remorse, nor personal consequence and walk around with the haughty arrogance of white entitlement.
I don’t want a country of only white aristocrats, nor foreign brainiacs only. I want a healthy population of folks that exemplify humility and the grace that comes with genuine gratitude. We are way short of that, imo, in this land of milk and honey.
Mako
@Angry Black Lady:
Wait, are we angry now? I thought we were getting along. It was a fucking joke. You know, like people chuckling together over common misfortunes or some shit.
Jrod the Cookie Thief
@wilfred:
Bullshit!
Who the hell are you to dictate what the working class will do? Do working class people never ever comment on their tendency to buy and consume cheap, shitty beer? I guess the hundreds if not thousands of times I’ve heard comments and jokes to that effect from my working class friends and family were just hallucinations.
Does the working class not… oh wait, it’s a fucking troll. How silly of me. Carry on.
asiangrrlMN
Had to reply before reading all the comments because this post really hit a nerve. All of them, as stated upthread. I have dug Wise since his White Privilege piece, and he continues to impress me with his willingness to call a…cracker a cracker. I have stayed away from the blogosphere since the elections because I’ve been too enraged (taking over for ABL, I guess) to engage. This was the perfect piece for me to ease my way back into the late night shift.
Plus, I’m doing NaNoWriMo. That shit takes some time.
@Mako: Yeah, I liked that letter, too. However, I like this one more because it’s aimed at the people who most deserve the ire.
blogreeder
@Mnemosyne: I think I left a word out, I meant to say you guys lost it big time.
Mako
@General Stuck:
I like Mexicans, and live amongst them. They work hard as anyone anywhere ever has, and though they may not be highly educated, there are more important qualities to being good citizens than simply education.
You know what really pisses me off? Fat people on airplanes.
Mnemosyne
@asiangrrlMN:
I’m bad. I didn’t write last night. Now I’ve fallen behind and I have to get caught up.
But have I turned off the internet, gone into the other room, and put on my headphones? No, I have not. Feh.
General Stuck
@Mako:
I don’t much care for people who get sloppy drunk and post on blogs.
morzer
@General Stuck:
Seems like someone needs a mak(e)over, dunnit? Plus a new battery for the brain function.
robertdsc-PowerBook & 27 titles
I think this essay is dumb.
Mako
@Capn America:
You are welcome, hey you know PBR is a hipster beer? Really, it is, kids with weird political ideas and tight pants and silly hats drink PBR cause its ironicaly cool. And cheap.
Mnemosyne
@blogreeder:
Then I am confused by what your meaning was.
asiangrrlMN
@Mnemosyne: Don’t think of it as catching up. Just think, “I’m going to write a paragraph.” Once you do, you know you’ll want to write more. And, why do you have to go to another room to write?
@General Stuck: How is Charlie taking the elections? Not too badly, I hope. (And yes, that was a hint for another picture).
mclaren
@Capn America:
Tough tit. Demographics show white people will be a minority in America within another generation.
For my part, what matters are the essential values of rule of law, common human decency, skeptical critical thinking, rationality, the scientific method.
White people have abandoned those essential values in favor of mindless superstition and authoritarian Mussolinismo and macho faith-based self delusion.
So fuck white people. Let the Asians and Latinos run America. Right now they’re upholding the essential values of Western civilization better than the white people are.
alwhite
Of course, Tim is assuming that the masters of the universe will not be able to subvert some number of these groups. Thinks about it, they have made middle-class whites work & vote against their bets interests with such ease. Why do you believe that they will not also be able to pull this trick off with enough hispanics/blacks/asians to maintain their control. Who knows maybe they will use poor whites as the boggy man one day.
It is always better to be a house boy than a field boy, if enough field boys think they can please master enough to be allowed to work in the house then our masters can control the whole plantation.
General Stuck
@asiangrrlMN:
repost
Charlie is setting the table for a democratic comeback
leftist
@alwhite:
Of course, Tim is assuming that the masters of the universe will not be able to subvert some number of these groups.
That’s actually what Bush and Rove were trying to do in 2000. Anybody remember how Bush used to pretend he could speak Spanish?
It was fairly smart politics. Split the more conservative Latinos off and recruit them into the Republican Party.
Bush and McCain even tried to push through immigration reform in 2007. The Teabaggers in some respects emerged from the racist coalition that stoped BUSH from reforming immigration.
Now they’re coming back to bite the Republicans.
Rebecca
@leftist:
Yup. As far as I can tell, my grandma is a teabagger and love her though I do, that pretty much describes her to a T.
(Well, she’s not an asshole. But she is supremely deluded. She still bears a grudge against FDR from when she was a kid during the depression.)
freelancer
@General Stuck:
@morzer:
Mako is “special” and speaks in Zen Koans, he is like the Alvin Greene of BJ as interpreted by Wonkette.
I seem to have snuck by you then, on occasion.
+7
Phoenix
@mclaren: It’s not a white people thing actually. Given wealth and the clear opportunity to royally screw their fellow humans over, members of any and every race, gender and religion will take the shot. Happily.
Yeah, the majority of people screwing the country are rich, whites, but it’s really dumb to think conservatism is somehow innately white.
Also, “white people believe…” really? You know them all, do you? Is that like saying “black people believe…”? Because I’m pretty sure either statement is idiotic.
Mako
@General Stuck:
Yeah. You’re probably not gonna fit in here then.
mclaren
@alwhite:
And yet…what happened to all those slavemasters?
Gone, baby, gone.
Those house boys and fields boys are free. The slavemasters are history.
History wiped them out. They’re gone. No mas, baby. They didn’t win. The slavemasters lost, and they lost big-time.
Today’s erstwhile masters will lose just as big-time.
blogreeder
@Mnemosyne:
I know you guys are upset and all but it sure looks like you’re losing it. Didn’t this gallup poll indicate only 20 percent would like a liberal agenda? President Obama has to move towards the middle for the other 80 percent.
Mnemosyne
@asiangrrlMN:
I kind of wrote myself into a corner the other night, so now I’ve pulled the Writer’s Toolbox back out and found a non-sequitur that might get me back on track. (I’m writing a period piece, so I had to discard all of the suggestions that involved airplanes and telephone calls.)
And I have to go into the other room to write because that’s where the bed is and writing on the laptop while I’m sitting up in bed is very cozy, especially since I get to let the cats come in and keep me company.
ETA: The Writer’s Toolkit
arguingwithsignposts
I am shocked, SHOCKED that a certain commenter has not shown up in this thread.
ETA: And it’s not *me*
mclaren
@Phoenix:
Here’s a fact you can take to the bank, buckaroo: in America in 2010, whenever you hear some particularly insane bullshit being spouted by a group of people, you can pretty much guarantee that those people will be white.
That wasn’t always the case.
But today, it pretty much is.
General Stuck
@freelancer:
the emphasis is on “sloppy”
General Stuck
@Mako:
yawn
asiangrrlMN
@waldenpond: You mean the one in which by that same exit poll, the group to vote the largest AGAINST Prop8 wuz mah people, the Asians? Who outnumber the blacks in said state? Who got no mention of the fact that they were the most progressive ethnic group on the matter (according to the same flawed exit poll. Hey, if blacks were getting flamed for it, Asians should have been getting mad props by the same reasoning). Who was the only group to vote over 50% against it? Hm. Doesn’t sound so socially-conservative to ME.
@General Stuck: Charlie looks fired up and ready to go. He will have to take my place, then.
@Mnemosyne: Ah. Yes. The dreaded corner. Just think of it as an opportunity to start again. And, I admire you for doing a period piece. I stay away from those like the plague.
morzer
@freelancer:
Bit of a harsh view of koans there. The guy’s hardly Nansen with the kitten.
Matt McIrvin
I want to believe this, and I’ve said as much myself in the past, in different words.
But is it true? Once upon a time, Irish people weren’t white. Now they are. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if most of the brown people in that demographic wave just get end up redefined as white so they can be co-opted by the white right and pitted against black people, just like always.
arguingwithsignposts
@Mako:
to Gen. Stuck
You really need to lurk moar before making comments like that.
Lesley
It will be nice to see the passing of the old racist white dicks, but I’m not naive enough to believe human beings will be or are any better than these miserable fucks who treat black people and hispanics like shit.
One of my colleagues married a black man and got disowned by her entire Chinese family, including her mother. But they would have disowned her if she’d married a Caucasian because many Chinese hate everyone who isn’t Chinese.
Meanwhile the white old racist fucks hate the Chinese as well as the blacks.
They have so much in common.
Oh it’s so much fun isn’t it.
Mike Kay (Team America)
here’s a question:
Will the part of the blogosphere who loathes HCR join Boenher to kill implementation of HCR? And if not, why not considering their hatred of insurance companies.
I ask because I read a bunch of post today with usual suspects still grinding their teeth and foaming over HCR.
Mnemosyne
@blogreeder:
Good thing we don’t have any ongoing problems in this country — like, say, crumbling bridges, massive state budget cuts, banks foreclosing on houses that don’t belong to them, unemployment over 10 percent, or a bad economy — that the Republicans are planning to make even worse than they already are.
Since we don’t have any problems, we can just look at politics like the latest sports game and you can come over and gloat like a Yankees fan because your team rulez and our team droolz ha ha ha wait till next year loozerz!
Wow, just imagine if we did live in a country that had major ongoing problems and you spent all of your time acting like politics was a game that didn’t ever affect people’s lives by, say, causing their child to choke to death because there weren’t any paramedics nearby due to state budget cuts.
That would be really pathetic, don’t you think?
Bob Loblaw
@Phoenix:
I would love to hear how Wise squares Mexican national politics and socioeconomic conditions with the alleged liberal benevolence of our future Hispanic plurals? Although I suppose that’s all the White Man’s fault too. Because Vicente Fox was forced into working for Coca-Cola and Carlos Slim was forced to act like a monopolist and the Sinaloa cartel are just unwitting pawns of the US military industrial complex.
The constant uphill burden of liberal politics doesn’t begin or end with simple matters of black and white and brown and yellow, there’s an awful lot of green mucking things about.
General Stuck
@arguingwithsignposts:
Lady Rorschach from planet bell curve?.
morzer
@arguingwithsignposts:
Hmm..Randy Moss, perhaps? That guy’s everywhere recently.
Mnemosyne
@asiangrrlMN:
I read a lot of period pieces, so that makes it easier to write one. I really should go now and stop arguing with trolls.
My randomly chosen next line is going to be, “On Tuesday, she asked me the most peculiar question,” but I have no idea what that question is. Wish me luck.
arguingwithsignposts
@General Stuck:
lol. maybe if we’re quiet, she won’t know we’re here. shhhhhh.
wasabi gasp
Hate and greed is as American as a credit card bill for apple pie.
morzer
@Matt McIrvin:
That’s going to take a ginormous cognitive makeover for the old bitter white dead-enders. No sign that they have the smarts for it, much less to do it in time.
Phoenix
@mclaren:
Those slave masters? Well, they retained political power and massive land holdings as well as great wealth in the post-reconstruction South. Easing on through time, they pretty much retained their power, easing into industry, real estate, investing and speculation while managing their inheritances. As a group, the slave masters did and are doing just fine. Instead of owning people outright, they moved on to owning slums or renting tiny parcels of land to farmers or running factories etc.
Sure, some were shot during the war, many others went bust over the years, but as a wealthy power-elite they didn’t go anywhere and certainly didn’t lose out.
And the former slaves? Free? Sorta. They get to play in a game where the rules are written against them. Where the decedents of the slave masters are making sure their schools are un-funded, laws unequal and employment unfair. Yeah, they’re not in chattel bondage anymore, and that’s a good thing. But they’re not free and clear either.
asiangrrlMN
@mclaren: Wait, what, what? I don’t WANT to be supreme overlady of the universe! Oh, wait. Hell, YES, I do! Bring it.
@arguingwithsignposts: He’s saving himself for the wedding night he imagines himself having with ABL.
@Lesley: However, the intermarrying thing is often generational. The longer an ethnicity is in America, the more it assimilates, for better or worse.
I will say that I do think power corrupts so it’s hard to say that with minorities in power (when we are your overlords and overladies), we will be kinder and gentler. I, for one, would like to give that experiment a try, however.
blogreeder
@mclaren:
That’s got to be the racist thing I’ve read. No, wait this is Balloon Juice what am I saying? I do have a question since you seem to be in the know about these things. What is the definition of racist around here? I know what that sounds like but there are multiple definitions floating around. There really are. The first thing in an argument is to establish a Principle of Identity.
Mako
@General Stuck:
Mako admiration good-
Disciples dance-
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87O16F1stXs&feature=related
morzer
@asiangrrlMN:
Wedding night? With ABL? Has anyone notified her?
Yutsano
@Mnemosyne:
But is someone wrong on the Internets? Things do have their priority after all.
@asiangrrlMN: Ssshhh…yer saying those durn facty thingies again. You’ll cornfuzzle the common folk.
JenJen
@Mnemosyne: No, you got it right the first time.
wilfred
Thus cultural hegemony; this is a functional definition This is why the only political consciousness that matters is class consciousness.
Mnemosyne
@Bob Loblaw:
Honestly, I doubt most Latino/a politicians in the US take their cues on how to govern from the country that their parents or grandparents immigrated from (not too many first-generation immigrant politicians, after all, much less ones who immigrated as adults after gaining experience in their own country’s political system).
They’ll do plenty of fucking up thanks to the bizarre dynamics of this country’s politics without have to drag the political feuds of other countries into it.
asiangrrlMN
@morzer: Gaaaaaaha! I must stab you with my rusty pitchfork now!
@arguingwithsignposts: Ah. I was thinking of ABL’s not-so-secret admirer who only showed up once she started posting. Little did I know, you were actually talking about…She Who Must Not Be Named!
@Mnemosyne: Yes, that would help. It’s exciting to ask a question to which you don’t know the answer! Good luck!
Mako
@arguingwithsignposts:
Heh. I know, he appears to be new here.
Mnemosyne
@blogreeder:
Yes, let’s not think about those crumbling bridges or those illegally foreclosed houses when we can come up with a Principle of Conservative Identity instead!
You do realize that you guys have turned into a parody version of those leftists from the 1960s who couldn’t get anything done because they were too busy fighting phantom
sociaIistsMuslimsfascists, right?Phoenix
@mclaren:
Then you ain’t looking hard enough. Or at all.
Oh woopsie. Look at that. It IS idiotic after-all. And racist. The behavior of a sub-group within any race/religion/nationality cannot be attributed to the whole without comitting some pretty heinous jackassery. Yeah, some white folk suck. But within any population there are people who suck. And while their resources and tactics may vary, the impulse to do evil isn’t confined to any demographic.
The “goodness” or worth of humanity is not color-coded for the thinking impaired.
morzer
@asiangrrlMN:
Have you heard the latest about Favre?
mclaren
@Matt McIrvin:
Once upon a time, human sacrifice was common. Now it’s unthinkable.
In medieval times, one of the favorite public amusements was cat-burning. People would gather in a public square and tie a cat to a pole and lower it slowly onto a fire and they’d howl with glee as the cat roasted and carbonized.
Today? Unimaginable. If you tried, a mob of people would drag you down and beat you.
Not that long ago most people were not even considered human: women, poor people, slaves, you name it…all “subhuman.” Today, that doesn’t fly.
You may not believe it, but the hard cold historical facts show that human beings have gotten progressively more humane over the last several thousand years. Violence has decreased exponentially. Acts of torture and mass murder which were taken for granted as part of everyday life only a few hundred years ago would today horrify and disgust the whole of humanity and provoke mass uprisings of outraged revulsion.
You’re looking at things from the narrow and limited perspective of a single human lifetime. Widen your view. History shows that human beings have become drastically more humane over recorded history, and moreover, this process appears to be accelerating.
Modern technology has explosively widened the circle of people with whom we have empathy. It has become enormously more difficult to dismiss someone with a contemptuous sneer “That guy is just a monkey, he’s not even human” when you IM the guy every day or when you can read the blog he writes on the other side of the planet by means of Google translate or when you can watch his subtitled YouTube vlog.
It becomes impossible to claim “those people don’t care about human life like we do” or “they’re just a bunch of animals” when you can watch the guy on YouTube playing with his kids or sitting down to dinner with his wife or walking 5 miles to the nearest well so he can get some unpolluted water for his family to cook with.
blogreeder
@Mnemosyne:
That’s a good analogy. Politics really is like a sports team. Which of the Coke or Pepsi teams we root for doesn’t have anything to do with how the budgets are determined. Only in the government would they cut essential services BEFORE cutting things like salaries, pensions, employees. That choking story you linked to earlier was quite tragic but wouldn’t the budget for the paramedics be determined on a local level anyway?
Phoenix
@Bob Loblaw:
Yeah. People are people. Exclusionary identity politics are a set of wonderful tools to divide people. I know good hard-working liberal illegals and I’ve known others that have dealt drugs. I’ve known white college kids who’d happily take bullets for some unknown homeless person and others who’ve committed some nasty crimes all while grounded in a narcissistic mania.
Hell, I remember listening to a traditional Catholic family with a gender-queer/trans kid, talk about how whatever the kid identified as was fine with them. Because it was clearly God’s will anyway and they’d love their kid no matter what. You just can’t ever assume.
People are just too complicated.
jwb
@MikeJ: But the “whitening” only happens if they eventually change their position on Hispanics, just as they eventually changed their position on the Irish. That was in fact the Rove/Bush strategy. I imagine that they are going to have to change their position, because otherwise they will soon simply become unelectable. On the other hand, they are currently digging a hole that is making it much more difficult, and it is certainly possible to alienate ethnic groups sufficiently that they are alienated for generations.
morzer
@mclaren:
I hate to rain on the parade, but ethnic cleansing, mass rape, torture as an instrument of state policy – those are all very much with us. As for torturing animals – plenty of sick people, including a current NFL quarterback, continue to get their kicks from it. I wish I felt that we had come a long way, that we were never turning back, and that all was hunkydory, but the facts don’t suggest that.
Ed Drone
@Scamp Dog:
The advantage of a high upper tax rate is simply that those who earn that kind of money, in order to save very much of it, have to invest it in businesses, use the deductions available for actually, you know, creating jobs, making things, so to avoid getting the big hit, the taxpayer reinvests in America.
And that’s why the 50s had a pretty good record in terms of prosperity.
I could see going back to something like that, personally.
Ed
mclaren
@Phoenix:
In America over the past 30 years, actually, yes, it is.
Over the past 30 years, white people in America have jumped the shark. They need to clean up their act or GTFO.
If that’s me being an anti-white racist, fuck yeah, baby. I call ’em as I see ’em. And when I look around at the genocidal torturing totalitarian lunatics in America, I don’t see mainly Asians or Latinos or blacks or American Indians.
I see white people.
Look at all the big crimes, the war crimes, the mass murders — one million civilians in Iraq dead. More cancer in Fallujah than after we dropped the atomic bomb in Hiroshima. Torture chambers organized like factories.
I don’t see black guys running that stuff. I don’t see Asians in charge of those factory-like torture chambers in Abu Ghraib. I see white guys.
Yoo and Condi are just about the only exceptions I can see. Everybody else involved in those mind-boggling crimes of mass murder and systematized torture and subversion of our basic civil rights and high crimes and misdemeanors is white.
Mnemosyne
@blogreeder:
You do realize that fire trucks don’t drive themselves, right? That we don’t have robots that put out fires? If you want to put out fires, you need employees, and you have to pay them salaries because most people aren’t willing to run into burning buildings for free.
What planet do you live on where government services magically run themselves without actual people doing the work?
It’s determined on the state level. Better contact your local Red Cross and brush up on your first aid skills, because your Republican governor is going to cut all of those useless paramedics who demand salaries to do their work.
asiangrrlMN
@Phoenix: The original article is not talking about all white people. He even specified it in the opening paragraphs. He is talking about that specific subset, the Tea Partiers and their overlords. In that, Tim Wise is right. They are, for the most part, white.
@morzer: No. That’s the sad, tragic turn to this tale (and I know YOU know about whom I am talking). And, Favre. Are you fucking with me, or has something actually happened with him (like a benching, plzplzplz)?
@Yutsano: Hi, hon! I’ve missed you. How you be? Yeah, I know. Sometimes, I just can’t help myself.
morzer
@jwb:
That’s the core of their problem. Widen their appeal, and turn off a chunk of the old white bigot base. Cater only to the base, and eke out a couple of wins at the expense of much of the next forty years.
Mike Kay (Team America)
@blogreeder:
In what way?
Should he restart major combat operations in Iraq?
Should he let the banking system collapse?
Should he let Wall Street collapse and along with it, pension funds, IRAs, and 401Ks?
Should he repeal John Boehner’s “No Child Left Behind” federal spending bill (see photo)?
Should he let insurance companies resume rescission and denying children coverage due to pre-existing conditions?
Should he remove the post-crash regulations on derivative traders?
Should he reduce the amount on drone attacks on Al Qadia in Pakistan?
Should he roll back George Bush’s left wing prescription drug plan that cost $1.2 Trillion dollars (yes, trillion with a T) that every republican voted for in 2003?
Should he cut all subsidies to red state farmers, and let them sink or swim in the free market?
Which one of these left wing positions should he abandon?
blogreeder
@Mnemosyne:
Principles of Identity are defined here. Funny you should say the right is fighting the phantom socialists when the left is fighting the phantom racists.
Dollared
Late to the party, but who cares about this stupid, racist, sour grapes rant? Speaking as a white person, it is our goddamn jobs to make sure the rest of the white people do not act like scared racists. And we failed.
And Obama so, so, so, so fucking failed. And it’s his day job. And the media’s complicity is only
60% 70% to blame.Obama is a goddamn coward. And that’s why we have to even entertain a stupid “demographics is destiny” rant like this.
I’ll say it another way: Obama saved GM and Chrysler over the vigorous, screaming opposition of Republicans. And Pontiac, Michigan has a new Republican Governor. And Janesville, WI has a new R governor and senator. And Belvedere IL has a new R Senator. And Akron, OH, has a new R senator and governor. Anyone else want to volunteer names and locations of auto or tire plants in those states? they still all voted Republican, because NO ONE HELPED PEOPLE REMEMBER.
People aren’t that goddamn stupid. The Dems, beginning with Obama, simply didn’t fucking do their jobs.
morzer
@asiangrrlMN:
No, I was just wondering if anything intriguing had risen to view. I see that Zygi Wilf had a conniption and nearly, oh so nearly, booted Childress.
Phoenix
@asiangrrlMN:
I’m not referring to the original article but to comments made by someone else attributing all the “bad things” in a America to “white people.” Just to be clear.
morzer
@Dollared:
So you feel that saving the auto industry wasn’t Obama’s job?
mak
Amen ABL, and thank you, Tim Wise. All that angry noise we’ve heard over these past several months has been nothing more than the death gasp of bygone days going by. Last Tuesday was the death grip on your wrist. By 2012, I’m hoping the body will have been long buried.
Ed Drone
@bootsy:
Not true — it’s just that their contributions cost more than they’re worth. Value? Yes, now and then. Cost? Higher than the value given.
They’re cheapskates — stingy, grasping cheapskates.
So, on balance, a negative; but contributions? Yes.
Ed
mclaren
But not nearly as much as even the recent past.
Think of it: ethnic cleansing still occurs, but when you look at the actual numbers, the genocides have progressively decreased. Read the Stephen Pinker article. He lays out the numbers. They’ve fallen off a cliff since WW II. And they’re continuing to drop.
“Torture as an instrument of state policy…[is] very much with us.”
Show me the 10,000 people dying slowly on crucifixes, the way they routinely did in the Roman Empire. Show me the public poles on which thousands of people are being impaled in public, the way they were in the Persian and Ottoman empires.
You can’t.
Julius Ceasar slaughtered 20% of the population of Gaul and he boasted about it. He thought that was a great achievement, and his fellow Romans agreed, and gave him a triumph for it.
Show me the leader who murders 20% of the population of another country today and gets a ticker-tape parade for it.
You can’t.
We’re not living in a wonderful fairytale world, but the world today is orders of magnitude less cruel and less violent than it was just a few hundred years ago.
That’s not optimism talking. That’s cold hard numbers.
Phoenix
@mclaren:
Well at least you’re honest enough to cop to being a racist. I fail to see how being exactly like the people you hate with only the names changed for taste is in any way striking a blow for justice.
Its adolescent at best, vile, repulsive and equally despicable to any other sort of racism and it’s basically psychological self-immolation, but hey, knock yourself out. That’ll really, uh show em.
Yutsano
@asiangrrlMN: Bleah. At least I still like the new gig. And new kitteh haz a favorite toy that makes me laugh to no end: plastic grocery bags. Plus somehow she has decided that one of my counter chairs, which is rather tall, is her new throne. This is fine, except I have no idea how she’s getting up there.
And ABL, luvs ya to death, but this thread is officially too sticky for me. If you throw up another bit of righteous anger I’ll jump on in there, but watching white folk get defensive about their privilege makes me ill.
Mnemosyne
@morzer:
I think s/he’s claiming that it’s Obama’s fault that people in auto industry states just plumb forgot that he saved their asses and if he’d just climbed into the bully pulpit to remind them three times a day, everything would have been hunky-dory. It certainly couldn’t be that they’re a bunch of ungrateful assholes.
And it definitely wasn’t the fault of the Blue Dog Democrats in those districts who ran against the president and promised that if they got back into Congress, they would do everything they could to block his agenda.
And it had absolutely nothing to do with a huge increase of Republican voters who didn’t vote in 2008, but voted this year, or stealth propositions on the ballots to ban sharia law.
Nope, it’s all Obama’s fault, because shut up, that’s why.
asiangrrlMN
@morzer: I don’t follow the team when they are not on the field, so I did not know that about Childress. Eh. Whatever. They suck.
@Phoenix: You are right. I re-read your original post, and I agree with the fact that we can’t wait. That’s the quibble I had with the original post. He mentions that all the baddies die in the end, and I can’t help thinking, “So do many good or innocent people.” Every time a friend said that in the end, the Tea Partiers and their ilk won’t win out, I kept getting stuck on, “Yes, but many many many people will be destroyed in the meantime.” I know two years is not that long of a time, historically, but it can be an awfully long time with our infrastructure crumbling.
@Mnemosyne: Go write! The hatred and the anger will still be here tomorrow. Go! ::makes shooing motion with hands::
Angry Black Lady
@Mako: it’s not you it’s me. i had a shitty day.
General Stuck
@morzer:
I think he is saying that it’s us white people’s job to stamp out 300 years of racism in this country to win this election. So you fucked up morzer, and so did I. And Obama as well for not making folks get off their butts and be responsible citizens and go vote. As well as making other citizens, or the same ones, it gets confusing, remember what happened less than two loooooong years ago.
Mark S.
@blogreeder:
You haven’t read much, I take it.
Mako
@mclaren:
You should do an “Angry, But Not as Insane Angry As You, Irish Name Guy” blog. I’d read it.
jwb
@morzer: The goopers will either have to piss off their base and widen their appeal or promote civil war. I don’t really see the corporate overlords liking the civil war option very much, since it tends to destroy property, and you can never really be sure that the guys you give the guns to won’t turn around and shoot you.
Angry Black Lady
@morzer: who are we talking about? should i lock up my liquor? and by lock it up, i mean drink it.
morzer
@mclaren:
No, they are not “cold hard numbers”. First off, you aren’t citing specific numbers, sources and incidents. You just assume that tens of thousands of crucifixions were the norm under the Romans. They were not. Why don’t you show us the figures, quote the sources? Because you can’t.
Second, you ignore the most obvious response: Stalin was very much in business purging and murdering people after WWII. So was Pol Pot. So were the mass-murderers of Rwanda, the Balkans, our own activities in Iraq and those of our “allies”. How many lives were lost in Vietnam?
More to the point, it’s absurd to say that we don’t kill as many people now that WWII is over. Of course there’s a difference – world wars tend to be rather bloodthirsty affairs! They are, in fact, global. But to artificially separate them from modern history is simply bizarre. But that standard, we might as well just talk about Rome after Caesar finished up in Gaul. After the Gallic wars, the Romans no longer massacred 20% of Gaul. Yay! What progress they made!
If you are going to play this sort of rhetorical game with history, sooner or later people will realize that it is just rhetoric. They can see the atrocities on screen, they know that the world is not a happier, wiser place. We simply make better excuses and deny, deny, deny our fuck-ups, our complicity, our anything but perfected state.
Mike Kay (Team America)
it’s so funny, conservatives:
didn’t pay for “No Child Left Behind”,
didn’t pay for the Iraq war,
didn’t pay for Afghanistan,
didn’t pay for the “Prescription Drug Plan”,
didn’t pay for the $8 billion “Faith Based Initiative”,
didn’t pay for the Trillion dollar tax cuts,
didn’t pay for TARP.
All of it – all of it – was passed with deficit financing. Not a single penny was raised to pay for their expansion of Big Government. But they didn’t say a word about the debt, or deficits, or blowing the surplus they inherited, or the unprecedented spending until they lost office. Now they care. Now they care about the size of government.
At least be consistent. If ya gonna rail against government when a Democrat is president, then you have to be against big government spending when the likes of Reagan and Bush and Tom Delay are expanding government.
KDP
@morzer: I didn’t get that. His complaint is that the Democrats did a piss-poor job of advocating for their accomplishments. Guess it’s easier to get attention with screaming cries of “Nazisociafacimooslimism” and ‘death panels’ than with explanations of “We saved the auto industry and made money on it. We saved the banks and made money on it. We protected the public from insurance company rescissions.” None of that is ‘sexy,’ and it has too many words. You have to think about it. Right-wing, teabagging Christianist don’t wan to think, they want to be told how to live and what to believe. It’s easier, y’know.
@Mike Kay (Team America): Yes! That is what I’d like to see the media asking about, and our elected officials commenting on. But, hey, not sexy, y’know!
Angry Black Lady
@Yutsano: i’ll work up some righteous anger for ya. right now, though, i feel like 10 pounds of shit in a 5 pound bag.
asiangrrlMN
@Yutsano: I DEMAND pics of your new kitteh! I love antics of cats. They never fail to amuse. Glad you’re still liking the new gig. I hope the move you to the night shift soon.
P.S. Seconded. We can haz open thread naow?
@Angry Black Lady: change. He (I’m assuming it’s a he) is quite enamored with you, if we go by the fact that he only started posting after you showed up and how often he posted in said threads. He likes pie an AWFUL lot.
And, throw up an open thread, pleeeeeaz? I’m easing my way back into politics, and I’m already feeling stabby stabby.
morzer
@Angry Black Lady:
Honestly, I really don’t know. I think I am out of the running. As for securing your liquor, your policy is prudent and productive of greater happiness.
Which reminds me, I have some unsecured Blue Moon and it would be a shame to tempt the neighborhood kleptomaniacs. They peer through my windows nightly and prowl around my fridge.
blogreeder
@Mike Kay (Team America):
I don’t know what he should do. Didn’t he say in the speech after the election results that he would be more compromising?
Mako
@Angry Black Lady:
No worries. My comments often rub people the wrong way for some reason. People actually comment on blogs when they aren’t drinking? What’s up with that?
Good to meet you and i will be a reader of your blog at –
http://www.angryblacklady.com/
jwb
Whoever bought and released this latest set of trollbots needs to ask for a refund. They are so lame. Maybe John will get us a better set when he rolls out the new site build.
Mnemosyne
Hey, why didn’t Obama appear at pre-election rallies in places like Minnesota or Wisconsin? I bet if he’d done that the Democrats would totally have won, but he just couldn’t be bothered.
Just think, if he had appeared in person at a rally for Tom Perriello in Virginia, I bet Perriello would have won!
morzer
@blogreeder:
No. He made it clear that he wasn’t going to toss away the things the Democrats achieved (i.e. fuck off GOP, health care reform is here to stay), but that, if the GOP put good ideas on the table, he was open to them. (No change there, and the likelihood of Bigotry Inc having said ideas is somewhere around zero and heading .. well, south, naturally.)
Phoenix
@asiangrrlMN:
I have an unfortunate theory that the further someone is from starving the more they lean towards writing sonnets of protest, rather than storming the streets. I’d like to be wrong about that, because that’s an unimaginable amount of suffering that’s required.
I’ve been there and am pretty close these days, so you’ll find me leaning very much towards the “enough words, on with the deeds,” side of things. I keep finding myself sneering at whatever latest author puts out a book to “raise awareness” or yet another foundation or non-profit built around “organizing” but not “acting.”
It’d also be really nice if we all didn’t need to relive the 1930’s – I get the feeling it wasn’t so great. Also it makes me wonder if the heroes of the ’30s would have done so much if they knew it’d last for such a short period of time. Probably. But it just seems like everyone that died during that struggle did so needlessly if we’re going to do a scene by scene remake of the whole thing.
mclaren
@Mark S.:
Yeah, these guys should read some of the shit spewed out by white extremists like The Convenant, The Sword and the Arm of the Lord. Does the phrase “Great day of the rope” ring a bell?
Hint: it ain’t a clothesline.
General Stuck
I’m going to bed, so we will meet here again tomorrow and figure out the meaning of life, and maybe have time to blog the redemption of mankind to get a brane.
After while Crocodiles
Mnemosyne
@asiangrrlMN:
All right, I’m going, I’m going. G gave up on me and went to bed, so now I have to sit in the comfy armchair instead of getting to write in bed. That’s what I get for arguing with stupid trolls who think that the Magical Infrastructure Fairy will wave her magic wand to fill the potholes on his street, thus bypassing the need for all of those nasty city employees with their salaries and their pensions.
blogreeder
@morzer:
Oh, OK. Thanks for the info. I didn’t hear the whole thing and I got most of it from listening to Norman Goldman.
morzer
@Mnemosyne:
Some trolls just expect bridges to fall from the sky. So far, they’ve been right just once – in Minnesota. All hail Pawlenty, he who brought a bridge down from heaven! Shame that people were like driving on it at the time.
Angry Black Lady
@asiangrrlMN: oh, that moran? pffft.
Mike Kay (Team America)
@blogreeder: I don’t know what he said, I didn’t see it, but if he did, those are just words, no different than Boehner saying he wants to amend the 14th amendment to kick out anchor babies.
but the point stands how does he move to the center if he’s already there. I mean, he kept Bush’s secretary of defense and Bush’s Fed Chairman and promoted Geithner who was Bush’s head of the New York Federal Bank to secretary of the Treasury. The only thing “left” about Obama is that he’s left handed.
asiangrrlMN
@Phoenix: Understood. I sometimes despair at the cycles we go through as a country, but an optimistic friend of mine pointed out that over the long haul (say, our entire life as a nation), things have crept agonizingly upwards. Again, I just hate the fact that in the intense period of recoil, there is going to be a lot of wreckage, and the people who are going to be most affected are, of course, the ones who can least afford to be hit. Same as it ever was.
@Mnemosyne: Yeah! I mean, really! What did he expect? I wasn’t in town when he came to MN. I heard it was a zoo, though, so I probably wouldn’t have gone, anyway. I’m still bummed out that Ratface Pawlenty has magnanimously stated he’d stay on the job until the new governor was figured out. Gee, Timmeh, you mean you’ll put off whoring yourself out to be prez in 2012 (fat chance) to further demolish the state? No fucking thank you.
FlipYrWhig
@Mike Kay (Team America): Well, that’s because what they _really_ care about is big government spending _on people not like them_. That’s just wasteful.
asiangrrlMN
@General Stuck: Night, Stuck. Give Charlie scritches for me, please.
@Mnemosyne: Good luck!
@Angry Black Lady: You have CRUSHED his secret dreams! Now, he must double-down on the idiocy in order to impress you.
Mako
DELETED
blogreeder
I didn’t see Tim Wise FAQ before about racism. Ha. What a dope.
Dollared
@Morzer, it’s pretty simple: Yes, the Midwesterners are pretty ungrateful. You see, you have to remember that Obama f@#$#%ked their union brethren in bailing out the industry, and despite the bailout, they have 15% unemployment. Not only that, but Obama has expressed no interest in fighting for the right to unionize, has not pushed China on currency warfare, refused to fight for a bigger stimulus that might have reduced unemployment to 12%, is trying to illegally expedite even more goddamned foreclosures, and has not explained how we’re ever going to fund enough education to get the poor Midwesterners out of their rut.
He won’t enforce the trade laws, refused to handcuff Wall Street, and refused to demonize the Republicans, who truly are psychopathic demons. He and Harry Reid were too interested in pleasing Brooks & Broder with their dealmaking skills, and now there are no more deals to make.
I’m a broken record. Obama shoulda FDR’ed those bastard Republicans, and he should have laid Wall Street low. He didn’t want to be a fighter, and now he’s got nothing to bring to a fight.
I take that back – there is one more deal to make. And the real goal of every Republican action since 1986, making 15% capital gains and 31% max ordinary income PERMANENT, is about to happen. And Social Security cuts will pay for it.
And yes, it is Obama’s fault. He wasn’t dealt a great hand, but he has played it very, very badly. And millions of people are going to suffer for years as a result.
blogreeder
@Mike Kay (Team America):
Interesting. So you’re saying that President Obama talks liberal but walks center?
Mike Kay (Team America)
and let me make it clear, I love Obama, but I’m a technocrat. That’s why I laugh so hard when conservatives whine about spending: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1bZ-TiX8rA
morzer
@Dollared:
Oh I see. Another bog-standard “Obama should have been the messiah” critique. Why is it you people never offer any coherent explanation of how he could have done these things? You may not have noticed, but FDR is dead, so is LBJ, and so are the majorities and parties they worked with.
Mnemosyne
@Dollared:
You mean he should have sold out one group’s civil rights like FDR did to get enough conservatives on his side to get his agenda passed?
I know we all love the great myth that FDR just made a bunch of great speeches and everyone fell before him, but there was a whole lot of odious horse-trading of minority civil rights that would be absolutely unacceptable to today’s Democrats.
If Obama had been able to get a $2 trillion stimulus passed, but the price was that he would drop his support for DADT repeal, would that have been acceptable to you? Because that’s what FDR did to get the New Deal through Congress, but worse since what he agreed to oppose was federal anti-lynching legislation, which allowed hundreds of murderers to get away with their crimes when local authorities refused to prosecute them.
Don’t get me wrong — FDR was a great man who accomplished a lot. But he did it at a price that was extremely damaging to a lot of Americans.
Mike Kay (Team America)
@blogreeder: what does he say that’s liberal?
That’s liberal? okay. Quoting the bible about being “my brother’s keeper” is liberal. Cool.
Mike Kay (Team America)
@Mnemosyne: you ain’t kiddin. Remember how FDR appointed Joe Kennedy as the first chairman of the SEC.
Today, that would be like appointing Jim Cramer to head the SEC.
Yet the left sees no flaws in FDR. It’s like they have no knowledge of Manzanar.
Anne Laurie
@Capn America:
__
They did, and it is. Look up the best-selling Finley Peter Dunne, during Karl Rove’s beloved McKinley administration, especially the column he wrote mocking a Harvard dean bemoaning the failure of “the flower of America’s manhood” to marry young and start breeding more Anglicans. Dunne said, in so many words, that the Irish and Polish (and German and Italian) immigrants in the Chicago tenements had plenty of kids who would grow up to compete with those few, fine-boned upper-class scions, quite successfully. And it is the grandchildren of Finley’s tenement babies who are now whining “I want my country back!”…
morzer
@Mike Kay (Team America):
The left also forgets that FDR and LBJ led a Southern party, and got key votes from Northern Republicans.
El Cid
Again, the 1960s TeaTards, their Beckist John Birch Society predecessors, even them embarrassing themselves and us on the world scene.
Yutsano
@Mike Kay (Team America):
Or, y’know, those little forced relocation camps for the Japanese during WWII. There’s a hugely powerful memorial in Little Tokyo called Omoide that tells the tale of a city block and the impact of that tragedy. And oh yeah that was all under FDR’s watch.
El Cid
@Mnemosyne: For all the New Deal’s failure to change the status for Africa Americans throughout the South and nation, there were in fact a few achievements:
Mako
@Mike Kay (Team America):
…but I’m a technocrat…
I’m trying to find 0Sx 4 for PPC. Help?
The Republic of Stupidity
@Mike Kay (Team America):
I’m not sure that’s an apt comparison… from what I’ve seen of Jim Cramer, he appears to be nowhere near as smart as Joe Kennedy…
And did you know Joe Kennedy was a major fan of Hitler, up to a certain point… that kinda derailed Joe’s own Presidential ambitions, once folks learned the truth about Adolph… ?
Mike Kay (Team America)
@El Cid: all good things come at a cost. FDR lost 47 seats in the ’42 midterm.
Mike Kay (Team America)
@The Republic of Stupidity: yes, of course I knew. The late great Ted Sorenson once said he knew Joe Kennedy for 20 years and he was to the right of Pat Buchanan.
El Cid
@Mike Kay (Team America): True, but then in 1944 he went on to handily win re-re-re-election, have 57 Senators, and re-took the House by 38.
And he also had a really cool promotional animated cartoon by the animator behind UPA with the assistance of Chuck Jones, the WB guy behind Bugs Bunny et al and was, sponsored by the UAW.
MattR
@Yutsano: I got into a discussion about the Cordoba community center who were both opposed to it because we were at war against them. After spending some time trying to differentiate Al-Qaeda from all Muslims, I switched over to the Japanese internment as an example of overreacting to fear during war that we later regret. Unfortunately their reaction was more of a “well, maybe FDR had a point”. Terrifying, but at least I knew that further discussion was pointless.
@asiangrrlMN: And I am pretty sure neither of them even know who Michelle Malkin is. (Oh, and for added fun this was our conversation on the car ride from the hotel to the office. Nice way to start off 12 hours together)
asiangrrlMN
@MattR: Gah. Yes. This is a handy guide in telling whether someone is worth arguing with or not. Shudder.
Mnemosyne
@El Cid:
Jarvis is, of course, more infamously remembered in California as the author of Prop 13.
dianne
@Lesley:
I believe it will take longer than 40 years – maybe when we all turn sort of a beige- brown and all look just alike. The Republica party will continue to shrink untill it’s a small nugget in the south, a stricly regional party.
Being a child of the south with many relatives still there, you just can’t be anything but a Republican if you live there. Anyone who is not, is drummed out of polite society. They are so invested with what their politics are that it is preached in the churches, schools (mostly private academies) and clubs (all white) and families that it is impossible to be anything else. Add on the viral hate that the internet has provided and you have the makings of many more generations of dysfunction. My brother told me as much 2 years ago. He said anyone with views like mine would have to move. I reminded him that I did move – 25 years ago. I love my great big, beautiful blue state and would live no where else. We got our kids away from the hatred and bigotry and the petty meaness that would have eventually infected them. I still don’t really understand how I never became what I, by all rights, should have been. And there are a few people back there who rose above their surroundings. As the previous writer said, I know some of them.
Howard Appel
Fantastic article. My only regret is that as I am already 56 years old, I won’t be around to see the shock on their faces when it happens.
kay
I see the value in venting, but are we really going to yell at older white people for voting? We did the math. We lost. We’ll continue to lose if we don’t turn out.
My daughter lives with four roommates, all of whom are liberals. She’s the only one who voted, and she’s the least politically engaged person in that house. I think she voted because I emailed her and asked her to check her registration, because I didn’t want her to get turned away if she did show up. I really thought about it before I did that, because, actually, it’s her job to check her registration when she moves, not mine. I spoke with one of her roommates last night and he said, with real shock and dismay, “we lost”. Except “we” didn’t lose. He didn’t show up.
The cavalry isn’t coming. Demographics aren’t votes. OFA isn’t going to save us and Hispanic voters aren’t going to save us and some mythical projected non-voting majority isn’t going to save us. To rely on that easy answer is a dangerous fairy tale, and yelling at the people who DID show up is the definition of futile. They’re not on our side. Obviously.
c u n d gulag
Fuck, I’m not gay and I want to marry this guy.
What a phenomenal piece of writing!!!
Cermet
@wilfred: Are you a total fool or just ignorant? If the later, than learn the truth. So-called lower economic white Americans have been the heart and sole of the racist movement and today, are the backbone of the repub-a-thugs party. Look at all the voters in the Midwest and even the Appalachia folk who have always lost more at the hands of the repub-a-thugs yet vote for their own ecvonomic interest just so nig$rs don’t get anything – and this excludes the Southern racist losers that have, at least, always been honest and open in their racist attitudes. These so-called poor white people have, for the most part, never supported equality of races or tolerance of other peoples, ideas or religions. If you refuse to learn these simple truths, than your ignorance is just stupidly like all repub-a-thugs.
alwhite
@mclaren:
Actually no, the master have gone underground a bit, and have to deal with laws that no longer allow for the actual shackle & whip but the masters of the universe are still with us & the teabaggers are their helpful field hands hoping against hope to be allowed to work in the big house.
alwhite
@Phoenix:
You talk real purtty! Your comment says the thing I wanted to say but couldn’t get quite right so I went with the pithier (and less well written) idea above)
Flugelhorn
HhhOOOOOOOOOOOOOOWWWWWWwwwwwwwllllllling at the moon. Love it.
The Fool
I’m a white southern male and I endorse this message!
I especially loved the whole bring it on section. C’mon you crazy ass teabagger Republicans, try to actually privatize Social Security and Medicare while cutting taxes for the rich. Get squarely on the record to where even you notorious liars can’t spin your way out of revealing who you really are. Your bullshit can’t survive in the long run because it is simply too far from reality. What goes up must come down. And you know what they say:
The harder they come. The harder they fall.
gravie
I love this so much.
JP Hammer
I think race hustler Timmy, who gets paid $4000 a speech, is trying to incite a genocidal race war against white people.
You’re a bad Jew Timmy and you’re going to hell!
lol
Angry Black Lady
@The Fool: that’s what i am going to love about the next two years, watching these fools try to “fix” the economy through more tax cuts. you betcha.
Dollared
@Mnemosyne
Thanks for the history lesson. Do you remember William O. Douglas? He kicked ass on Wall St., for FDR. Do you remember the “Malefactors of Great Wealth” speech? do you remember the bank holidays? Do you remember all the homesteading and anti-foreclosure actions of the 1930s?
Have you ever read the Securities Act of ’33? ’34? They made selling securities illegal, and then said when and how you could do it, with William O. Douglas’ permission. In other words, from 1933 on, Wall Street lived only if FDR allowed it. All Obama has to do is enforce that act. He needs no one’s permission. But he won’t – he is bought and paid for.
Obama doesn’t remember any of that shit. He remembers that Reagan was great, that Wall Street is the engine of prosperity, that Social Security needs to be cut, that nobody’s rich until they reach AGI of $250k (that’s above $300k gross income for most people). He seems to remember that the foreclosure and bankruptcy laws should protect the common people because the banks are supposed to be in a better position to assess market value and market risk.
He flat won’t advocate for working people. Bill Clinton was far, far, far to the left of Obama, at least Clinton could feel pain and could say “if you work hard all your life, you deserve to be treated well.”
The result? A strong words about captial gains treatment of the carry, and the hedge funds pumped $500M into electing Republicans, and it worked. No ordinary income treatment for them! They will pay lower taxes than a bus driver for the next ten years.
I will vote for Obama again. But I now know to expect nothing but a holding action from the General McClellan of 21st century American politics.
PanurgeATL
Beige America is not gonna happen. (I mean, I thought we were into diversity, right?) There’ll always be lots more whites than any other single group, and there’ll be plenty of majority-white states. (Besides, it’s not as if the actual number of white people is falling; it’s just that almost all the growth is coming from non-whites.) Most people will still marry within their own race, FWIW.
You can be a liberal in the South if you live in a big city (or even a suburb). I guess someone’s just gonna have to go out there and re-explain liberalism to people, something that’s simply not happened for decades; from my experience, there are people out there who would listen, and that might make a difference down the line. OTOH, conditions are such even in the big cities that even some of the Freeky Alterna-Peepul here are libertarians (of, I suppose, the better sort–people who’d otherwise be liberals but “don’t trust the government”), so I guess even they’ve internalized the right-wing message somewhat. (Besides which these days lots of Freeky Alterna-Peepul are just neo-squares who like throwback punk rock and kinky sex.)
wes
i always thought that the reason why we’re in this situation is because the majority of voters are the huge number of baby boomers who are averse to change. my parents are baby boomers, and they HATE being told what to do. “i can save you money by switching to comcast, consolidating your phone, internet and cable bills all into one!” and they scream “NO! WE LIKE THINGS THE WAY THEY ARE! WE LIKE OUR $40 A MONTH AMERICAN ONLINE!”
so when my generation, the college-educated-technology-immersed generation becomes 50 or 60, and our numbers and urge to vote are unsurpassed, that’s when we’ll “get our country back” from the crazies who are currently yelling the loudest.
independent
Let’s not entirely overlook a couple of historical facts, 1) the herd mentality – right, left, nationalist, socialist, white, and non-white, and 2) the ‘silent majority’ – a large number of people largely ignored and ignoring. I don’t think you can neatly put either group into either category.
mike
Those who voted tea party/republican were not wishing to return to 1950 with its racially restrictive laws.
What they were seeking was a government that would follow the precepts of the constitution. Smaller government, lower taxes for all, fiscal responsibility.
No government can continually borrow and spend more money than it takes in. A day of reckoning WILL arrive. The only reason America became a strong nation was because of responsible spending and taxation, and jobs.
The government cannot give money to anyone unless it has already taken it from someone else. There is no free lunch, someone pays for it.
Tim Wise also doesn’t understand that as young people age and grow in maturity they come to a point where they understand things differently. Many people I knew in my twenties voted strictly democrat in order to gain more protection for workers and unemployment to provide a safety net in hard times. Those are all good things. But now that they understand the folly of providing a government dole to people who may not deserve it they vote conservatively. They comprehend the gov cannot continue with wasteful spending. Those “young people” he now speaks of so affectionately will in twenty years wise up and he may be in for a big surprise when he learns there are dark skinned people voting conservatively in contradiction to his predicted behavior. One more thing. A great majority of “latino people” are catholic. The church has the duty of convincing them to vote for those who oppose abortions. When thirty-somethings become fifty-somethings with grandchildren, they appreciate the value of life. When they enter the ballot box, they see the faces of their precious grandchildren and find they are no longer able to vote for the candidates who favor abortion. There goes your progressive majority, “they went and got old on ya’.”
Maybe one day Tim Wise will actually become “wise”.