A Cancer Of The Soul
19 January 2007 5:00 pm by Taylor Marsh
A Cancer Of The Soul
guest post by Ed Encho
Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without a devil. Usually the strength of a mass movement is proportionate to the vividness and tangibility of its devil. -Eric Hoffer
During a week that began with a national holiday in honor of murdered civil rights leader The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. who was a true American hero, it’s fitting to take a look at the insidious use of racism as a tool. It is the most kick ass club in the bag for the Republican party and is invoked often, both overtly and subltly for the sole purpose of fueling the hateful demagoguery that continues to tear down and pollute what passes for discourse in this sick new American century.
While it can be said that those who are not Caucasians generally face an overall more inclusive society than in the days preceding the civil rights movement there is still a very dark and ugly undercurrent of racism that thrives in this country today. This undercurrent of animosity runs especially deep with conservatives and it is the preferred currency of trade amongst those seeking to climb the ladder in the Republican party hierarchy.
The GOP has successfully played the race card in order to capitalize on resentment over desegregation since the sixties. That was the decade upon which nearly ALL of the cornerstones of the Republican temple of hatred were laid. Along with civil rights, women’s rights, liberalism, hippies, rock music, sexual freedom and the need to smack down any who would dare to question corrupt and unprincipled authority if not the establishment itself all sprung from the Sixties. But that is a topic for another time – it is the insidious use of racism that we are going to look at here.
The Republicans have institutionalized racism since the days of Richard Nixon’s infamous Southern Strategy. It was a plan that sought to divide and conquer by fomenting racial enmity. It was immensely successful in charting the path to GOP power by capitalizing on the festering resentment in the deep south over their being forced to accept their ‘devils’ as equals instead of relegating them to subhuman status. The epitome of the charlatan as politician that was Ronald Reagan tapped into this when in 1980 he shamelessly pandered to the peckerwoods in Philadelphia, MS the site of the 1964 murder of three civil rights workers. The film Mississippi Burning was based on that tragic incident where animosity and raw hate combined in brutal murder that opened the eyes of a nation in torment to the cruelty and repression within. The Gipper used this carefully chosen forum to continue the sly peddling of the demagogy of race baiting that would form the cement for the next quarter century of disastrous conservative rule.\”I believe in states\’ rights. I believe we have distorted the balance of our government today by giving powers that were never intended to be given in the Constitution to that federal establishment. preached Dutch to the delight of hordes of sweaty, red state knuckle draggers assembled at the Neshoba County Fair.
The importance of Reagan’s speech was the inclusion of the code word ‘states rights’ being newspeak that fanned the flames of racism. The late Lee Atwater admitted as much in a 1981 interview with historian Alexander P. Lamis that was published in his book Southern Politics in the 1990s:
Atwater: As to the whole Southern strategy that Harry Dent and others put together in 1968, opposition to the Voting Rights Act would have been a central part of keeping the South. Now [the new Southern Strategy of Ronald Reagan] doesn’t have to do that. All you have to do to keep the South is for Reagan to run in place on the issues he’s campaigned on since 1964… and that’s fiscal conservatism, balancing the budget, cut taxes, you know, the whole cluster…
Questioner: But the fact is, isn’t it, that Reagan does get to the Wallace voter and to the racist side of the Wallace voter by doing away with legal services, by cutting down on food stamps…?
Atwater: You start out in 1954 by saying, \’Nigger, nigger, nigger.\’ By 1968 you can\’t say \’nigger\’ – that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states\’ rights and all that stuff. You\’re getting so abstract now [that] you\’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you\’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.
And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I\’m not saying that. But I\’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me – because obviously sitting around saying, \’We want to cut this,\’ is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than \’Nigger, nigger.\’
Atwater incidentally was the man who as a campaign strategist for Poppy Bush was behind the lowball sleaze of the Willie Horton commercials that helped to bring down Michael Dukakis in the 1988 election. One of Atwater’s protégés was an ambitious and amoral man of some renown in recent history, a man named Karl Rove who continued Atwater’s legacy by using an orchestrated clandestine slime campaign based on innuendo that Senator John McCain had fathered a black child to lay waste to his momentum in the 2000 GOP primaries and catapult George W. Bush into a lead that he would never relinquish. Under the destructive influence of Bush’s Brain American politics have disintegrated into an orgy of slander, racism, religious discrimination, swift boating, slander, fear, hatred and animosity of a level that has now begun to feed upon itself, growing exponentially with each diatribe by a hired propagandist.
On Martin Luther King Day, the extremist rabble rouser Michael Weiner, more commonly known as Michael Savage, used his nationally syndicated radio show to launch into a standard racist diatribe:
But basically, if you\’re talking about a day like today, Martin Luther King Junior Day, and you\’re gonna understand what civil rights has become, the con it\’s become in this country. It\’s a whole industry; it\’s a racket. It\’s a racket that is used to exploit primarily heterosexual, Christian, white males\’ birthright and steal from them what is their birthright and give it to people who didn\’t qualify for it.
Savage and his fellow fascist talkers routinely offer up chunks of bloody red meat to fill the bellies of the beasts. Their vitriol is like music to the ears of the reactionary right that has made race baiting into an art form. That hatred when combined with their media dominance and finely tuned echo chamber stokes the fires of bitterness at a society run badly off course that has cast aside so many for profit. Recent events and economic trends have made it possible to make racism itself more inclusive so as to make any non-WASP a potential target.
In the aforementioned film, Mississippi Burning Agent Rupert Anderson played by Gene Hackman, a good ole boy who had renounced the racism of his southern upbringing mused aloud:
Where does it come from, all this hatred? You know, when I was a little boy… there was an old Negro farmer liveddown the road from us, name of Monroe. And he was… Well, I guess he was just a little luckier than my daddy was. He bought himself a mule. That was a big deal around that town. My daddy hated that mule. His friends kidded him that they saw Monroe ploughin\’ with his new mule… and Monroe was gonna rent another field now that he had a mule. One morning that mule just showed up dead. They poisoned the water.
After that there was never any mention about that mule around my daddy. One time we were drivin\’ past Monroe\’s place and we saw it was empty. He\’d just packed up and left, I guess. Gone up North or somethin\’. I looked over at my daddy\’s face….and I knew he\’d done it. And he saw that I knew. He was ashamed. I guess he was ashamed. He looked at me and he said…\”If you ain\’t better than a nigger, son, who are you better than?\”
But after all, this is the big melting pot of America and the racist hatred has immense crossover appeal due to recent events as well as the immense structural damage to the prospects of working American families due to the class warfare that began under the sainted Reagan. The economic resentment over the gutting of the economy by outsourcing, offshoring and importing cheap labor to as the talking point goes ‘do the jobs that Americans won’t do’ has created a cottage industry for trashing Mexicans and illegal immigrants. We have unaccountable yahoo paramilitary forces patrolling our borders, violent anti-immigrant video games, nutball celebrities like Ted Nugent appearing at Republican inaugural events decked out in the Confederate flag and spewing epithets and inflammatory language, and an over the top hard core flaming racist freak like Colorado’s Tom Tancredo who is actually contemplating running for president in 2008. Maybe he can give George Felix Allen a jingle to see if he is interested in joining the ticket since he’s looking for a new gig now.
The terror attacks of 9/11 gave rise to a wave of anti-Muslim sentiment that has been used to justify the ruinous lost war in Iraq and the looming kickoff to Armageddon that will commence with the imminent bombing of Iran. There are many in this sick society who would thrive on a true war of civilizations, many of them among the leaders of extremist elements of the powerful Religious Right who do their best to stir up anti-Arab bigotry among their sheep as though it were some sort of divine mandate. Using the fear and loathing of those terror attacks have allowed the Bush-Cheney-Rove Axis of Evil to consolidate their power, codify torture, destroy civil liberties and strip habeas corpus from the law.
The right-wing demagogues have made hay with breeding distrust and fear
to the extent that every Arab or Muslim living in this country must fear for their lives. They are on the hit list by both a renegade government as well as the pitchfork bearing mobs who are incited by the rants of pigs like Glenn Beck, Savage, Malkin and every other hater with a soap box and a sly wink from the right-wingers who own the major media. Look at the idiot Republican Virgil Goode who savaged newly elected Democrat Keith Ellison who was a Muslim for asking to be ‘sworn in’ in the traditional photo op on a Koran rather than a bible. Never mind that the Koran actually once belonged to Thomas Jefferson
. Democracy and any history other than the revisionist brand matters nothing to these lunatic fifth columnists who despise all that American stands for. There is the slanderous treatment of Barack Obama and the manipulation of his name to embed the in the public subconscious a link with Osama Bin Laden that even somehow made it onto CNN. With a media like this being an active accomplice to the racist machinations of the ruling Republicans is it any wonder when some red state idiot threatens to hold pig races next to a mosque for the sole purpose of offending the Muslim worshippers?
Racism is a cancer and it ravages societies, destroying them from within. Yet at the same time racism is gospel preached to an endless supply of converts by demagogues with political agendas. The Republican perpetual hate machine is fueled by racism, that and the fear and without them it could not exist. The demagogues preach to the masses from their electronic pulpits. They seek to pander to those seeking an answer for all that has gone wrong in their pathetic and failed lives. Lives in most cases that have been made miserable by the power brokers behind the demagogues who they have come to worship.
The hatred, the fear, the racism it is their benediction. It is in the hate that they seek shelter, the ability to salvage something resembling self worth from the cruel world.
Ultimately in choosing to affix their sins to scapegoats they find a sort of salvation, but ironically it comes at the cost of ultimate damnation as they are consumed by their anger and their victims made to suffer for the expedience of those who seek to make them outcasts. If you ain’t no better than a (insert epithet here) then who are you better than?
Lee Atwater died of an inoperable brain tumor in 1991, cut down in his prime. He did however experience something of an epiphany that brought about reflection and change. In an article published shortly before his death in Life Magazine he wrote:
My illness helped me to see that what was missing in society is what was missing in me: a little heart, a lot of brotherhood. The \’80s were about acquiring — acquiring wealth, power, prestige. I know. I acquired more wealth, power, and prestige than most. But you can acquire all you want and still feel empty. What power wouldn\’t I trade for a little more time with my family? What price wouldn\’t I pay for an evening with friends? It took a deadly illness to put me eye to eye with that truth, but it is a truth that the country, caught up in its ruthless ambitions and moral decay, can learn on my dime. I don\’t know who will lead us through the \’90s, but they must be made to speak to this spiritual vacuum at the heart of American society, this tumor of the soul.
While I am highly skeptical of deathbed conversions it may be that facing the end of one’s mortal existence does provide an unprecedented opportunity for introspection. A self-analysis stripped bare of the deceits and hypocrisies of a daily existence for even a lifelong parasite like Atwater. Perhaps staring down the barrel at impending death is what it takes for a renunciation of the sins of a life spent sowing the seeds of hatred. Atwater is correct when he refers to it as a tumor of the soul. That it is, and as torn and frayed as this country is now that it has metastasized, it may be terminal.
