The Apostate Paul and Iowa

update below [16 January]

I have no idea if Ron Paul is racist, although I'm inclined to think he isn't. But the vehemence with which people on both the ostensible left and the right have gone after him for his newsletters from years past, and implicitly his seeming unwillingness to disassociate himself with some of his evidently racist supporters is fascinating. I realize it isn't exactly the same thing, but I'm reminded of how Obama so eagerly repudiated the reverend Jeremiah Wright in 2008, and vaguely said we should have a "dialogue on race", then decided not to.

At the time I thought, what if BHO had stood by his friendship with Wright, offering the distinction that while he disagreed with his views, and added that a lot of us have friends and associates who have views we wouldn't want to defend, people shouldn't have to disown their friends in order to run for office. After all, to expect that of a pol means that, as a society we expect , in fact require, our politicians to be shallow and venal and pliable, to only stand up for comparatively uncontroversial virtues, and not offend us by sticking with their friends, or by expecting us to grasp nuance, like the idea that one can have a friend who holds disagreeable views and only be responsible for our own.

(Yeah, I know, I'm talking about Barach Obama, and it's pretty hard to imagine him ever behaving that way. At any rate I assume the establishment media would have excoriated him in much the way they're doing with Paul now.)

Now I also doubt Jeremiah Wright is a racist, but that's not really the point. Actually, I gather that Wright and Paul both disapprove of the imperial quality of American foreign policy, even if they might both have supporters who like their differently expressed views on this subject but wouldn't care for each other too much. (Maybe they should get together and talk about it and try to understand one another's views, without the big media mediating. I wonder what would happen.)


It's not that racism is no big deal, but you have to ask, whose racism are we talking about? Racism is about the dehumanizing of an other, right? I don’t hear anybody at The Atlantic or The National Review, et al, calling racism on, say, Hillary Clinton for joking “we came, we saw, he died” about the killing of Qaddafi, or on Rick Santorum for saying he’d pre-emptively bomb Iran even if they don’t have nuclear weapons, or on Obama for yukking it up at the Washington Press Club dinner about how funny it is to send unmanned drones after people you don’t like.

But Ron Paul is marginalized as crazy and dangerous and possibly racist because of his newsletters, and because he doesn’t do things like that, and in fact takes issue with long-standing US foreign policies of financially ruinous imperial overreach and the farce of characterizing resentment of the US as “hating us for our freedoms.”

(If anything, I’d argue that his desire that we turn away from an aggressive foreign policy that requires us to demonize people in far off lands who have oil and other goodies we want to take from them may serve as prima facie evidence that he isn’t racist.(1)

I will admit that I dislike many of Paul's positions. He would get rid of social security and medicare, and certainly his dismissal of the 1964 Civil Rights Act doesn't sit right with me. All the same even if Ron Paul doesn't approve of the civil rights initiatives from the 1960s, somebody like that seems less harmful than numerous establishment pols, both right and left, who won't say something like that but are okay with indefinite detention and the endless imperial wars. Doesn't not wanting to jail people without charges and not wanting to kill so many people trump unsavory views, alleged or otherwise?

We shouldn't have to choose of course, but in repudiating Paul it's not as if we get a choice anyway. The supposedly less crazy non-Paul-like politicians in both parties also want to gut social security, but they are less upfront about it, avoiding alarming us by explicitly telling us their plans, and arguing about super-committees and interminable stop-gap budget deals instead to distract and confuse us. I guess this is pretty big of them, even if it suggests they regard us as a nation of distressed Tennessee Williams heroines who need to be protected from the truth of what's being done to us.

The people on cable TV news tell us again and again that Ron Paul doesn't have a chance in the long run, that his base of support is passionate but narrow. Maybe that's true, at least of politically oriented people who think elections make sense and actively support the two-party system, even if they routinely tell pollsters how much they disapprove of the actual politicians.

Monday night I watched Erin Burnett on CNN talking about the Iowa Caucus and how the turnout for the polls were expected to be about 100,000 out of over half a million eligible to vote. (About 17% of eligible Iowa voters participated in 2008's caucuses.) In other words, the Iowa caucus is kind of a joke, because of the complicated caucus system, but also because of the traditionally low turnout.

Evidently its purpose is to push candidates who don't have money to burn out of the race, so that the "serious" candidates who do know how to raise buckets of money don't have to deal with the unserious in New Hampshire and elsewhere. The fact that it's a low-density, low-population state with lots of opportunities to showcase scenes of serious fundraiser candidates pressing the flesh and meeting normal people is a nice bonus. I guess noticing the ridiculously low turnout numbers and concluding that Iowans also think their caucus is a joke will simply mean you'll never get invited to those swell Washington D. C. parties the jus' folks fundraisers probably can't wait to get back to after Iowa is in the can.


Of course if Ron Paul did luck out and somehow win Iowa the script for that was ready. One imagines it would’ve proved how out of touch Iowa GOP voters are, at least according to the fine folks at the cable TV networks. (A week or so ago I saw a discussion on HLN(the former CNN Headline News) in which one of the panelists argued that Iowans should be concerned that if Paul won it would prove that their caucus was irrelevant, which struck me as the height of arrogance, and reinforced my long-held sense that Iowa is intended to weed out populists and others who don't toe the corporate line, or problematic figures like Ron Paul, whose views and appeal serve to highlight in sharp relief the phoniness and mutual complicity of the major political parties and the press who tell us about them.

Christian Science Monitor, "If Mitt Romney wins both Iowa and N.H., it may be 'game over'"

Conor Friedersdorf, The Atlantic,"Grappling with Ron Paul's racist newsletters"

Dave Lindorff, "Why the Establishment is Terrified of Ron Paul"


KFO, "How to prove bigotry"

KFO’s pal Glenn Greenwald at Salon,"Progressives and the Ron Paul fallacies"who writes

Ron Paul’s candidacy is a mirror held up in front of the face of America’s Democratic Party and its progressive wing, and the image that is reflected is an ugly one; more to the point, it’s one they do not want to see because it so violently conflicts with their desired self-perception.

Cüneyt,"Pardon My Glibness in Response to Glibness"


[FYI: The girl in the triptych above is pop singer Kelly Clarkson, who endorsed Paul last week. I was tempted to be willfully obscure and not tell you, but decided against it. I have no idea of her views of PIPA and SOPA, etc.]


update:

JM of Political Anxiety Closet writes in the comments, sharing 3 links. One doesn't seem to work, but here are the other two:
Judd Legum, Think Progress, FACT CHECK: Ron Paul Personally Defended Racist Newsletters

Teddy Partridge, FDL Is Ron Paul Also Homophobic?

Both are from December 27th.



...

Darkness and light

From Joshua Holland’s "Fallout of Hate Is Spreading Across America from "Ground Zero" which appeared in AlterNet on August 21st:

In May, a man walked into the Jacksonville Islamic Center in Northeast Florida during evening prayers and detonated a pipebomb. Fortunately, there were no injuries. (If the man had been Muslim and the House of worship a Christian church, the incident would have garnered wall-to-wall coverage, but while the story got plenty of local press it was ignored by CBS News, Fox, CNN and MSNBC.)

It was the most serious of a series of incidents in which mosques far from the supposedly hallowed earth of Ground Zero have been targeted. A mosque in Miami, Florida, was sprayed with gunfire last year. Mosques have been vandalized or set aflame in Brownstown, Michigan; Nashville, Tennessee; Arlington, Texas (where the mosque was first vandalized and then later targeted by arsonists); Taylor, South Carolina; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Eugene, Oregon; Cape Girardeau, Missouri; Tempe, Arizona; and in both Northern and Southern California. A mosque in a suburb of Chicago has been vandalized four times in recent years.

In May, an Arab man was brutally beaten in broad daylight in New York by four young men. According to the victim’s nephew, "They used the bad word. 'The mother bleeping Muslim, go back to your country.' They started beating him and after that he don't know what happened.” A Muslim woman in Chicago was assaulted by another woman who took offense at her headscarf. A Muslim teacher in Florida was sent a white powdery substance in the mail. In San Diego, a man in his 50s became so incensed by the sight of an American of Afghan descent praying that he assaulted him after screaming, “You idiot, you mother f**ker, go back to where you came from."

The perpetrators of these hate crimes are clearly unhinged, but they’re not operating in a vacuum. They’re being whipped into a frenzy by cynical fearmongers on the Right. Writing for Tablet magazine, Daniel Luban astutely calls the dark spread of Islamophobia, “the new Anti-Semitism.”

Since then I know of the cabbie who had his throat cut in NYC and vandalism of a mosque being constructed in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. The latter stood out in my mind because my mother briefly attended Middle Tennessee State College, as it was known then, in the early 1950s. She was born and raised in Iraq, and she remembered her time in Tennessee fondly.

My perspective may be different when it comes to would-be Koran-burner Terry Jones, maybe because I “look like them,” in the eyes of the Terry Joneses of the world. It’s not a question of breadth of vision, or wisdom, or empathy. Your life is different when you know you look like “them” in the eyes of people around you, some concerned about that more than others.

When the towers were attacked in September of 2001, I felt in those moments watching on TV and the second tower was hit that the republicans had received a gift, and our social landscape would immediately change, and there would be no going back. Now, years later and nearly two years through Obama’s term in office it’s pretty clear it was a gift to both parties.

Even today I find it unlikely that we will eventually be rounded up like the Japanese-Americans were during WWII, but I am concerned that things will get worse. Rob suggests the establishment media is working for the government; I'm more inclined to think that the government and the media work for a common group of owners.

Earlier today Jonathan Schwarz wrote:

the sad reality of life on Earth is that horrible things happen all the time. What was unusual about the terrorist attacks wasn't that they happened, but that they happened to us. We have two giant oceans on either side of us; two weak, friendly neighbors; and the most powerful military in the world. As awful as that one day was, what was true before is still true afterward: No one has less reason to be scared than Americans. Wondering whether we're safer is a little unseemly, like Yao Ming wondering whether he's ever going to get taller.

I think that’s largely true. The scope of the 9-11 attacks was also unusual, but the two-edged nature of ever-advancing technology suggests that more large scale 9-11 like attacks may be more likely in the future, especially as the global overclass strives to lock in their huge financial advantage over everybody else and make class increasingly less fluid in the years to come.

In the meantime, the hostility towards Arab-Americans and Muslim Americans not only looks like it will get worse, it looks like the product of a country that knows its in decline and is lashing out at convenient scapegoats. (Of course when my mother attended college it was communists.)

Even in September of 2001 the wars we waged(and continue to wage) since were by no means inevitable. In our screwed-up political climate it would have been easier for a sitting republican president to show restraint than a democrat. A few targeted strikes here, a few there, and we would have matched "their" body count and claimed one burnt corpse to be Bin Laden's and called it a day. Meanwhile the CIA could easily refute(or even refudiate!) any subsequent tapes or videos as fakes. (I got an auto-email from my congressman today which said that 2,977 Americans died in the 9-11 attacks, and that (thus far) 5,661 US soldiers have died in the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. I have to believe the scenario I sketched out would have cost fewer lives, on both sides.)

It's actually pretty amazing to me, how America's elites apparently don't want to solve our long term problems and seem to want them to get worse. Seems there's money to be made investing in the decline of America, but only for a lucky few. Some years ago I saw an article in The American Prospect, I forget who the author was, entitled, "Where are the rational greedy bastards?" As far as I can tell the American overclass is increasingly divorced from the rest of us, so breaking US society down for tax cuts appears rational to them. Which must be why they're happy to gin up social strife, as we're less likely to notice what they're up to.

At any one time it seems that there is a certain portion of the population, maybe 15 to 20 per cent, that are what popular parlance today calls "haters." People who reason based on fear and authoritarian impulses, that have an undue respect for authority schizophrenically mixed with a simultaneous resentment of it. Maybe in bad times, like nowadays, it climbs to 25 or 30 percent. By assigning numbers to it I recognize I'm being a bit glib, but my point is I'd like to believe that even nowadays they're a noisy minority, even though like Joshua Holland I'm concerned at how they've become emboldened of late. (And that's why I do care about the president or secretary Gates urging restraint, even if it's grossly hypocritical on several levels. Because when two-bit Koran burners show restraint this may influence others, who look to them for imagined permission to do other things.)






It's a strange country we live in, where much of the society cares about being insulated in would-be innocence from the world beyond our borders while our government meddles bloodily all over that same world. When I read about New York cabbie Ahmed Sharif's would-be killer Michael Enright and looked at the photo of him looking all innocent and alarmed in court I thought about that dichotomy, and wondered if it's a sort of mental illness shared by millions.(I note, however, that Enright had the presence of mind to select an non-white lawyer to appear with him.) I'd like to believe in the other America, the one described in Wayne Drash's story of two young Muslim Americans who traveled cross country for Ramadan and said they encountered mostly warm, decent people. But as far as I can see, they both exist.



New York Daily News, "Muslim cab driver slashed by boozed-up bigot just back from filming Marines in Afghanistan: cops"
(original title: Muslim cab driver slashed by upstate New York man because of his religion: police)

Wayne Drash, CNN: 2 Muslims travel 13,000 miles across America, find an embracing nation