Category Archives: politics

Three things about the recent, tragic Tucson shootings:

1. Clearly, shooter Jared Lee Loughner was not a Tea Party member or Sarah Palin/Glenn Beck acolyte. His political views, presumably inspired by such diverse thinkers as Ayn Rand, Karl Marx and Adolf Hitler, are not mainstream or cliched. He’s an independent thinker whose views aren’t neatly classified as “liberal” or “conservative”. Reports are that he had met Congressperson Giffords at a previous community meeting and wasn’t happy with the encounter. So the odds that his inspiration for the assault had anything to do with Sarah Palin’s crosshair graphic are unlikely.

2. Violent, paranoid political discourse inspires mass murderers. Maybe not Loughner, but Byron Williams was directly influenced by Glenn Beck when he set out with a car full of weaponry to murder workers at the ACLU and Tides Foundation. Kenneth Kimberly was arrested before he killed anyone, but he admits that he was directly inspired by Glenn Beck to start making and stockpiling grenades. And Giffords wasn’t present when the glass door to her Tucson office was either shot or kicked in, hours after her pro vote on health care. With all of the evidence that violent rhetoric absolutely inspires violent actions, how could people not assume that there was a connection in Tucson? I bet even Sarah Palin assumed that Loughlin had seen her crosshair chart when she first heard about the shooting.

3. So conservatives can pout about how unfair it is that MSNBC and all of their liberal critics are calling for more civil discourse in light of this mass murder. And they are technically accurate that Loughner was, most likely, not directly influenced by the cross hairs on Palin’s propaganda; Beck’s paranoid rantings about Obama planning to kill 10% of the population; Michelle Bachmann’s crazed fantasies about communists in the white house; Sharon Angle’s readiness to resort to “second amendment remedies”, et cetera, et cetra, et cetra. But there’s a lot of smoke here, and there’s a lot of ammunition. So the calls for calmer political discourse in light of the violent travesty in Tucson are well-warranted, because we don’t need to follow it up with the next Byron Williams succeeding in killing people that Beck highlights on his blackboard, or the next Kenneth Kimberly lobbing grenades at imagined communists. These people are directly inspired by the right wing rhetoric. There’s no denying that.

Photo by Raymond Mendosa

I’ve been pretty horrified by the new TSA security procedures since I first caught wind of them.  The Boing Boing blog has been doing excellent coverage of the fiasco, providing the best examples of how damaging these new exposing and groping procedures can be to innocent Americans, and why crossing over from threat detection to threat assumption policies is bad, bad, bad for our democracy.

I’ve also been hearing the backlash against the complaints.  A number of people had relatively painless holiday travel experiences last week and are now saying it was all a lot of hype.  But I continue to consider a level of terrorist prevention this extreme to be more likely to traumatize more Americans than the threat they’re protecting us from will.  It’s not about the 95% of the population who, like me, can pretty much shrug and say “I don’t care that much if you photograph me semi-nude” or, “I can tolerate a little more radiation — it’s not like this is the only place I’m exposed to it” or, even, “I get that you’re going to touch my private parts and that this isn’t molestation, you’re not enjoying it either”.  It’s about the rape and molestation victims, past and future, as well as the people who, for personal or religious reasons, can’t minimize the trauma of being exposed to or groped by strangers.  Not the majority of us, but a very significant minority,

So then I see an article like this, which has the top TSA official basically saying to parents (like me), “don’t explain to your children that what the TSA agent is about to do to you is necessary, but should never, ever be tolerated by strangers when Mommy and/or Daddy aren’t right here with you and it isn’t absolutely required for security reasons”, but, instead saying, “tell your kid that the TSA agent is just playing a harmless game that involves touching you”.  Because strangers touching children’s genitalia is, of course, no big deal and the priority here is to make sure everyone is calm and smiling as they submit to these procedures.  Months later, when lecherous Uncle Eddie wants to play the same game, well, Mommy and Daddy know about this game and said it was okay for the TSA agent to play, so they’re not going to consider this a problem…

Security at the cost of the humiliation of abused adults and government approved molesting of children terrorizes citizens.  It doesn’t make us more secure, even if it’s not a “big deal” for most of us.  This is a government-sanctioned human rights violation, and we really shouldn’t tolerate it.

I’ll happily give Kentucky’s Republican Senatorial candidate, Dr. Rand Paul, a pass and assume that he is no racist.  In fact, his objection to the portion of the civl rights act that denies businesses the right to discriminate based on race is very consistent with Libertarian views. The problem is that those Libertarian views are based on an idealistic world view that is so radical that electing them to high offices would be the first step towards armageddon.

In this MSNBC interview, Rachel Maddow tries to pin Paul to a yes or no on the question of whether he would support a modern-day F. W. Woolworth‘s right to refuse to serve blacks, and he dances around the question so deftly that you’d think he studied under Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, mostly by throwing his own red herring back by equating race-based discrimination with the right to bear arms.  

I think Rachel missed the talking point.  The question is, if he takes the absolute Libertarian view that Government should not regulate private businesses, then is he saying that health inspection should be abolished? Zoning ordinances? Safety standards?  It seems so, as, early on in the segment, he’s quoted as saying that the ADA might have gone too far, and suggests that requiring that a business install an elevator for a disabled employee would be unnecessary if they just gave the employee a first floor office.

What is so surreal about the arc of the Tea Party from rage-filled yahoos upset that “the America they grew up in” wouldn’t have elected a black man President to their adoption of Libertarian, “government should keep it’s hands off of everything” ideals is that they are pushing this just as the world is reeling from disasters caused by lack of governmental regulation.  The financial crisis occurred as Federal regulators ignored people who were screaming at them that Bernie Maddow was running a pyramid scheme while the big banks were playing additional con games.  The gulf has just been traumatically infected by the largest oil disaster in history because the Mineral Management Service was too busy partying with the execs to regulate them.

The proof that people would suffer if government didn’t regulate private businesses is screaming from the front page headlines.  And Rand Paul, a guy whose more idealistic than any hippie ever was, has secured a senatorial nomination.

You might have read about Keith Bardwell, a man out of his time, who, throughout his 35 year career as a Justice of the Peace in Louisiana, has steadfastly denied marriage licenses to interracial couples. For their own good, of course. And for the good of any children they might bear. Some might consider Bardwell an old coot who means well, when he defends his cruel and discriminatory behavior as being based on his concern that interracial marriages generally don’t last, and that it’s cruel to subject children to a world where they will be pariahs to blacks and whites alike. But I can’t listen to his defense of bigotry with anything but an understanding that he has a choice. He can “protect” children from the hate he perpetuates, or he can stop being hateful.

Clearly, Bardwell doesn’t get out much, if he thinks that life for interracial couples and children is all that bad. Apparently, he can’t — or won’t — imagine a culture like the SF East Bay, where my wife, son and I live happily amongst many other interracial families and suffer no more or less discrimination than most of our single or multi-cultured peers. But I’m not buying his racism dressed up as concern for the children defense. I suspect that all of Bardwell’s good buddies, including a State Attorney General who passively condoned his illegal actions, generally agree that hey, we can deal with multiple races, as long as they don’t cross-pollinate.

It’s striking to me that Bardwell’s defense is based on the usual trifecta of bigoted justifications: He “doesn’t believe in mixing the races in that way”; he doesn’t believe that interracial marriages will last, questioning their validity (in relation to single race unions); and he seeks to protect the children. This sounds a lot like the recent Proposition 8 campaign in California, which amended the state constitution to ban gay marriage, not because there’s anything wrong with gays — “We love them!” the Prop 8 backers exclaimed — but because they don’t approve of that sort of union, and it’s not valid, and, if we condone it, we’ll harm the children.

Unlike Bardwell, who had his rationalizations for racism at the ready, the Prop 8 types look like they’re grasping at straws. Asked by a judge to explain exactly what the threat that homosexual marriages hold for heterosexual unions is, an attorney for the Prop 8 coalition admitted that he didn’t know. But, he protested, there might be a threat! We can’t allow two people who love each other to be treated as equal with two other people who love each other because, um, well, there might be some unforeseen consequence for the other people!

My son’s first exposure to racism came a few years before we were planning to teach him about it, when we attempted to stay at a cliff-side inn on the Oregon coast, only to find that another family had gotten down to the beach before us and had taken the opportunity — after seeing my dread-locked wife — to etch, in large letters, “N I G G E R” in the sand, in plain view from anywhere up the bluff. We had to explain to our four year old why we had to leave the nice hotel and get back in the car. Because of the bad people; the ignorant ones, who will insult and threaten us for irrational reasons.

He’ll run into this again. In fact, we’re certain that he already has run into subtler forms of racism. But he’ll suffer less of it than I did, as a Unitarian boy growing up somewhat ostracized in a school where 75% of my classmates were Jewish (unaware, until I was older, of my Jewish roots). I clearly remember the single lunch table where the black kids sat, bused into our 99% white school from Boston. I comforted my interracial friends who were beaten by other kids for being too light-skinned; or stopped by the police for being too dark-skinned in their own neighborhood. There’s still plenty of this type of racism around, but there’s less of it than there was, and it’s easier for us to shelter our son, appropriately, from it.

And it beats what our parents went through. My Jewish heritage was a secret because, after being chased out of the Netherlands by the Nazi’s, my mother and her parents shed their religion like a blood-soaked frock. My wife’s grandmother and aunt signed the earliest petition in what became Brown vs. the Board of Education, and lived through the firestorm that signing that petition incensed in the white community. We are both still very much products of a history of discrimination, and it tempers who we are and what we want for our child.

But we have hope for the future, because, while I don’t find age and naivete to be justifications for discrimination, I do see the generational trend that seems to be eradicating it. It is a better world for my interracial son to grow up in than it was for his racial parents. But it will be an even better one if we work, actively, to resurrect a media that used to pride itself on not taking sides. And we can’t tolerate the Bardwell’s and the Prop 8 bigots who are so sure of their superiority that they can easily justify denying others the same rights and privileges that they have. This is the world that my son is growing up in, let’s make it one that he’s welcome in.