Rhode Island has a long reputation of being a solidly
Democratic state. Republicans in positions of power are so scarce that the fact
that we have a Republican governor, Gov. Donald Carcieri, must be attributed
partially to the gender of his Democratic opponent. If she
had been a he, with her history in public office, we would be enjoying
her second term. In the aftermath of Hillary Clinton's success in RI, things
may have changed for female politicians but back when Gov. Carcieri was
elected, running-while-woman virtually guaranteed her defeat.
Thus it has been a source of wonder to me that my students,
who had always tended to be apathetic and often, to my surprise,
considering how Democratic RI is, conservative, suddenly took an active
and hostile
position towards George W. Bush. It appears that his legacy in the
Ocean State
is to have made many of them openly antagonistic to conservatives and
especially, to him.
I noticed the change a
couple of years ago. Perhaps my students had laughed off Bill Clinton's priapic
misadventures because times were good; one can afford to be indulgent of peccadilloes if one's
pockets are full. I noticed the hostility to Bush early in his
administration. In one class discussion, the anti-Bush jeers turned to
hostility and one student even suggested that someone should just shoot him.
When these political discussions arise, I tend to pull back and let them have
at it, telling them that I want them to think for themselves, not to parrot
what I think. But on this occasion I jumped in and told him, "You must NEVER
say that again; you should not even think it. You have no idea how devastating
a political assassination is to a country or the effects it has on our people.
Nothing is worth killing a president. If you don't like him, work to defeat him
in the next election."
I never mentioned this incident outside my classroom. Once Obama
started to run, I, like every liberal in the country, was afraid to
mention the subject; we don't want to "tempt the evil eye." Everyone who is old enough to remember the sixties is seared
by the memory of those terrible days when first John F. Kennedy was killed and
then, less than five years later, the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. and New York
Senator Bobby Kennedy were killed in close succession. I was too young to vote
when Bobby was killed but I was old enough to feel the emptiness in our public
life and to work for a candidate who could make a difference. Thus my first
political involvement was to stuff envelopes for Bobby's campaign. It was a
small thing but it gave me a sense of ownership; a sense that I was
contributing to making our country a better place. On that terrible night, when I heard that he had been shot, I
felt like our dreams were like balloons, flying high and then shot out of
mid-air.
If Bobby had lived, Nixon would not have become president;
the Vietnam war would have ended sooner; Henry Kissinger would have stayed in
his rat hole; and thousands of Cambodians and Vietnamese would have survived
the war. Our country would not have
come to the edge of chaos because of the manipulations of Nixon and his
plumbers. If, if, if...
There are still questions about JFK's and the Rev. King's
assassinations, allegations that highly-placed political leaders and government
agencies were involved, as well as disputes over the validity of the official
findings. And there are scars on the body politic: Who really trusts the
government? George W. Bush and Dick
Cheney have raised governmental secrecy, incompetence, and duplicity to new
heights resulting in an even deeper distrust of government that that left by
Richard Nixon.
We are on the brink of electing Barack Hussein Obama, a
black man, to the presidency. He appears to have the gifts needed to restore
our faith in government and to inspire our citizens to ask, in John F.
Kennedy's words, what they can do for our country. Unfortunately, his middle
name, Hussein, is the same as that of an old enemy, and Obama is similar to
that of another old enemy, Osama bin Laden. I wonder how they would play it if
he were named Barry Jefferson Lincoln? You need not worry; he's black; they
would find a different way to play the race card; racists always do.
By trying to characterize him as being different from us,
and associate him with Arabs, therefore, terrorists, John McCain, the Republican
nominee, and Sarah Palin, his feckless running mate, have found an effective
way to play the race card and stir up the kind of race hatred that led to the
1960s' assassinations while feigning innocence. Republicans think they can
treat this as a gambit in a game but they are tone-deaf to the tenor of the
times. With people losing their homes, jobs, savings, and retirements, the hunt
will be on for a scapegoat. When it happened in Germany, Hitler rose to the
occasion and provided leadership and a convenient scapegoat: The Jews. Then
they went after the Gypsies or Roma, the homosexuals, and the political
dissidents.
Born in 1964, Sarah Palin is too young to remember the
assassinations of the sixties but John McCain remembers and if he continues to
allow race hatred to leech into his campaign unabated, we will all pay the
price for it. With America's history of hatred fresh our in our common memory,
we know that once this ugliness is let out of the box, it will be impossible to
restrain. Like a plant suddenly exposed
to light, air, and water, it grows wildly in response to the nutrients it
couldn't get while in containment.
Some point to McCain's half-hearted attempts to stop
the hatred emerging at his campaign rallies and argue that he isn't a racist.
Unless he uses the bully pulpit of his candidacy forcefully to stop hate in its
tracks, he will not escape the characterization. Racism corrodes and destroys
public life. He may claim that he is not a racist but if he allows it to
flourish in his campaign and is willing to harvest its fruits, then he is a
racist and should be unmasked as such.
