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blue bits. red rocks.
Monday 8 June 2009

It was in the first Bush administration when Republicans first discovered that they could aggravate the hell out of their enemies, and have a good cynical chuckle in the bargain, by nominating underqualified (and worse) people of color to important positions and then, throwing around terms like “high-tech lynching” and “move to the back of the bus”, accuse anyone who objected of racism. Of course, when you factor in the considerable drop in brainpower when you dive bomb from Arlen Specter and Clarence Thomas to Tom Tancredo and Rush Limbaugh, the possibility of projection, as opposed to conscious plotting, has to be considered. I don’t think that either of these is the case here, though. I grew up in Mississippi in the ’70s with a Klansman father, as regular readers of this space are no doubt sick of hearing, but I think the experience did give me certain insights into the mindset that is now very much the accepted, official viewpoint of the Republican party. What you want to keep in mind about these people is that, all appearances to the contrary, they don’t think they want to hurt anybody or even unduly insult anybody. People like Tancredo and my pop, and if he means the shit that he’s been shoveling, even so illustrious and establishment-acceptable a figure as Limbaugh, is that they think they’re doing what Martin Luther King did. They’re representing their people in a twilight struggle against their oppressors. That’s why they have that authentic, heartfelt tone of bitter grievance in their voices. There was a time when you could get away with dismembering some smart-ass black man who looked cross-eyed at a white woman, when blacks could be chased away from a polling place or a lunch counter and weren’t allowed to touch their white co-stars on TV. And it’s terrible enough that these things, which represented the proper balance of things in the universe, had to be changed. But now, when you call certain phone numbers, you get a recording offering you your choice of being spoken to in English or Spanish. What did Rosa Parks ever have to endure that was half as bad as that!? Phil Nugent

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