EDITOR’s NOTE: Due to a technical Glitch, this was up on TMV with the wrong byline for about one minute. We regret the error.
Prostitution may be the oldest profession but racial and religious intolerance doing business in America are fellow bed partners.
All three seem to merge this past week into a national pissing contest. We see it in the power-grubbing Congressmen and the shrill battle cries of sanctimonious liberals to tone down the political rhetoric. Conservatives counter with decibels equal to a jetliner take-off in their defense of denial they had nothing to do but speak their constitutional rights of free speech and assembly and save the country as they envision.
Horse feathers.
The debate, if you call it that, is American politics not at its best but at the loudest. Ironically, it comes on the heels of a shooting tragedy in Tucson and a rare uptick in popularity of the President and Congress for getting a few things done in the lame duck session of the 110th Congress.
I’ll pass on the screamers chronicling what’s happening now and focus on the covert undercurrents of what may be driving this debate: Race and religious intolerance nipping at the heels in what should be an exclusive domain of policy.
This week some observed reluctantly civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, a designated national holiday. In my small (pop. 100,000) adopted town of Temecula, Calif., one hardly noticed any reverence except government and school offices were closed and traffic snarls were mostly absent.
Certainly, the national media, Internet, television, radio and newspapers echoed the calling and meaning of the slain black icon. And for all the right reasons.
But the thought strikes me that Martin Luther King Day is second tier stuff right along with Presidents’ Day where we combine Washington and Lincoln’s birthdays into one Monday. Only Christmas, Thanksgiving and Veterans’ Days garner the highly observed tribute from our melting pot of cultural and ethnic origins.
Mother’s Day grabs the cockles of our hearts more than half the national paid holidays, it seems to me. That, too, is righteous. After all, family, religion and country are why we survive and compete, first and foremost.
When Barack Obama was elected the first black president of the United States in November 2008, my reaction was akin to the old cigarette commercial: “We have come a long way, baby.” And, I am a WASP, White Anglo Saxon Protestant, which is a group rarely on the receiving end of racial and ethnic slurs. But, baby, can we dish it out, with the rest of the culturally biased folks we call our neighbors.
Obama, I thought, was a positive step for America but never the end to racial profiling or bigotry. The emotional level simply dropped a notch from near boil to medium simmer. Except for bigots who refuse to be led by a man of different color and the misguided purists who use the constitution as a pretext to demean his legitimacy, Obama is still stalked with an ugly stigma.
Yes, the president has made a few gaffes when rarely supporting a black cause or defend his old Harvard professor’s conduct with a Cambridge police officer.
But race takes on its own inner battles such as a few black civic leaders saying he was not black enough when he was campaigning against Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination.
Sometimes we need to rely on our comedians to point out our nonsensical notions of how blacks perceive their own race. Two examples I recall from memory.
— Wanda Sykes, headliner of a Washington Gridiron Roast, confirmed her ethnic allegiance to the president except the times he screwed up she blamed on his white side of the genetic pool.
— Chris Rock has a skit which he instructs his white audience the only time they can call a black man a Nigger. Blacks, it seems, can call each other the N word without remorse.
But our ethnic groups stick close to their kind. Never has any poll shown Obama’s popularity and most favorable ratings among blacks on almost all issues under 90%.
Racial and religious prejudice is deep seated in all of us but is manifested in different forms. I need not address the violence it has ignited in the civil rights riots in Watts, Newark, Detroit and several cities such as Birmingham in the Deep South.
I refer to the ignorance of the old white lady during a John McCain New Hampshire campaign who said she feared Obama was an Arab. Bless old John, he shot that notion down immediately.
We as a people tend to label across the board entire religious or ethnic groups as one for purposes of simplicity because we are inherently lazy and insensitive.
On a national scale, John Kennedy ended once and for all the idiotic concept that a Catholic cannot be president because of his vows to the papacy. Obama broke the racial barrier and some day women and Jews will crack the glass ceiling in the mythical house of horrors.
On a personal level, I have said my Waspishness has shielded me but I am not blind at the demons that make me a hypocrite.
As a college senior I dated a beautiful freshman coed and she invited me to spend one weekend at her parent’s home in a swanky neighborhood on San Francisco’s East Bay.
“I’m Jewish,” she said on the drive to San Francisco. I told her I didn’t know nor really cared.
Then she told me the night of her senior high school prom, school vandals papered her front yard and spray painted a crude Cross of David on her front door.
“That’s part of the Jewish experience we have to endure,” she said. For me, it was a mild epiphany, an awakening of evil that lurks all around us in so many insulting manners.
Years later, the same expression was raised by my sister-in-law, a community activist involved in La Raza Latino causes in the San Diego barrios.
“You married into a Mexican family. You think you know us but you will never understand the Latino experience,” she once told me.
No, I don’t. I can only conceptualize. I think I understand the root causes by real and imagined insults thrust at a person’s color and religion over a period of generations.
But I am as guilty as anyone when miffed at a colleague for screwing up either by criminal behavior, rudeness, petty paranoia or failure to do their job.
Out comes the suppressed hostility that these people are not like me and don’t live up to my standards. Blanket indictments such as stupid Mexican, lazy black, white trash welfare mom, money-grubbing Jew banker.
The hostility heightens when the object of my displeasure plays the race card as his defense.
I consider myself a tolerant guy, preferring to judge a person by his character and talent and not his color, religion or sexual orientation.
But, being human, I have failed. Many times.
Jerry Remmers worked 26 years in the newspaper business. His last 23 years was with the Evening Tribune in San Diego where assignments included reporter, assistant city editor, county and politics editor.