Category: Culture


Can we revive the melting pot?

Now that the modern Archie Bunker character has been elected President many are reviewing the game tape to learn and point fingers about failure.  It is ‘whitelash’ that elected the #BigotinChief?  Somewhat, but it is more than that I think.  Fear works on people no matter your skin color or religion or lack of religion.  Rational self interest is distorted into the most extreme ‘us and them’ on can imagine.  Our politics have been based in that for most of my lifetime.  The grand oratory of Kennedy has given way to Twitter rants.  Education looks more like an above ground oil storage facility of large and small silos between public schools, religious based schools, and the home schooled.  Trusted journalism is ideological too.  There is no Walter Cronkite figure, but there are plenty of characters and ways to reach them.

America has embraced the image of Mulligan Stew instead of melting pot. Confessionally, I like in a gated community that I’ve discovered is more diverse than I thought.  What my neighbors are realizing is that the gates invite people to climb over to see what is inside.  The sense of security is only psychological. When will reporters start following the money in politics and in the many conflict of interests that surround the President Elect and those that are filling out his cabinet.  In the end you can count on one thing: Donald J. Trump is only concerned with his brand, his bottom line and his, his, his.  As the video shows, he will say anything to create the mob that chants his name and increases his power.

How will the President Elect handle the mob when it really acts out having been given the license of mainstreamed White Nationalism and of the KKK. Is this how fascism begins?  The prosperity Gospel and ‘me and my Jesus’ theology helped elect Archie Bunker.  He will happily use evangelical white Christianity’s desire to reign like the Taliban did or does, while giving those same evangelicals the scapegoat to blame for their economic and self esteem problems.  They have tied themselves to the new Empire at their peril.  Christianity is not a minority voice in our country.  Evangelical and fundamentalist Christianity is well represented in our Congress and in my own State House.  Now, this group is empowered by a President Elect to really go to work on our culture because it benefits him and his bottom line. If is didn’t benefit Trump, he wouldn’t pay evangelicals any attention.  No, this is not a new reality, but it is a reality practiced by Trump with impunity.  The Republican Party is set up to reign for at least an election cycle at the federal level, but it could be longer if the notion of Mulligan Stew America is allowed to flourish.  In the States there is much more work to do.

I was at an event where Rev. Dr. William Barber spoke.  He spoke not of red and blue America, but of an America that has a moral conscious.  The working poor and middle class have more economic interest that are similar than they have pigment or religious differences.  We’ve got to dust off our Nation’s moral compass if we are to survive the 45th Presidency of these United States.  Maybe mules do kick the hardest near the end.  If that it true then we are in for some serious thrashing about.  The New York Times offers a couple of reads that I found helpful as I review the game tape and formulate a plan about my next steps.  They are worth a read.

The End of Identity Liberalism by Mark Lilla.

We need a post-identity liberalism, and it should draw from the past successes of pre-identity liberalism. Such a liberalism would concentrate on widening its base by appealing to Americans as Americans and emphasizing the issues that affect a vast majority of them. It would speak to the nation as a nation of citizens who are in this together and must help one another. As for narrower issues that are highly charged symbolically and can drive potential allies away, especially those touching on sexuality and religion, such a liberalism would work quietly, sensitively and with a proper sense of scale. (To paraphrase Bernie Sanders, America is sick and tired of hearing about liberals’ damn bathrooms.)  Click here to read more.

And

I am a Dangerous Professor by George Yancy.

Well, if it is dangerous to teach my students to love their neighbors, to think and rethink constructively and ethically about who their neighbors are, and how they have been taught to see themselves as disconnected and neoliberal subjects, then, yes, I am dangerous, and what I teach is dangerous.  Click here to read more.

Count Ourselves Outloud

As the President Elect continues his made for TV cabinet selection process, many of whom are as qualified as I am though I would tell this President Elect “no” if asked to serve, if falls to those that voted for former Sec. of State Clinton, to those that voted for Libertarian and Green Party candidates, to those that didn’t vote, and yes, to Republicans who preferred the con artist Bigot in Chief to the over qualified woman to be the resistance, and hold our Congressional Reps accountable to be a ‘check’ to President Elect Trump.  He has proven, in this age of cameras everywhere, that he will say and do anything to enrich himself, legally, unethically, and outright lie.  His exploitation of women, his words and actions, would bar him from serving as a camp counselor for any secular or religious affiliated summer camp program.  Americans still do not know the web of business connections that Trump has because we have not seen his taxes.  How can we trust that he is making decisions based on the common good for these United States instead of his own bottom line.  He has begun extracting wealth openly from American tax payers by charging the Secret Service rent for space at Trump Tower in New York to provide him protection. “Trust me.” he says.  I think not.  I shall not.

As I wandered through the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC back in March I didn’t want to believe that American had become a place where the characteristics of Adolf Hitler would be persuasive, and yet I had accepted that Trump’s election as President was probably going to happen.  Senator Mitch McConnell and other GOP Congressional Leaders are responsible for the polite racism that daily worked to nullify President Obama.  Senator McConnell and others like him in the GOP stoked the racism that led to Trump’s slogan, tactics, and inability to denounce the White Nationalists and actually employ Steve Bannon who is too eager to take the money of White Supremacists peddling all kinds of conspiracy theories that blame everyone for their lot in life without need to take responsibility for themselves.  It is everyone’s fault, but their own.  Students at Harvard Business School put it this way about Bannon and Trump.

“Trump brought racist ideologues into the mainstream. Harvard is furthering the process of normalization for racist hate,” the group’s event page says. “We do not accept hate and bigotry as normal or legitimate. Come protest.”
(Steve Annear. The Boston Globe. “Warm Welcome Unlikely for Bannon, Conway at Harvard this week.” November 28, 2016.)

Multi National Corporations and corporations like Koch Industries are the real reason for much of the economic suffering.  It could have been different had Senator McConnell and the GOP Congress governed with President Obama rather than treating him as a “boy.” Though never calling the President “boy” their actions during President Obama’s two terms is evidence they were ready to allow middle, white America to suffer to regain their reign of the federal government as well as many of the state houses.  At all costs McConnell and the other GOP leaders could not allow a non-white male to successfully rally community to the greater good.  Had they done so it would be harder for a white male to get elected.  That kind of obstruction of governing has set back democracy and the economic future of a generation.

Americans, sadly, have not learned from our history and the election of Donald Trump mirrors the same dysfunction that troubled the world at the turn of the 20th century.  Problem is that nuclear winter is part of the revelation guide for the apocalyptic minded needing a war of civilizations.  I’m trusting it doesn’t come to that.  In the end we need journalists to do that journalism thing instead of chase ratings.  We need people who will follow the money and be willing to stand up in defiance to President Elect Trump and those that serve at his pleasure; his pleasure, as he demonstrated during the campaign, is all that matters.

Barbara Kingsolver, writing for The Guardianoffers some good thoughts about the need to “count ourselves out loud.”
“Trump changed everything. Now everything counts.” (November 23, 2016)

Wariness of extremism doesn’t seem to trouble anyone young enough to claim Lady Gaga as a folk hero. I’m mostly addressing my generation, the baby boomers. We may have cut our teeth on disrespect for the Man, but now we’ve counted on majority rule for so long we think it’s the air we breathe. In human decency we trust, so our duty is to go quietly when our team loses. It feels wrong to speak ill of the president. We’re not like the bigoted, vulgar bad sports who slandered Obama and spread birther conspiracies, oh, wait. Now we’re to honor a president who made a career of debasing the presidency?

But politeness is no substitute for morality, and won’t save us in the end. We only get to decide who we are. As a writer and a person my bedrock is perennial hope for a better world than this one, and for that I’ve borne the radical brand, not by choice. As outlaws go I’m as boring as toast, a polite, southern female who’s never broken any law but the speed limit. Despite this gentility I’ve endured FBI investigations and personal threats, and once had to travel on book tour with a bodyguard. This was during Republican administrations that sounded infinitely friendlier to dissent than the one that’s now on deck. So you’ll forgive my weak faith in broad-shouldered American tolerance and the guaranteed free pass for good behavior.

 

Next page →
← Previous page