OK, I’m not saying that the actual historical Jesus — who may have been black — was racist. He seemed to be a pretty chill guy.
But certainly the European Christian concept of Jesus — all blonde and blue-eyed and ready to do some smiting — was crazy bigoted.
Of course, the link between racism and Christianity has been strong for centuries. Think of the forced conversions of indigenous people in the Americas, or the zealotry of missionaries in Africa.
Decades ago, you might have heard Republicans say, “Vote for us because we will improve your lives.” They never delivered — unless you were already rich, of course. Otherwise, they didn’t even try to make life better for the middle or working class.
So the GOP eventually changed its appeal to the watered-down “Vote for us because we will get rid of all the stuff you hate.” This time, they really did try to fulfill their promises. But on just about every conservative issue — abortion, gay marriage, Obamacare — the Republican Party failed, mostly because the GOP’s ideas are idiotic, reckless, and unpopular. Conservatives couldn’t get rid of food stamps, establish English as our official language, prohibit “anchor babies,” or really achieve any of their main goals — except tax cuts for the rich. They are extraordinarily good at accomplishing that.
So Republicans have been reduced to their latest sales pitch, which is, “Vote for us because we hate the same stuff you hate.”
That’s basically it.
There is no grand plan or ambitious goal, unless delusional idolization of the 1950s somehow counts as a vision for the future.
There are numerous aggravating hypocrisies that permeate our culture, such as right-wingers using the word “Orwellian” to refer to anything they don’t like, even if it has nothing to do with Orwell’s theories.
However, using doublespeak to espouse doublespeak is not as egregious as claiming victimhood in order to maintain power.
Yes, “many White conservatives roll their eyes when Black people claim that systemic racism exists,” yet these same individuals “have steadily built a legal and political movement that claims White people are the primary victims of covert forms of racism embedded in American institutions.”
It’s a nifty trick. Racism doesn’t exist, except whenever White people feel they’re not in charge as God intended.
When I was a kid, I learned in school that the Lincoln-Douglas debates were intellectual tour de forces of democracy in action. But I didn’t hear that Stephen Douglas argued that “this government was made on the White basis, by White men, for the benefit of White men and their posterity forever, and should be administered by White men and none others.”
I also learned that Charles Lindbergh was a hero who exemplified can-do American spirit. But I didn’t hear that he fraternized with Nazis, extolled anti-Semitism, and embraced a bizarre scientific theory that White men should be made immortal so that they could rule for all eternity.
I learned that Black people got out of control and burned down Watts. But I didn’t hear that White people got out of control and burned down Tulsa.
And I believe the Trail of Tears was mentioned once in passing.
You get the idea. I received what was regarded as a well-rounded education. Unfortunately, it was just slightly full of bigoted bullshit.
In this crazed maelstrom of a society, surely there is one thing that we can all agree on. And it is simply this:
Terror Management Theory is an awesome name for a punk band.
It’s a missed opportunity, however, because this term actually describes a psychological model for how humans deal with the knowledge that we will die someday. Terror management theory (TMT) postulates that “death anxiety drives people to adopt worldviews that protect their self-esteem, worthiness, and sustainability and allow them to believe that they play an important role in a meaningful world.”
Of course, I’m Gen X, so I can’t help but bust out in cynical laughter at the phrase “important role in a meaningful world.”
Ha, there it is again. Sorry, last time, I promise.
In any case, TMT proposes that individuals develop “close relationships within their own cultural group in order to convince themselves that they will somehow live on — if only symbolically — after their inevitable death.”
Well, Benjamin Rush was one of the more obscure Founding Fathers, but he was kind of a big deal back in the day.
Rush signed the Declaration of Independence, served as surgeon general of the Continental Army, and was an all-around Enlightenment intellectual. He opposed slavery, advocated for free public education, supported women’s rights, and lobbied for a more equitable justice system — all edgy ideas for the 1700s. He is also regarded as the father of American psychiatry, and he left a legacy of philanthropy and scientific excellence.
Wow, he sounds great, doesn’t he?
Oh, he also believed that being Black was a horrible disease, and that with proper “treatment,” African Americans could be “cured” and become White.
Yes, for the vast majority of human existence, nobody was cool or hip or happenin or tight or flexing or phat or badass or whatever the kids are saying today.
Those concepts didn’t exist.
So everyone — from kings to peasants, from farmers to pirates — just went about their business, devoid of coolness, until the day they died.
And then the 1920s arrived.
All of a sudden, we had jazz and nightclubs and drinking and carousing. We had crazy parties, hipster lingo (e.g., “the bee’s knees”) and America’s first wild women, the flappers.
Seriously, how cool were the flappers?
But the development of this new human state of mind provoked an equally strong backlash. So we had the first scolds, the first self-righteous hypocrites, and the first moral panics.
Why did this happen?
Well, as usual in America, you can blame it on Black people… or more accurately, you can blame it on White people who blamed it on Black people.
You see, the 1920s saw the rise of jazz, often proclaimed as the only music genre created in the United States. Of course, I would argue that the blues is an original music form that was born in America, and the same can be said of rock and roll as well as rap/hip-hop (and yes, Black people invented all of them).
In any case, jazz musicians were primarily Black, and the White audience that danced to those crazy beats had upended a cultural norm that no one ever thought would be upended.
For the first time in American history, Black people were influencing White people. Never before had White Americans admired or respected Black people the way they did with jazz musicians. This was simply unprecedented, and to many White people, it was unimaginable and abominable as well.
And this inversion of societal mores promptly caused much of White America to freak the fuck out.
The criminalization of drug use, the demonization of the younger generation, the hysteria about loud music, the terror over premarital sex — all of it had its roots in the 1920s. And all of these cultural fears were based upon the jagged foundation of racism, the true root fear for so much of our country’s hatred and paranoia.
This particular set of horrors is closing in on a century of cultivation. And as we all know, these fears are stronger than ever with a very large and very loud portion of America.
But to be fair, without apocalyptic sermonizing and uptight judgement and close-minded intolerance, we would not have their antithesis: the concept of being cool.
So here’s a salute to those wild, bawdy, and edgy 1920s jazz lovers, partying until sunrise and drinking bathtub gin and dancing bizarre jitterbugs like the chicken flip, the kangaroo dip, and the monkey glide (all real dances, by the way).
We can all only hope to be half as cool as they were.
As I mentioned in my last article, I have recently had computer problems that prevented me from posting updates to this site, or commenting on the myriad issues that are afflicting America — issues like, apparently, the gender of a toy potato.
Wait, what the fuck?
OK, maybe I’ve been offline for a little bit, but surely, nobody is falling for the GOP’s obvious attempt to reignite idiotic culture wars in a pathetic ploy to distract from their massive failures of leadership, criminal neglect, boorish incompetence, and treasonous behavior.
Look, maybe we should reassess what constitutes a crisis.
For example, despite definite progress, the coronavirus has not been vanquished. In fact, Republican-led states now have higher Covid-19 case rates and death rates than Democrat-led states, which may have something to do with right-wing zealotry that encourages conservatives to punch anybody wearing a mask.
Or perhaps Americans should be alarmed at the fact that “Republicans are taking a sledgehammer to voting rights” and that assaulting democracy has become “the central tenet of their party.”
For that matter, perhaps we should at least acknowledge how freaky it is that 40% of Republicans might become violent if they don’t get their way.
And speaking of the GOP, am I the only one who is just a little annoyed that not a single Republican voted for pandemic relief legislation? I mean, the effort was immensely popular and had the backing of most economists. It was a golden opportunity for Republicans to refute the idea that they “only care about the people who can make donations to their campaigns.”
After all, these are the same people who threw a party when they passed tax cuts for billionaires. So isn’t everyone pissed off that Republicans clearly don’t care if average Americans swan dive into bankruptcy or get sick and die? Isn’t every citizen incensed at the hypocrisy, indifference, and corruption?
Hmm, I guess none of this is bothering people.
So never mind. Maybe I’ll just go and disconnect my computer again.
If you could time travel back to 2016 and issue dire warnings about the Trump Administration, as soon as you mentioned the president tear-gassing peaceful protesters in order to engineer a photo op in front of a church while waving a bible around… well, your listeners would dismiss you as a deranged liberal spewing heavy-handed metaphors that defy belief.
And yet, here we are, in the clutches of a fascist Snidely Whiplash who is so comically corrupt, idiotically inept, and grotesquely authoritarian that he’s morphed into a human parody. Except nobody is laughing.
There is some comfort, however, in the fact that American society has deteriorated so far and so quickly that subtlety, subtext, and irony have all been trampled under the leaden heels of conservative fear-mongering and white nationalism. And that sliver of a silver lining is this:
We all know exactly where we stand.
There is no more justifying tortured syntaxes, misogynistic insults, or racist asides with mutterings of “What the president really meant to say is…”
There is no more dismissing neo-Nazis on parade as potentially good people in disguise, or claiming that the GOP is going along with high-caliber insanity in exchange for tax cuts.
There is no more shadowboxing the truth, rationalizing praise for dictators, or dismissing the fetishization of violence.
There is not a conservative or a liberal who is confused about this president.
You say that Trump wants to censor social media — a blatant kneecapping of free speech — solely because Twitter fact-checked one of countless lies? That sounds about right.
You say the president has “mused” (now there’s a quaint word!) about unleashing American military might on American citizens on American soil? Not a shocker.
Similarly, we cannot be too taken aback at the state of this country, and the morass of shameless, vile behavior that erupts forth every day.
So there’s a white woman in Central Park who calls the cops on a black man, knowing full well he could be killed because of her false accusation, because he dared to ask her to follow the rules? Yes, we could have predicted that.
And a homicidal cop in Minneapolis kneeled on a black man’s neck for several minutes, for no reason other than to inflict critical physical pain, without even the slightest concern that people were watching and videotaping for minutes on end? Hey, the only surprise is that it doesn’t happen more often.
And you shout that we now have nationwide — and even worldwide — protests against America’s systemic racism that have turned hundreds of city streets into rolling street battles? Honestly, who couldn’t have seen that one coming?
Yes, perhaps there is yet one sad, stupendously delusional Trump fan who is muttering, mostly to himself, that our jabbering chief executive is not as power-hungry as he seems to be, and that our nation is actually on the right track.
Well, I’m sorry, my friend, but when it comes to this president and this country, plausible deniability died long ago, brutality and decisively. Its essence was cremated, and then the ashes were scattered over cages holding migrant children.
The benefit of the doubt has been executed, and conservative “principles” have been revealed as the pathetic façade they always were.
Those moderate Republicans who still believe Trump will magically become a unifying leader? They are as real as Bigfoot.
And journalists who still believe that Trump won the votes of rural whites because of “economic anxiety”? They are some strange fairy tale or a half-forgotten urban myth.
Nobody truly believes any of those absurd ideas anymore.
Instead, we believe in the undeniable, the clear-cut and the perfectly obvious. We believe in rage and malicious motives and unquenchable greed. We believe in irrational fear and shrieking and the banging of heads against walls. We believe in those things because we see them every day.
It’s all out in the open now.
African Americans are sick of being targets. Progressives are tired of being polite. And racists aren’t even hiding it anymore. Everyone knows where one another stands.
