I Have A Scheme*

*Kudos to John Stewart for his takedown of Glenn Beck and also to Stephen Colbert for his slam on Beck's martyr complex.

Carnival barker Glenn Beck has been whipping up interest in the two-headed lady, who will appear tomorrow at his Destroy Honor rally. Strange white people--and I mean very strange looking people-- are showing up here in Old Town with signs for the rally in their cars with Midwest license plates. Remember the organizers warned people to stay away from Maryland and the black sections of D.C. Instead they are urged to come here to Northern Virginia. As I wrote before, evangelicals are beginning to freak out about Beck's recent public turns toward Mormon theology, saying that Beck is trying to make America into a Mormon country. Other evangelicals supportive of Beck issued this morning a pastoral letter saying that you don't have to be "de-Christianized" to attend the rally. The Koch family, the nation's largest polluters, are bankrolling the hotels and transportation for the attendees.

This morning's CNN poll showed that only 29% of Americans back the Teaparty people with a large majority against. That's good news.

Gene Robinson at the Washington Post was rather sanguine about the affair , reminding people that Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King are forever immortalized in our history so that Beck's egofest shouldn't threaten anyone. Gene did remind everyone that the original march on washington for Martin Luther King's "I Have A Dream Speech" was aimed at jobs and poverty. A. Phillip Randolph spoke on that very subject at the event.

While Gene is right that no one should be upset by this nonsense, this event is another unsettling episode over the last two years of the right trying to re-write history. It follows in the long line of radical right opposition to very basic amendments of our Constitution and the loony-tune elimination of the wall between church and state advocated by the Beckites. The emergence of this extreme view of American history indicates some deeper sickness at work.

So who should I turn to for some answers? Luckily, there is a wonderful new book of James Baldwin's uncollected writings The Cross of Redemption (Pantheon, 2010). This volume is a companion volume to the Library of America's collection of James Baldwin's essays. Even after all these decades,his prose is eloquent, his wit acerbic and his observations penetrating. In two of his essays, Baldwin recalls his terse meeting with Robert F. Kennedy over civil rights where Bobbie told Baldwin that the United States would have a black President in 30 years. Well, he was only off by 10. Most of the essays and speeches were written in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the awful aftermath of the assasinations had been felt and Richard Nixon re-emerged with his Southern strategy and the country was torn by Vietnam. From the modestly hopeful essays of the early 1960s, Baldwin plunges into despair and he expresses concern that white Amerca was in fact beyond redemption.

Several essays resonate to this day about the obliviousness of white Americans to the history of the United States. Baldwin many times argues that the problem in race relations in particular is that white lacks any true identity. "They don't know who they are." is a refrain heard throughout his writing. He makes the point that "the white" is a fabrication by people who abandoned their own past to belong to the United States and that amnesia of their roots has fueled their racism. Having lived in France, which was supportive of black artists in those days, Baldwin drew sharp contrasts with how he was treated there and how he was treated in the States, particularly in the South. In his testimony before Congress on creating studies in black history and culture, he emphasized that this shouldn't be done just for black Americans but for whites. "My history is your history and until you understand that you can't make progress."

It's all well and good to invoke the periods of nativism to understand this bizarre focus on illegal immigrants or this anti-Islam rage but there is some deeper pathology. Hatred and fear of President Obama isn't simply the old racist theme. It has a new twist. His African roots mean he is not our "darkie" but he's from one of those who escaped being enslaved by whites. And even worse he is a product of miscegenation. This is where the "birther", "Muslim" themes come from. He's totally other. The other you can't control or who does not understand what it is to be controlled by the whites.

You only have to read the body language of the Senate Republicans to get the message. Jeffrey Beauregard Sessions is a prime example of this. The President "that boy" must wait and learn how to behave according to our rules. It is also not a coincidence that all the CEOs speaking at Aspen likened Obama to Mussolini (they actually loved El Duce) and Hitler. If this were not true, you would hear about his Pilgrim ancestors and hear more that he received the largest popular vote in American history, a fact you only heard on election night and not a day after. How insulting is it to have a group of well-meaning Christian ministers write a letter affirming the President's Christianity? Who would dare do such a thing for Richard Nixon or even Ronald Reagan, both of whom never went to church? And why is it that the media so happily plays along?

This time there is a larger agenda than just to race-bait. This is the old bait-and-switch. Rev up the racist sentiment, while we pick more white pockets. A large piece of the American artifice collapsed in the last decade. We have seen all those who own America come out of the woodwork in the last 18 months to ensure their continued privilege. But the raw price of this is devastating and places at risk the survival of the country as we've known it. The last hurrah of the golden horde is here. That's why we are seeing the constant historical revisionism , the review of the constitution itself and the full scale attack on the whole idea of government itself. We are simply not brave enough to discuss the economic reality of the country and what we need to do to create a liveable society for everyone.

Yet we will remain deluded as people try and convince the public that Social Security is at risk and that the national debt isn't fixable so we must destroy the remains of a social welfare system. For this we need the new history of how the white Christian America was duped by "progressives" into creating a social welfare state. And we are actively helped out with this project by extraordinarily wealthy people like the Koch family and other billionaires, who must like the amusement of getting a whole subculture to act as their ministrel boys in the Tea Party Movement. The final looting has begun. And these poor souls will act as lemmings willingly jumping off the cliff for the sake of individual liberty and freedom.

We should have seen this coming. A tentative attempt by conservatives was made in 2008 when the economic system was collapsing . At that time, I received e-mails suggesting that George Soros, Charles Schumer and Barney Frank were at fault for the sub-prime mortgage crisis and that Soros was speculating wildly on the market. In short, the Jews did it. But that soon died because it was obviously uncouth. So then it was all those minorities who got subprime mortgages. The e-mails even threw in Jimmy Carter as a culprit because he outlawed "redlining", the practice of not selling real estate to blacks. Now amnesia sets in and all this is really just a Big Recession, which requires more tax cuts and shrinking the size of government. I had been waiting for any Republican to stand up in the last few months and admit that the white boys screwed up --and almost fatally. It will never happen.

So it makes sense to make whites become victims. You even get a choice. White Christians can believe they are persecuted because of their views on gays. White nationalists can lament the wave of Latinos coming into the country. And all whites can believe they are victims of a "racist" President--constantly warring with his identities--who hates the private sector. Take your pick. When the white boys go wild, they really go wild!

What is actually hopeful in reading James Baldwin is that he describes much of this as it happened in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when there was a civil war in this country of sorts. And we managed to survive that and move on for a generation. He would have understood perfectly where the attacks on President Obama were coming from. In many of his essays, he talks about the white Southerners' fears of blacks, the fear something was going to be taken away from them. Bayard Rustin always said that race was the 'burr under the American saddle" but he also indicated that it was economics that was the basis for all this conflict. It's too bad we haven't come farther in that understanding.

Recommended reading:
"We Can Change the Country"
"The Use of the Blues" (gratuitous)
"What Price Freedom"
"The White Problem"
"The Price May be Too High"
"On Being White..and Other Lies"
"The Nigger We Invent"