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CounterPunch
December
18, 2002
American Diary
Why Strom Won in '48; Why Biking's
Bad for (Some) of You
by ALEXANDER COCKBURN
It's one of the staple and indeed few remaining
pleasures of American political life. A Republican taken with
drink, speaking unguardedly near a live microphone, or in Trent
Lott's case coasting through a ritual farewell speech on automatic
pilot, drops a racist gibe or fond salute to America's dark past.
The rituals of outrage, apology, self-abasement, renewed outrage,
deeper self-abasement, forgiveness or rejection, duly follow.
Sometimes the sinner is ceremoniously
booted into oblivion, as happened with Richard Nixon's secretary
of agriculture, Earl Butz, or Reagan's Secretary of the Interior,
James Watt . Sometimes, as is now happening in Lott's case, the
Democrats give him a thumping while hoping that in the end Lott
will hold onto his post as Senate Majority whip, the better to
remind black voters that this is the true face of the Republican
Party, featuring the Klansman's robe, the burning cross and the
lynching tree. Better Lott than some oily substitute like Frist
of Tennessee solemnly declaring that the Republican Party has
finally put the past behind it and that the healing should now
begin.
One of Bill Clinton's many offenses was
that he devalued the public apology. He had to make so many of
them that they ceased to be valid as currency, like bank notes
in the German inflation of the early 1920s when people had to
take a wheelbarrow of cash to buy a sausage for lunch.
These days, post-Clinton, a manly mumble
of contrition is no good. Unless a politician comes out with
a truckload of apologies and keeps sending them round the track
them for a week, people claim he's refusing to climb down, and
keep insisting, Does Lott really and truly mean it. And for that
matter, why stop with Lott? What about the four Dixiecrat states
which voted for Strom Thurmond back in 1948. Shouldn't their
governors today issue formal apologies, make available "apology
bins" in every neighborhood wherein those who actually voted
for Strom or their descendants, can deposit personal expressions
of remorse?
Another factor in this inflation is the
fact that sometimes the apology is rejected, no matter how often
repeated. The Democrats and the press did this to Jesse Jackson.
Columnists like the late James Reston who defiled the editorial
pages of the New York Times on a weekly basis with racist diatribes
about Jackson's effrontery as a black man in presuming to seek
the Democratic presidential nomination in 1984 and 1988 then
whacked him again for inadequate demonstrations of remorse for
his crack about Hymietown. Senator Joe Lieberman even managed
to bracket Jackson and Lott last, saying that neither of them
were sincere in covering themselves with sackcloth and ashes.
The rhetorical undertow of the Lott uproar
has been rosy-cheeked affirmation that because Strom Thurmond
didn't become president in 1948, didn't even draw enough votes
from Truman to put in the Republican Dewey, America thereafter
made decisive strides towards racial equality, with justice and
prosperity for all, achieved at some undefined point in the middle
past.
Perhaps I missed somewhere in the press
a useful update of the Kerner Commission, which was convened
after the urban uprisings of the late 1960s to investigate the
causes of that violence and which concluded that despite formal
renunciation in the early 1960s of the old, abused doctrine of
Separate But Equal, at the practical level Separate And Unequal
remained the overall condition of black Americans. How much better
are things for black people today?
True, a few overt statements of racism
by politicians get chastised from time to time. True, as George
Bush likes to point out, his administration is adorned by Condoleeza
Rice and Colin Powell, which is like saying that all Nubians
were doing well under the Roman Emperor Augustus because a Nubian
eunuch stood at his elbow. But who are, either absolutely or
in terms of proportion, the poorest, the most harassed by cops,
the most imprisoned, the most executed, the most under-served
in terms of schools, doctors, housing, lawyers, the most often
at the receiving end of the economic boot, the most vulnerable
to any adverse stroke of fortune, the least protected by those
institutions can offer credit, emergency assistance in a time
of need?
Banished these days from public venues
and discussion is the designedly vicious racism of the sort that
prompted Strom Thurmond to declare in 1948 that "All the
laws of Washington and all the bayonets of the Army cannot force
the nigger into our homes, our schools, our churches." (
As Tom Gorman recently pointed out on the CounterPunch website
recent press accounts of this speech have been sanitized, replacing
the word "nigger" with "Negro." According
to Gorman, audio recordings of the speech have Thurmond saying
the former. You can
listen to them here. Adam Clymer in last Sunday's Times
went out of his way to assure his readers that "the better
spoken white Southerners of the time, including Mr Thurmond"
eschewed the word "nigger" in favor of Negro.)
The politicians, the think tanks and
the academics these days don't use the word "nigger"
but embrace concepts with which Thurmond or the young Trent Lott
one of the leaders of segregationist forces at the University
of Mississippi would have felt entirely comfortable. Remember
the Bell Curve, which amid much earnest praise in the press,
mustered statistical trumpery to argue that blacks are stupider?
The basic intent of The Democratic Leadership Council that greased
Clinton's career (and of which Senator Joe Lieberman was once
the chair, was to wean the Democratic Party away from any sense
of obligation to "the special interests", meaning mostly
black people.
In other words Strom Thurmond won in 1948, to the extent that
the Democratic Party took his point entirely to heart. When the
Mississippi Freedom Delegation tried to seat itself in the Democratic
convention of 1964 the party regulars, including Northern liberals
like Humphrey and Mondale, fought savagely and successfully to
drive them out. It was in practical recognition of Thurmond's
victory that Michael Dukakis began his presidential campaign
in 1988, catering to Dixie prejudices in the Deep South, that
Bill Clinton played to the same gallery in his campaign, railing
at Sister Souljah and okaying the execution a black man with
some of his brain missing.
The Democratic party that is now railing
furiously against Lott is the same that didn't raise a finger
against, indeed covertly connived at the coalition that overthrew
Rep Cynthia McKinney in Georgia in the Democratic primary this
summer and installed a woman, who had until recently been a Republican
and who had enthusiastically endorsed Alan Keyes, the most rabid
opponent of abortion on the campaign trail for the Republican
nomination in 2000. Of course McKinney was not only an economic
radical but also vocal on the topic of bipartisan US support
for Israel's persecution of Palestinians. You want to talk about
Democratic hypocrisy on the topic of racism, given its unswerving
support for a state which has racism and segregation as part
of its founding principles?
Imagine Strom Thurmond, the night before
he launches his Dixiecrat campaign in 1948. An angel (heavenly
host, Democratic side of the aisle) appears before him in a vision,
and says, "Strom! Don't do it. The party you have just quit
will one day have as its majority leader just one of those northern
liberals you say is trying to destroy everything you and the
South hold dear. This man will be called Tip O'Neill and according
to God's blueprint he will, in the year 1986 if I am not mistaken,
cooperate with the man you now know as a film actor but who will
in 1986 be amid his second term as president of the United States.
Listen to me now, Strom! These men O'Neill and Reagan will join
together in framing drug laws that will ensure that by the year
2002 (when it is scheduled that you will reach one hundred years),
many young black people will live in the certainty of spending
long periods of their lives locked in prison.
Of course Strom tells the angel he doesn't
believe him and pushes ahead with his Dixiecrat bid, but as the
angel said, the fix went ahead on schedule.
Bikes Are Bad
for Your Balls
Ahoy there, male bicyclers! There have
long been stories about bicycling, particularly on those narrow
modern saddles, being bad for the balls. Now comes fresh reason
to avoid them. This just in from Britain's New Scientist. "Men
who maintain grueling mountain-bicycling programs are apt to
have lower sperm counts and more abnormalities of the scrotum
than nonbikers are, a new study finds."
Tests on two groups showed that mountain
bikers "had injuries, mostly subtle, to their scrotums and
testicles." Semen samples revealed that bikers averaged
20 million sperm per milliliter of semen, compared with 47 million/ml
in the nonbikers. Reason: Higher scrotal temperatures during
strenuous biking depress sperm making, and "when viewed
under a microscope, the bikers' sperm were also significantly
less mobile than the others'-The doc in charge of the enquiry
recommends bikes with shock absorbers and cushioned seats."
Yesterday's
Features
M. Shahid Alam
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Changed America
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and Henry Kissinger: True Love At Last
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on His Den:
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A Middle East Peace Process without the Peace
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