Most live in present; Some of us remember the past

  GEORGE TEMPLETON: COMMENTARY  

Image from Storyville.

By George Templeton
Gazette Columnist
 
Political Correctness in “No When”

“No When” is separate from time.  It has no past, present, or future.   It is absolutely true and politically correct.  It is never ambiguous, contradictory, or incomplete.  Nothing happens or changes in “No When”.  Time vibrates randomly forward and back.  Cause and effect goes away.  There is no point in trying to measure it.  Time requires regularity.  Instability causes infectious uncertainty.  Disorder allows claiming and concluding anything.  When you drop an egg, the fragments of its shell are accessible, but you cannot put it back together along with its spilt yoke and white.  That changes its future irreversibly.  Our lives are like that, but most of us live in the present.  Some of us remember the past.

Politically Correct

We grew up politically incorrect, but we did not realize it.

Paul Broca, the master of nineteenth century craniometry, concluded that brain size, facial shape, woolly hair, and skin color predicted intelligence.  It was the foundation of white superiority that Hitler believed in.   Jesse Owens’ four gold medals in the 1936 Olympics called it into question.

Storyville was a red light district at the turn of the twentieth century.  It was a mixing pot of musical styles, cultures, and races, where the most beautiful girls were of mixed race.  Julie, an entertainer on the Show Boat was one of them.   That 1927 musical dealt with racial prejudice and tragic love.  How does one know that they are “black”?  Julie passed for white.  Her marriage became illegal and she could no longer perform for a white audience when her black blood was discovered.

No court had struck down a ban on interracial marriage prior to 1948.  It was not until 1967 that the Supreme Court unanimously ruled (legislated from the bench) that laws against interracial marriage were unconstitutional.   The movie, “Guess who’s coming to Dinner” and the sitcom “All in the Family” reminded us of how we really felt.

Arthur Jensen (2002) studied the influence of genetics and race on intelligence.  But we are not intelligent enough to know what conscience is or how it works even though it will soon drive our cars.  We mistake self-interest for empathy.

In 2003, scientists mapped the human DNA code for the first time.  Armed with computer ANOVA (analysis of variance), they found that there is more variation within races than between them.  This is what happens when science runs up against what it means to be human.  The self fractures apart.  Only people are left.

Living in Racist History 

The founding fathers wanted to abolish slavery.  So wrote Glenn Beck in a fit of patriotic hubris, but we fought a war over it.  Today, our President would identify non-citizens in the census, but they trust him less than the North and South came to trust each other.  Then, we counted slaves as 3/5 of a person.

Anti-immigrant sentiment thrust the Know-Nothing Party to prominence.  Abraham Lincoln wrote that they would change our Declaration to read “… all men are created equal except Negroes, foreigners, and Catholics”.  Illinois and Indiana barred African Americans from entering their states, while Oregon ordered all black people out. 

White America objected to Jackie Robinson’s entry into Major League Baseball in 1947.  The early fifties Arizona school books wrote of how the slave owners treated their valuable investment well.  The Amos ‘n’ Andy show (1951-1953) made fun of blacks, treating them as incompetent and stupid.   Colored people needed guidance.  Our society was structured that way, so they agreed.  If they did not show deference and obedience, they would be sorry.

There was de facto segregation in Mesa and Phoenix in the fifties.  There was hard core segregation and inequality in the Southern States, where blacks could not sit at the lunch counter, drink at the “whites only” water fountain, enter through the front door, or get a job even though they held master’s degrees.

In the fifties, I listened to the “race records”, played by the colored radio station on my grandfather’s giant Philco radio.  It was before Elvis Presley.  The music was delightfully “different”, but our parents worried that it would rot our minds.  They even worried about Elvis.  The musical “Memphis” describes that time.  Its subject is not only black music, but the relationship between whites and blacks, and inter-racial romance.

In 1957, Governor Orval Faubus called out his national guard to prevent the Little Rock Nine from attending Central High School.  When Louis Armstrong complained about how blacks were treated, we said “Don’t they appreciate that we freed them from slavery?  It’s Communists that make them act this way.”

In the early sixties, the pastor at my church explained that God was for “separate but equal”.   His congregation would not tolerate minorities lowering their property values.   But youth had more “soul” than the establishment.

The students in southern universities protested against racial integration.  They carried signs reading, “Go back to Africa, Negros”.  How do you suppose they feel about Trump’s suggestion to the five new idealistic Congresswomen, “Go back to where you came from”?

In college, we lived together, participated in civic obligations, planned and cooked our meals, and debated racism along with theology.  It wasn’t just God’s grace and his little book that counted.  Deeds mattered.  The important thing in religion was to engage in and serve society, not dogma.  Religion had not yet become a weapon of political ideology.  We believed in the role of the church, but that is getting harder today.  Now it is solidly on the side of cruelty and the destruction of liberals.

There was no agreement.  There was controversy over things like whether the universe was much more than 6000 years old and if all the animals came over on the Ark.  There was confusion about the theology of Paul Tillich, and offense over the idea that faith requires doubt.    But we were not politically correct.  As students, we sang “God is on our side”.  The establishment had to be turned.

We can thank Lyndon Baines Johnson for the Civil Rights Act of 1964.  Eighty one Republicans approved.  Only fifty nine Democrats did.  By doing the prudent thing, Johnson lost the political South.  As in musical chairs, the Republicans and Democrats changed sides.  This is the cultural and political foment that existed in Joe Biden’s early service to our country.

At our lunch table, the discussion turned to how Martin Luther King was the beguiling, deceitful anti-Christ, imminent before the pending apocalypse.  Promiscuous, unfaithful, and Communistic, he should not be granted a holiday.  Governor Evan Mecham agreed.  It was white society’s self-understanding.  Now, we hear it again in the GOP’s strategy.  We find it difficult to have empathy for people who are different than us.

It Hurts

In the seventies, Civil rights opponents controlled the Senate.  Biden had to work with powerful segregationists like James Eastland of Mississippi.  There were blacks who did not want to be bused to white schools, whites who did not want to be bused to black neighborhoods, and strong community friendships that mattered as much as anything to the social development of children.  What is appropriate relates to demographics, geography, finance, school quality, and local job opportunities.  These are neighborhood variables.

Racism hurts feelings, but Kamila Harris got what she wanted.  She dammed Biden using faint praise about him not being racist and then launched into an issue that is historical, nuanced, and not appropriate for the hurry up of the “debate”.

Kamila was bused to a better school, but it hurt her feelings because she discovered that the world was imperfect.   She printed T shirts and sold them to finance her campaign, with her little girl picture on it.  Such politics is disingenuous, contrived, and motivated more by ambition than anything else.  Meaning is deeper than political correctness.

Bigotry is an insidious disease because you don’t know when you have it.  You can’t be only partly accepting.  What others do justifies one’s self, and that comes from the top down.  When our president speaks of immigrant “infestations” from “sxxx hole countries” bringing criminals, drug deals, and rapists, he justifies those who feel that this the fact.  It is the ground of the 9500 member dehumanizing, racist, Border Patrol Facebook group described in recent news.  It is in Lindsey Graham’s comment justifying cruel treatment of families seeking asylum. “Things are tough all over the world”.  We have a breathtaking facility for ignoring other people’s pain.  The Art of the Deal contains a monstrous impulse revealing how our darkest urges lurk in the background of every transaction.

Trump says that he is the moral one because he loves our country.  Evangelicals overwhelmingly agree, ignoring the majority of the Bible.  That only adds to our “Heart of Darkness” and raises a new generation to be amoral hurting the very cause religious people argue for.  The reason their churches are shrinking is not because educated people prevent them from believing in God.

So, now your neighbor has a supply of crosses to burn stored in his barn.  He has hoods in his closet, and he tweets white nationalism, but he is not racist.  Evangelicals can see into his heart and they find no hatred.  He is a loyal member of the Republican Party, justified because it is just politics, not racism.   It is the evil other that disagrees with Trump and whom he calls Godless Communists (Socialists).  But his words reveal the hidden seeds of his thought and that good or bad are nothing more than what mommy said when he was a child.  We worry about what has happened to America’s heart.  Racism should not require something more, like conviction for a hate crime.  But neither moralizing nor edict will make any difference.

Democratic Republicans

Perhaps the best Republican for the job is a Democrat.  The big challenges we face are bipartisan, neither Republican nor Democrat.

I voted for Barry Goldwater many times.  He often stuck his foot in his mouth, but he was an honest man.  I trusted him.  I voted for John McCain for similar reasons.  I can find room to support Jeff Flake’s ideas set forth in his 2017 book, Conscience of a Conservative.  John Kasich describes policies that liberals do not find repugnant in his 2017 book, Two Paths, America Divided or United.  These men thought that America would come to its senses, but apparently not.

We need the idealism of youth, but they have not lived the problem, have not met the reality demons.  The cult of amateurism and novelty is contradictory to experience and wisdom.  Whoever becomes president is going to be confronted by many imperfections that will require personal sacrifice, consistent policy, and cooperation for tens of years.   If we go too far to the left, the pendulum of ideology will continue to destructively oscillate.  If the Democrats are to win, they need something more than Trump’s game.  Perhaps it is history, honesty, experience, wisdom, and character.