America is Better Than This
Bob Herbert
NY Times Op-Ed: August 27, 2010
America is better than Glenn Beck. For all of his celebrity, Mr. Beck is an
ignorant, divisive, pathetic figure. On the anniversary of the great 1963
March on Washington he will stand in the shadows of giants - Abraham Lincoln
and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Who do you think is more
representative of this nation?
Consider a brief sampling of their rhetoric.
Lincoln: "A house divided against itself cannot stand."
King: "Never succumb to the temptation of becoming bitter."
Beck: "I think the president is a racist."
Washington was on edge on the morning of Aug. 28, 1963. The day was sunny
and very warm and Negroes, as we were called in those days, were coming into
town by the tens of thousands. The sale of liquor was banned. Troops stood
by to restore order if matters got out of control. President John F. Kennedy
waited anxiously in the White House to see how the day would unfold.
It unfolded splendidly. The crowd for the "March on Washington for Jobs and
Freedom" grew to some 250,000. Nearly a quarter of the marchers were white.
They gathered at the Lincoln Memorial, where they were enthralled by the
singing of Mahalia Jackson and Joan Baez. The march was all about inclusion
and the day seemed to swell with an extraordinary sense of camaraderie and
good feeling.
The climax, of course, was Dr. King's transcendent "I Have a Dream" speech.
Jerald Podair, a professor of American studies at Lawrence University in
Wisconsin, has called Aug. 28, 1963, "the most important single day in civil
rights history." This is the historical legacy that Glenn Beck, a small man
with a mean message, has chosen to tread upon with his cynical rally on
Saturday at that very same Lincoln Memorial.
Beck is a provocateur who likes to play with matches in the tinderbox of
racial and ethnic confrontation. He seems oblivious to the real danger of
his execrable behavior. He famously described President Obama as a man "who
has a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture."
He is an integral part of the vicious effort by the Tea Party and other
elements of the right wing to portray Mr. Obama as somehow alien, a strange
figure who is separate and apart from - outside of - ordinary American life.
As the watchdog group Media Matters for America has noted, Beck said of the
president, "He chose to use the name, Barack, for a reason, to identify not
with America - you don't take the name Barack to identify with America. You
take the name Barack to identify, with what? Your heritage? The heritage,
maybe, of your father in Kenya, who is a radical?"
Facts and reality mean nothing to Beck. And there is no road too low for him
to slither upon. The Southern Poverty Law Center tells us that in a twist on
the civil rights movement, Beck said on the air that he "wouldn't be
surprised if in our lifetime dogs and fire hoses are released or opened on
us. I wouldn't be surprised if a few of us get a billy club to the head. I
wouldn't be surprised if some of us go to jail - just like Martin Luther
King did - on trumped-up charges. Tough times are coming."
He makes you want to take a shower.
In Beck's view, President Obama is driven by a desire to settle "old racial
scores" and his ultimate goal is "reparations" for black Americans. Abe
Lincoln and Dr. King could only look on aghast at this clown.
Beck has been advertising his rally as nonpolitical, but its main speaker is
Sarah Palin. She had her own low moment recently as a racial provocateur,
publicly voicing her support for Laura Schlessinger, radio's "Dr. Laura,"
who went out of her way to humiliate a black caller by continuously using
the n-word to make a point, even after the caller had made it clear that she
was offended.
Palin's advice to Schlessinger: "Don't retreat - reload."
There is a great deal of hatred and bigotry in this country, but it does not
define the country. The daily experience of most Americans is not a bitter
experience and for all of our problems we are in a much better place on
these matters than we were a half century ago.
But I worry about the potential for violence that grows out of unrestrained,
hostile bombast. We've seen it so often. A little more than two weeks after
the 1963 March on Washington, the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham
was bombed by the Ku Klux Klan and four young black girls were killed. And
three months after the march, Jack Kennedy was assassinated.
My sincere advice to Beck, Palin and their followers is chill, baby, chill.
***
http://www.thenation.com/article/37476/katrina-not-metaphor
Katrina Is Not a Metaphor
By Melissa Harris-Lacewell
The Nation: July 14, 2010
I haven't missed an episode of HBO's compelling new series Treme. I have
watched most of it in bars and restaurants in New Orleans. Creator David
Simon has captured much about life in the city. Most critical, the series
understands that New Orleans is, at its core, a physical experience. It's
routine to spend a Tuesday night standing shoulder to shoulder with 200
strangers in a tin-ceilinged sticky-floor bar, dancing to the blaring horns
of a brass band until your hair falls in a wet pile around your ringing
ears. Treme evokes New Orleans as the unbearable weight of summer's
humidity, the sobering perfection of a midnight beignet, the magnificence of
a crane taking flight in City Park, the familiar taste of home in a plastic
bowl of red beans and rice bought from a street vendor.
Perhaps this is why so many New Orleanians love the show. It feels so...
real. Seamlessly incorporated locals like musicians Trombone Shorty and
Kermit Ruffins are just the start. The city's landmarks, restaurants,
newspapers, T-shirts and taxis are the authentic fixtures that give the show
substance. But I worry that, for all its authenticity, Treme is ultimately
reductive. It is still a fiction whose characters only gesture toward the
far more complicated reality they portray.
Take the case of Phyllis Montana-Leblanc, who plays Desiree, the girlfriend
of Antoine Batiste, portrayed by Wendell Pierce. Leblanc is not an actor by
training. She entered the national scene as the most compelling voice in
Spike Lee's When the Levees Broke. Her personal testimony and stinging
analysis were the captivating threads holding Lee's long documentary
together. In that film Leblanc told her story with unflinching honesty and
well-directed anger, without a hint of self-censorship or self-pity. In
Treme she is scripted, cast as a fictionalized rendering of herself.
Leblanc's story is given back to her as lines written by someone else.
Desiree, the character, is an allegory for Leblanc, the citizen.
This representation is especially disturbing because throughout her
post-Katrina ordeal Leblanc insisted on her humanity even in profoundly
dehumanizing conditions. In her memoir she writes of her frustration while
waiting for help to evacuate the flooded city: "I am a person, a living
breathing person with a heart beating inside of a body, and you can't help
me?" Her insistence that the government violated human rights and flouted
basic human dignity resonates throughout her book. But each time her story
is mediated-first by Lee's editing and then by the writers and directors of
Treme-it becomes more palatable, even entertaining. With each translation
some meaning is lost.
This is not a criticism of Leblanc; it is a criticism of a pervasive trend,
of which Treme is perhaps the best example, of reducing Hurricane Katrina to
a mere metaphor. These days it is fashionable to use Katrina as a discursive
tool.
In March 2009, Frank Rich wondered if AIG bonuses would become Obama's
"Katrina moment." A few months later Politico reported that "Republicans
hope General Motors is President Obama's Hurricane Katrina," only to be
topped by the Washington Times, which asked, "Will Swine Flu Be Obama's
Katrina?" By January of this year the Wall Street Journal readily declared
that the Haiti earthquake was Obama's Katrina, while Arianna Huffington
recently assured readers that it was jobs, not the BP oil spill, that would
be Obama's Katrina.
Sometimes it feels like commentators can't wait for another Hurricane
Katrina. After all, catastrophes focus public attention, reveal
institutional shortcomings and evoke powerful emotional responses. Maybe it
was inevitable that Hurricane Katrina would be reduced to a casual metaphor.
For thirty years pundits have described political scandal involving intrigue
and corruption with the handy suffix "gate." Now Katrina is shorthand for
administration-crippling unresponsiveness. Mention Katrina to remind
politicians that they need to look concerned and engaged when citizens are
suffering. Deploy Katrina as a lesson in bureaucratic incompetence. Shake a
scolding Katrina finger at leaders who seem overwhelmed by a current
challenge. Katrina is unexpected disaster. Katrina is spectacular debacle.
Katrina is the beginning of the end of a flawed leader.
Except that it is not. Eighty percent of the city flooded when the levees
failed. More than 1,500 people were killed. Tens of thousands were
permanently displaced. Billions in property was lost. The levee failure
caused by Katrina wiped away entire communities, irreparably damaging homes,
schools, churches and stores. It stole decades of family memories. It
altered centuries of tradition in a matter of moments. It left a legacy of
blight, economic devastation and personal suffering in its wake.
Each time Katrina, whose fifth anniversary is on the oil-soaked horizon, is
evoked as a political metaphor, we risk a dangerous mediation of experience.
These metaphors reduce catastrophe to an object lesson, implying that the
effects of the disaster have been resolved, that the plot has been resolved
and that the continued suffering of our fellow citizens is little more than
a literary device.
Yes, New Orleans is a city whose cultural excess and eccentricity cry out
for understanding through the literary, the poetic, the musical, the
athletic and even the magical. But when we reduce Katrina to fiction-even
really good fiction-we risk making it little more than a trope. The fifth
anniversary of Katrina reminds us that to fully restore New Orleans, and to
change it into a more just and equal city, we must build tangible political
will based on sober assessments of the city's continuing challenges.
Katrina is still our Katrina. This story does not yet have an ending.
Melissa Victoria Harris-Lacewell is an American writer, political scientist,
and an Associate Professor of Politics and African American studies at
Princeton University. She received her B.A. in English from Wake Forest
University, her Ph.D. in political science from Duke University.
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