James Baldwin observed that Americans are the only people on earth who need to “find themselves.” Baldwin was probably not the first to make this observation but his point is well taken. In the absence of communitarian values we are all on our own, suspicious of and pitted against the other guy, and we have a pretty low tolerance for anyone else’s values. Social Darwinism is our creed. The poor are weak, and the rich get what they deserve. Might is right, and nice guys finish last. A sucker is born every minute, and none of us want to be that sucker. Kindness is weakness, and altruism is suspect. Donald Trump’s genius is that he recognizes all this.
Many American Christians prefer the more muscular Old Testament to the effeminate Gospel of Jesus, and we American Jews have long forgotten what it is to be a stranger in a strange land. Truth be told, many Americans would rather worship at the feet of Ayn Rand than in the pews of traditional religions which, inconveniently, all exhort us to care for orphans and the poor. Turning the other cheek is much less in our nature than smiting the sinner by rock or sword – or at least sticking them in stocks and pillory – or social networking equivalent. In order to smite as many sinners as possible, we have the most savage armory of weapons on the planet, and we are the only nation to unleash the power of the atom on fellow human beings.
We are experiencing a particularly vicious resurgence of racism and nativism in this country. Police murders of Black people are pandemic, and Republican candidates unabashedly make racist proposals. If we look carefully, the GOP’s minor candidates are guilty of even worse than the front-runner. Scott Walker is unsure if we need to build a wall to keep out Canadians, and Chris Christie wants to track Latinos like FedEx packages. You can’t make this stuff up.
None of this should be a surprise. In 1936 the Union Party ran William Lemke alongside Roosevelt and Landon. The party was formed by the infamous Charles E. Coughlin, Gerald L.K. Smith (an associate of Huey Long), Lemke, and F.E. Townsend. Coughlin and Smith were priest and preacher, respectively, the others populists from states with poor, uneducated citizens. Besides their virulent anti-communism, cafeteria Christianity, open racism and Antisemitism, all had a fear of foreigners and a hatred of intellectuals. Although the party dissolved three years later, their political descendants have since found a home in the various brown shirted Tea Parties which now dominate the GOP.
Before that there was the Red Scare, obsessed with Jews newly arrived from Europe. Before that, the fear of anarchists – again with its bald Antisemitism. And before that, the Know Nothings, an anti-Catholic political party with no sympathy for the hundreds of thousands of Irish potato famine victims coming to America to survive. Not surprisingly, they also supported slavery. In the 1857 Dred Scott decision Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Taney wrote that Blacks, free or enslaved, could not automatically be granted citizenship. No anchor babies! And before that – our Original Sin, slavery itself, and Jim Crow, and institutionalized racism, and xenophobia, and all the other forms of madness we have perfected.
In 1989 San Francisco enacted a “City and County of Refuge” ordinance which prevented city employees from aiding Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) unless there was a warrant or federal law required it. Republicans have twisted the ordinance to mean that the city knowingly harbors foreign killers. Interestingly, the Book of Leviticus – which every fundamentalist Republican should have memorized by now – mandates cities of refuge for shielding murderers from blood retribution. To the west the cities of Golan, Ramoth, and Bosor, and to the east of the Jordan River the cities of Kedesh, Shechem, and Hebron were to be sanctuary cities. Today Hebron is filled with violent settlers (many “illegals” from America), darlings of a GOP which applauds Israel’s “Right of Return” law, permitting Europeans and Americans to settle in the West Bank, but doesn’t see the irony of denying similar privileges to those whose ancestors once lived in the third of Mexico that the United States seized in 1848.
The America of today has too much blood on its hands and hate in its heart for any citizen to truly “find himself.” We are at so many intersections – technology, environment, income equality, race, militarism. And we blow through every red and yellow light – always in a hurry to go nowhere, always taking the wrong turn.
This was published in the Standard Times on September 3, 2015
http://www.southcoasttoday.com/article/20150903/opinion/150909797
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