Racism, Commies, and the Moonwalk

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

French TV's been full of nostalgic documentaries celebrating the 40th anniversary of Neil Armstrong's trip to the moon. It was hailed not only as a superpower's scientific advance, but a human achievement belonging to us all, a first step towards a glorious future in which we would all hold hands and sing Kumbaya while circling the campfire on our jetpacks.

All things considered, we didn't get very far. There's no man on Mars. No real space program. And as for our crappy life here on earth, every day brings a new flashback to the messy irrational hatreds of the Cold War era.

Like in segregated cities in the 50's, sixty black and Latino kids were booted from Philadelphia's The Valley Swim Club in late June even though their day camp had paid more than $1900 to join the "open membership" pool. The reason? "[C]oncern that a lot of kids would change the complexion ... and the atmosphere of the club."

Some kids reported that the pool attendants had been rather less euphemistic saying "they did not allow minorities in the club and needed the children to leave immediately." At least one white parent loudly freaked, "Uh, what are all these black kids doing here? ... I'm scared they might do something to my child."

The Young Republican conference in July was an equally retro celebration of misogyny and racism. The group chose self-described "true conservative" Audra Shay as Chairman, over Rachel "must be a dyke" Hoff who was slammed as much for wearing pants as for supporting civil unions.

The skirt-clad winner Shay was elected despite, or because of, blatantly racist Facebook comments, LOL'ing in response to the statement we "need to take this country back from all of these mad coons" and responding to an effigy of Sarah Palin with "What no 'Obama in a noose? ... I am wondering if the guys with the Palin noose would care if we had a bunch of homosexuals in a noose."

One sign of progress, though, is that fifty years after we put a man on the moon, there are now enough Republicans of color in power to add their own garbage to America's racist cesspool. One of the biggest supporters of the violently bigoted Audra Shay was apparently Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, an Asian American periodically touted as the Republican answer to Obama.

Michael Steele, the African American head of the GOP, was on hand to tell the Young Republicans crowd he planned to attract more people of color to the party by offering up fried chicken and potato salad. Not support for small businesses in poor minority neighborhoods, or efforts to repeal drug laws responsible for dumping young black men in jail. Fried chicken and potato salad.

Republican attacks on justice nominee Sonia Sotomayor were almost as sophisticated, largely boiling down to "temperament" and "personality," code for "I don't trust you because you're a woman, a spic, a woman, a spic."

Democrats aren't immune from idiocy. In New York, State Senator Ruben Diaz, usually celebrated for his outrageous homophobia, brought his own racism to the table when he sneered at state Republicans as los republicanos blanquitos, "little Republican whitey's" in a Spanish-language interview.

Meanwhile, in Akron, Ohio, a group of black teenagers celebrated Independence Day by attacking a white family after a fireworks show yelling: "This is our world!" and "This is a black world!" The uninsured construction worker father ended up in critical care for five days, stacks of hospital bills, and questions about buying a gun.

Which would be easy enough in Missouri where a car-dealer is giving away free AK47's with his trucks. In an interview with an astounded journalist from the BBC, he explained that pretty much all Americans like guns, except for Commies, of course. When asked just what semiautomatic weapons were good for, he said you could have a lot of fun shooting stuff up, but that AK47's were especially useful in case of "home defense".

They could have used a few last week in Cambridge where a white neighbor called the police because a black man was struggling with the front door of a house in an apparent break-in attempt. Eventually, the nefarious black man, Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., was arrested for getting pissed off that the cops came and questioned his right to enter his own home.

Instead of complaining, calling the policeman a racist for only doing his job, and irresponsibly provoking the situation by asking for his badge number, I suppose the distinguished professor Gates should have saved the cops the trouble and shot himself for intruding on the peace of mind of his lily-white neighbors.

That's post-race America in a nutshell. Forty years after the moonwalk, skin's still a disease too many of us are mad with.

Remaking the Republicans

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

I think of Washington as that place where politicians spend their days waving around the feathers that create hurricanes on the other side of the world, or at least Louisiana. At swearing in ceremonies, they should all be required to take the Hippocratic oath. First do no harm.

You're not going to get that kind of modesty from the Democrats if the polls are right, and they take the country top to bottom with a solid majority. The main question for me, then, is whether the Republicans (if they lose) will manage to cast aside their eight war-mongering, scandal-ridden, pork-addicted, gay marriage-hating, Constitution-ripping, regulation-busting years to regroup and form an effective, and thoughtful opposition.

You may have heard rumors of that, the yin and the yang, as opposed to the boot and the Democratic doormat we got during the Bush era, or the opposition for the sake of it the Republicans offered during Bill Clinton's thwarted administration.

There used to be differences after all, and they often did some good. The Democrats were the party actively promoting civil liberties, kind of, as well as pushing for social safety nets. And if you can imagine it, Republicans were fiscal conservatives with an allergy to big government, and moderation in foreign affairs.

I admit being attracted to the GOP as a kid, mostly because the pork barrel Democrats had a strangle-hold on my home state of Kentucky, where somehow tax money never did reach the schools that floated near the bottom of our fifty states, or alleviate the need in rural areas.

Appalachia was altogether shameful with grinding poverty and environmental policies essentially set by outsiders from coal companies who weren't forced to live where the runoff from strip mining turned all the well water to such a disgusting sludge that you needn't bother adding coffee because it was already a thick, brown, toxic brew.

Why not vote for local Republicans in protest? Now, after eight Republican years nationally, why not vote Democratic to protest Bush's hasty wars, immoderate greed, and vicious authoritarianism?

Unfortunately, we need more than an anti-Bush. It troubles me that plenty of Democratic loyals would have Obama rush around like toddler on Coke, yanking the troops out of Iraq without strategic considerations, dishing out tax cuts, and rebates and economic incentives to Bush's middle-class and working class victims without a clear idea either where all that money's going to come from, or frankly where it's going in the end.

When Bush handed out cash this fall, Americans didn't go out and grease anybody's economic wheels. No, we stuck it under our mattresses. Now, I hear the banks that Mr. Paulson has given a big chunk of his 700 billion dollars to have likewise decided to sit on it like chickens in their nests. In Europe, at least, they've made it a provision of their bailouts that the banks must actually use the money for its intended purpose--giving loans. Why didn't we think of that?

That's the kind of idea an effective opposition should have come up with, accountability. Frankly, we could use plenty of ideas on all fronts, both inside and outside the Democratic party.

If maverick McCain's campaign is any sign of the GOP's near future, I doubt they'll be much of a gold mine. As brash as Unilateral Bush, McCain tosses out new solutions daily to every problem we face from the economy to Afghanistan. Every Palin campaign stop, the Republican lunatic fringe is once again rallying against that ever present menace of gay marriage, as well as insufficiently patriotic Americans, as if all Americans need for success is a red white and blue heart, and the queers biting the dust. Which is only slightly more unrealistic than Obama's virtuous mirage of ending war and uplifting the downtrodden poor with a combination of good thoughts and money, plenty of it.

Maybe all an effective opposition has to do, on either side, is respond to every speech from every party with the mantra, "It's more complicated than that. Have you thought it through?"

The new Republicans, if I had a say, would be a lot like my grandparent's generation. What government was supposed to do was get the roads built and make sure the schools worked. Its job was practical stuff, plus the bare extra to give everybody a shot at the American dream which they defined as enough prosperity to keep the wolves from the door, and the self-respect of having earned it.

By and large they backed away from social engineering and left questions like abortion and sexual identity to a person's own conscience. What mattered was what you gave to the family and community. How hard you worked. What you were made of. Thrift was valued, but so was generosity. And religion (like politics), never got talked about at the dinner table. It wasn't polite, and besides. Somebody might choke.