The Porter Bureau

In the news today, thousands of white people gathered at the foot of the Lincoln Memorial to protest their continued dominance of American politics and culture.

“Look, we’ve seen this before,” opined Larry Tippits of Villisca, Iowa. “For all of the twentieth century white people were in control of politics, culture, and wealth. Hell, even “the first black president” was white! And that trend only continues today; there’s what, one African American senator? And that’s Roland Burris! No, we’ve had all we can take and we can’t take no more. We won’t be satisfied until people like me [Mr. Tippits self-identifies as "white, with some Cherokee from my great grandmother"] no longer dominate the halls of power and privilege.”

Mr. Tippit’s views appeared to be shared by the mono-chrome crowd who at one point heckled members of the House and Senate–speaking at the event on behalf of their re-election campaigns–with chants of “no taxation without representation!” When Senator Lamar Alexander broke from his rehearsed stump speech to point out that as an elected official he did, in fact, represent the people of Tennessee, he was met with shouts of “well I didn’t vote for you!”

Approached after the event, Senator Alexander threw up his arms and stated, “What the f@#$, don’t these people go to school? I’m in the middle of a stump speech talking to people who look exactly like me, and I have to stop and review the basics of a representative form of government? That’s a sure sign that f@#$ing white people have been in control of this government for far to long, and I won’t tolerate it!”

The event was not all verbal Caucasian on Caucasian violence, however. Lee Greenwood arrived to wow the crowd with a stirring rendition of the now-classic “I’m Proud to be an American.” As he left the stage he shouted to the gathered attendees, “Don’t let this be the end, make it the beginning! Take this crazy energy of yours and go out there and vote yourselves out of power! For the children!”

An official number of participants was unavailable as the park service no longer estimates crowd sizes at rallies held at the National Mall. However, one park ranger was overheard to say that there was a “whole bushel load of white folk” in attendance. Urbandictionary.com defines a “bushel load” as greater than a “shit load,” but less than a “full load.”

Where to start? Joe Wilson proving that, in fact, the main-stream of the Republican party are a bunch of nut-cases that wouldn’t know civil discourse if it yelled “end big government!” at them? Or how about the whiplash inducing conservative reversal on “respect for the office” to “the President wants to brain-wash our chillen!”? And then there’s the town hall meeting on Washington which Fox–their journalistic integrity safely residing at zero–reported on by using a photo over a decade old. If you’re going to doctor photos in order to artificially inflate the numbers and significance of your rally, the least you can do is scrub off the “1998″ in the bottom corner. Shame on us for paying attention I guess.

I have some good friends who are conservative, and as individuals I respect their opinion. But as a movement, I can’t help but think that the Fox News sponsored, corporate apologist, lily-white, near racist (see Joe Wilson again), history challenged, ideology conflating (look, pick either communism of fascism as your boogy man; using both makes you look selfish), marching-against-their-own-best-interest right-wingers need some quiet time and perhaps some breathing exercises. Once they can play nice with the rest of the kids, they can rejoin civil society.

I mean, what's the worst that could happen? ... Oh

Glenn Beck makes me laugh. Not because he’s got a stand-up routine that he does when not holding forth on Fox News. Nor am I referring to his on-air shenanigans from when he was a morning show DJ. No, Beck’s humor is more of the kind where you go, “dude, did he REALLY just say that? I mean, even the people who THINK that don’t actually SAY it.”

I also draw no end of amusement from his ridiculous conspiracy theories. On a recent trip to Utah I was was watching TV with my brother. We were flipping through the channels and Eric turned on Fox News (he gets all the comedy stations I guess). Well Beck gets started and his first joke was great: he told his viewers that Obama plans to raise the minimum wage because he wants to run small businesses out of business, thereby taking much-needed jobs away from African-American young people. Why would the President of the United States want to systematically kill small business and take jobs away from young black men? The answer, Beck tells us while stifling a guffaw, is that Obama wants to FORCE young people into volunteer programs like AmeriCorps where they’ll be compelled to work FOR THE GOVERNMENT for FREE. I swear I laughed so hard I nearly fell out of my chair. I mean, this was good stuff. I can just imagine it:
“Hey Marcus, you got a job this summer?”
“No man, I can’t find work cause the Federal Government raised minimum wage to $45 an hour, plus dental.”
“Ah, damn it! Why the Fed gotta be all up in KFC’s grill like that? Well, you wanna go hang out, maybe watch some TV, play some ball?”
“Naw, I’m gonna go sign up for AmeriCorps. I mean, what else am I going to do?”
“Word.”
I don’t think Eric got the joke, however, because he wasn’t laughing and he changed the channel.

Now look, I like to be entertained, and someone who can make me laugh like Beck doesn’t come along every day. But what I didn’t realize was that there’s a dark side to Beck’s humor. No, I’m not just talking about the man’s predilection for bursting into tears (he is SO good at that. I swear, every once in a while I think he’s being sincere). Rather, I guess some people out there are taking him seriously. One lady even Rambo’d a military base because she thought it was one of Beck’s “FEMA camps.” Ha ha, boy did she get fooled. I bet she was laughing all the way to the detention cell and saying to herself: “ah, that Beck. He’s such a kidder. He got me good.”

Even more alarming, however, is the news that some advertisers didn’t realize that when Glenn Beck called President Obama a racist, he was clearly just making a joke, and they’ve subsequently pulled their ads from his show. Come on, how hyper sensitive can you get? You think that a WHITE national TV personality would be so insensitive as to SERIOUSLY call the black President of the United States a racist? I mean, the irony is so think that it’s ridiculous. This kind of disrespectful and irreverent insensitivity happens on South Park and HBO stand-up specials all day long and I don’t see anyone pulling ads from those shows. I just don’t get it. Don’t they know that Glenn Beck is a joke? err, tells jokes?

But look, I don’t want to be selfish here. Yes, I would like to keep Beck around so that he can amuse me with his latest conspiracy theories, or shock me with his total disregard for reason, logic, common sense or tact. But I’m ready to sacrifice for my country. I am willing for Glenn Beck to be taken off the air if it means that people will stop taking him seriously and stop painting swastikas on African-American congressmen’s offices. I’m not so self-centered that I think my amusement is worth more than a civil society that is reasoned and informed by facts, not hyperbolic nuttery. I know, I know, I should strap on my Colt .45 and demand my right to laugh at Beck, but there comes a time when we all have to dig a little deeper, give a little more, and emulate those patriots who “more than self their country loved.” If what my country demands of me is that Beck get thrown off the air, then that’s a sacrifice I’m ready to make.

In the mid 19th -century, the leader and founder of the Mormon faith, Joseph Smith, decried the mob rule that continually threatened his followers and fledgling religion. Angry mobs hounded the early Mormons from one settlement to another until ultimately they shot and killed Joseph Smith at Carthage Jail in 1844.  A subsequent leader of the Mormon faith, Joseph F. Smith, wrote, “We do not tolerate [mob rule]. Latter-day Saints cannot tolerate such a spirit as this. It is anarchy. It means destruction. It is the spirit of mobocracy, and the Lord knows we have suffered enough from mobocracy, and we do not want any more of it.”

The present-day conservative movement appears to be inheriting that dubious mantle from the religious bigots of the eighteen hundreds with their planned and systematic disruption of town hall meetings across the nation.  I have, from time to time, complained on this bog about the vitriol and hate coming from right-wing “entertainers” such as Beck and Limbaugh. But the “shout down your congressman” and “intimidate other participants” methods being employed by conservatives at what should be one of the purest forms of our democracy, makes even Beck’s asinine conspiracy theories seem innocent, by comparison.

Now don’t get me wrong. Protest is an important and respectable part of our democracy, and I respect the fact that a minority of people want to maintain the unsustainable health care system (about 70% want health care reform). However, that minority has no right to shout down those who are in favor of reform. If they want to be part of the conversation, then join the conversation, don’t shut people up for having the temerity to disagree with you. There are any number of opportunities for the health care lobby to bus in protesters for staged events without depriving regular citizens of the right to discuss these monumental decisions with their elected representatives.

Perhaps the most ironic part of these staged disruptions is that they actually impede the ability of conservative citizens to 1) get accurate information about the nature of the proposed health care reforms and 2) to affect the way their representative will vote. There are sure to be some conservative citizens at these town hall meetings that aren’t planted there by the lobbyists, but what hope do they have of asking questions and offering feedback to their representative when Bubba runs the congress person out of the room in fifteen minutes?

No, the Republican party and their corporate sponsors have gone too far this time. Pepper your infomercials on right-wing talk radio with half truths and scare tactics if you must, but if you want to be a part of civil society, then you must be, well, civil. Otherwise you shame all of us and likely hurt your own cause, all for a glimpse of mob rule that you can post on YouTube and pretend is a spontaneous grassroots movement. Yes, Governor Boggs would be proud of you, but in this case I think you’ll find that, perhaps ironically, Americans will stand with those 19th-century Mormon leaders and not “tolerate such a spirit as this.”

David Brooks, or as I like to call him, “the thinking man’s conservative,” recently wrote an op-ed piece comparing the state of the health care system in America to a horde of trampling rhino’s charging through our national village. An apt metaphor to be sure:

The rhinos are closing off your future. As the White House folks say, health care premiums have doubled over the last decade. The government is saddled with $36 trillion in unfunded liabilities.

So your only question should be: Where do you find a tool or weapon big enough to stop the rhino stampedes? You know the problem is big, and you figure the response had better be gigantic.

Then you look on Capitol Hill and you see a bunch of popguns. The politicians describe these big ugly problems, but when it comes time to talk about their remedies they tell you: Don’t worry. Nothing’s going to change. In other words, we’re going to eliminate the biggest, hairiest, most entrenched problem in the country without fundamentally changing the system and without asking for sacrifice from anybody.

Good luck.

He has a critical point. If whatever group-think, underfunded, compromise laden, don’t scare the old folks worded, “slippery slope to socialism” redacted bill that comes out of congress doesn’t have the strength to actually address the issue, then the results will be all too predictable.

But, for all of Brooks’s insight and keen analysis, I dare you to try to read his article without the following song in your head. (It won’t work, I tried.)

There you go again, blaming the MSM for running you out of office (can someone please point me to the apocryphal personal attacks on her downs syndrome son Trip?).

Truly, this incessant “play the victim” line of hers is the only thing that really bugs me. It offends my sense of strategery. Yes, it’s good to garner sympathy, but everyone who CAN name a major newspaper other than the Wasilla Frontiersman knows that if she thinks she’s being picked on now, just wait till she comes to the lower 48.

Take, for example, her Facebook entry: “[T]hough it’s honorable for countless others to leave their positions for a higher calling and without finishing a term, of course we know by now, for some reason a different standard applies for the decisions I make.” The not-so-subtle reference here is to President Obama leaving the senate after he was elected POTUS. But the comparison is, of course, ridiculous if for no other reason than that Obama only resigned his position AFTER being elected.

Now, some Palin apologists argue that in order to be on an even playing field with the likes of Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee, she can’t be up in Alaska where she’s isolated and tied down by that pesky “governor” job thing. She needs to be out raising money and glad handing in the lower 48. Fair enough. Politically it makes sense for her to get out of Dodge. But for the love of all that’s holy woman, don’t blame your choice on the media. Not only does it make you look thin skinned and unready for prime time, but your claims about being especially targeted are demonstrably untrue. Don’t believe me? Google “Hillary Clinton.”

So to the rest of us, the vitriol spewing from the angry right (Mike Savage, Rush, Sean “Great American” Hannity, Glen Beck… all of Fox “news”) is curious if not outright disconcerting. How can the world look so different from their perspective? Sure, ratcheting people up and employing half truths (if that) is their job, well what they get paid for at any rate, but the hypocrisy seems a little thick, even for this band of McCarthy-lites. Anyone who disagrees with their particular kneejerk brand of conservatism is quickly labeled both a Socialist and a Nazi. You know, if you’re going to slander the freely elected leader of the country that you purport to love, you could at least do a little homework and find out that those two positions are, ideologically, mutually exclusive. See: WW II, Eastern front

But, as is frequently the case, Jon Stewart has entertainingly captured the general reaction to those crazy fellers on Fox better than I can here on my little blog (must be my lack of a teleprompter). Check it out.

A socialist while filling out one’s taxes.

I went in to have a conference with one of my professors a few days ago. While we were discussing my final paper, I noticed that she had a picture of the Salt Lake temple on her bulletin board.  So when we were done I said rather inquisitively, “you have a picture of the Mormon temple on your board.” To which my professor responded, “yeah, I guess I had better take it down now.”

I was taken aback. Why would my professor assume that she needed to remove this picture of the Mormon temple? The answer, of course, came to me quickly: my professor immediately assumed that with my observation came an implicit critique of the now infamous “Proposition 8,” California’s recent constitutional ban on gay marriage, and that like her I was upset with the Mormon involvement in that vote. I hurried to explain myself, “well, you don’t necessarily have to take it down… I ask because I’m a Mormon… I’m from Utah. I was just curious why you might have the picture there.” After an awkward moment where both of us wondered if in our misunderstanding we had seriously offended the other, she told me that her mother was one of the writers on PBS’s production of The Mormons, a production that was generally well received by people of the LDS faith and thought to be both insightful and honest.

So here was a woman who as far as I could tell was not religious, certainly not a Mormon, but who had enough pride in her mother’s work that she had bothered to pin this flier to her board. And if I interpret our conversation correctly, she at one time felt an affinity for the Mormon faith because it is so misunderstood. The Mormons, she might have said six months ago, really aren’t all that different, and they’re clearly making an effort to not be seen as insular or “odd.” Now, however, when reminded of this Mormon symbol in her office,  her first thought was to take it down, despite the fact that for her it was a symbol filial pride and not religion.

This is what Mormons have lost–the cost of their funding of proposition 8. Here was someone who was more than willing to approach Mormon culture with an open mind, and while I doubt she’d ever consider the religion, she felt a sympathy for the Mormon faith, a faith that has been unfairly reduced to HBO specials and punch lines on South Park. She wanted to give Mormons what every religious, ethnic, political, and social group wants: to be considered in all of their complexity–warts and all, yes, but at least with the possibility that open-minded people will see the good in the “all” as well.

Some of my Mormon friends might say, so what? She’s a liberal professor in a liberal field teaching at a liberal university. Why would we expect any reaction other than a kneejerk condemnation of Mormons after proposition 8 and the gay/lesbian reaction to its passage? To which I would respond by pointing out just how much is lost when a liberal professor in a liberal field at a liberal university changes her attitude about the Mormon faith and culture from empathetic to antagonistic. Scholars in the humanities, and literature in particular, are at best suspicious of religion and at worst openly hostile towards it. Despite the sometimes thinly veiled antagonism I have felt because I believe in a fundamentalist Christian faith (“fundamentalist” is an adjective in this case, not a noun), I have never apologized for my beliefs–which for a graduate of the University of Utah is hard to do. That the Mormon faith and culture had an ally in such a liberal environment is not something to be scoffed at. But now that ally is gone.

I don’t know what the answer is to the conflict between homosexuality and the Mormon faith. I’m fine with my religion dictating theological and moral principles, but I get nervous when any organized religion, my own included, extends their influence into civil matters. In this case, the Mormon faith seems to have crossed the line between “we do not” to “thou shalt not,” and I have to wonder what the consequences will be for Mormons who are more than willing to follow the leadership of the church on spiritual matters, but not on civic ones.

Despite her sincere invitation to return and talk more about religion and my paper, I haven’t gone back to see if my professor took down her picture of the Salt Lake temple. I would, but I’m just not sure how to go about apologizing for my beliefs.

I’m proud to be an American. Sure, we have to hope that President Obama is as effective as Candidate Obama, but man, what a day, what a spirit. Zeitgeist indeed. More thoughts as soon as I finish grading this stack of horribly written freshman papers.