Macaca in Extremis

I was not at all surprised to hear last week of the Montana Republican who wants to challenge for Jon Tester’s US Senate seat in 2012, openly admitting his past ties to the Ku Klux Klan. In fact, he admitted, with Barack Obama in the White House, people seem to be coming forward more in admitting their racial concerns.

Well, there you have it, officially: Racism is the new black in fashion politics.

Actually, it has been since January 2009, when the President was inaugurated. Only, it’s progressed (or regressed) from being not-so-cleverly disguised behind accusations of socialism or communism or even fascism on the Right to incessant criticism about policy, words said or unsaid, adamant instructions of what exactly this President should be doing, to overt comparisons with Bush as the ultimate insult coming from the extreme Left, to obvious race-baiting, dog whistles and euphemistic references to “old-time days that aren’t forgotten” in the lead up to the next electoral cycle.

Indeed, one of the biggest, identifiable racists in recent years is back on the campaign trail. George Allen is attempting to win back his Virginia Senate seat, which he lost to James Webb in 2006. Allen, you’ll recall, went from hero to zero on the strength of his call-out to a Webb supporter standing in the crowd during one of his speeches.


Later, Allen tried to walk back his remarks, first saying “macaca” was a word he’d actually made up. Still later, he admitted he’d learned the word, as a child, from his mother. Thereafter, information emerged, drip by drip, like Chinese water torture, of other less salubrious titbits about Allen, relating to his macaca moment outing – how he’d regularly drive around his Southern California neighbourhood with a Confederate flag decal on the back of his car and how he displayed a noose – as a joke, you understand – in his office, along with – yes – another Confederate flag.

Allen’s family wasn’t Southern and had no known Southern connections. Indeed, Allen’s mother, he later disclosed, was a Jew of North African descent. His father worked in an industry which, even in the early and late Sixties, was far more racially integrated than any other business type of the time – professional football.

All of that doesn’t belie the fact that George Allen certainly displayed racist tendencies, to the point that, on the campaign trail, he made a pointedly racist remark about a supporter of his opponent, to that supporter’s face.

Needless to say, and quite rightly, he lost that election.

Now, six years later, he’s back and running again for the GOP nomination. It reveals a sad state of Republican affairs in the Commonwealth when Allen’s opponents for the Republican nod are a Tea Partier and a State politician who advocates Virginia minting its own currency and who manages to make Pat Buchanan look like a Progressive. In the world of the Republican blind, the one-eyed George Allen is king, at least in Virginia.

But Allen, like everyone in the Republican party, is a Christian, who believes in forgiveness and atonement. (Actually, Eric Cantor is Jewish, but I expect at any moment, he’ll attend a snake-charming Holy Roller event, speak in tongues and declare himself a Jew for Jesus, especially if it buys him the votes). Anyway, Allen is a Christian and a Republican, and mindful of the fact that he might need a few swing votes, or that some of the people who remember his macaca moment just might have been particularly horrified by its intent and its content, he chose to attend that branch of the Republican Party at Prayer, otherwise known as the Faith and Freedom Coalition, to make good his contrition. In short, six years after the fact, he apologised:-




All well and good, but not good enough. It’s craven that he could only bring himself to render an apology when it served a purpose to advance his ambitions: Allen is running for the Senate against the high-profiled Tim Kaine. It’s even more craven that he couldn’t endeavour to contact S R Sidarth, the person at whom he leveled this perfidious piece of ad hominem, directly and apologise in person. It would have been notable, had he done that sooner, rather than later, and had used his six years away from public service to connect with the growing minority population of the Commonwealth – African Americans, Latinos, Asians and Orientals.

Instead, he chooses to level his apology, not to Sidarth, the victim, or the minority population of Virginia as a whole, but to the Republican-packed Faith and Freedom Coalition, just so they could cleave him to their collective bosom and pronounce him saved and whole. And please note, as well, how Allen managed to turn this act of contrition into one wherein he emerges as the victim. His family were targeted and suffered immensely from remarks and verbal attacks brought about by the inadvertant slip of his tongue which revealed exactly what he was and is: a racist.

George Allen came to the Commonwealth as a young man to finish his education. He came, Californian-born and bred, because his father had accepted a lucrative job offer in the DC area. He transferred from UCLA to the University of Virginia, at a time when that institution was undergoing its greatest transition from what Faulkner referred to as the all-male “country club of the South” and the “last vestibule of Southern decadence” into vibrant academic community of racial and gender diversity. At the time of Allen’s sojourn as a student there, Melissa Harris-Perry’s father was Dean of African American Studies.

Allen was accepted on the strength of his having been a third-string quarterback at UCLA. He captained a football team, which lost every game with him at the helm and whose games students attended with the express intention of getting drunk. He played with white players and with African American players. People who knew him in those days said he used the n-word regularly. I remember him as someone whose presence about the Grounds oozed privilege, entitlement and arrogance.

Virginia is a state with a stained heritage of having been the capitol of the Confederacy. It lives with the ghost of Robert E Lee and houses a university and law school which bears his name. It is not something of which most Virginians are proud, but they live with this and have moved on from it. I cannot speak for the United Daughters of the Confederacy or for the Sons of the Confederate Veterans. I have never belonged to the UDC, nor have I ever wanted to belong. I think I’m right in saying that, for most Virginians, certainly those of the Democratic persuasion who remember Jim Crow and the end of segregation, for those of us who’ve remained Democratic and liberal (and there are many of us, still, in the Commonwealth), the Civil War ended in 1865. We lost, and we’re over that.

However many times he apologises, and – indeed – he can go on apologising every day on the campaign trail until Election Day, it won’t erase what was said; nor should the pithy, self-pitying and opportune apology convince anyone that a genuine epiphany has occurred in his life. George Allen, quite simply, is awfully sorry for having called S R Sidarth a “macaca.” He’s awfully sorry that the moment was caught on film and that it was actually his true colours which were revealed.

In a sane world, there would be no contest in this election. In a sane world, Virginians would queue up to vote for Tim Kaine. In a sane world, George Allen’s political career would be over, and the Virginia GOP would not even entertain such a candidate for such an office.

But this isn’t a sane world anymore. Not in Virginia, and certainly not in the United States at the moment.

Bageant and Webb: Virginia's Loss

Early Monday morning, I heard about Joe Bageant’s passing. Joe, along with Senator James Webb, provided me with a seminal epiphany regarding both my political and biological heritage this past year.

I was born in Joe’s hometown of Winchester, Virginia – basically because at that time, the mid-1950s – Winchester Memorial Hospital was the only hospital servicing Frederick, Clarke, Warren and Fauquier counties in Virginia, as well as southern West Virginia; but the people Joe described in his first book Deer Hunting with Jesus are all too familiar to me.

For a long time, Joe had been a champion of what he calls redneck culture, and not derisively, as many of the Left refer to that demographic. Senator Webb, as befits a Senator and a statesman, refers to that tranche of Southern society in a more refined manner, as those people of Scots-Irish descent, in his history of that culture, Born Fighting.



Both books left an impression on me, if for no other reason than both men are relatively scathing – Bageant even moreso – in their open criticism of the Coastal cultural elites who have reshaped and effectively sought to dominate the Democratic party for the past 40 years. Collectively, they’ve created the myth of the virulent racist redneck, found in the South and in the rural Midwest, and their urban counterpart in the Rust Belt, caricatured years ago in the character of Archie Bunker. Both men go into detail about how this myth was propagated by the so-called ueber-Left Progressive Democrats in affluent boroughs and safely Democratic constituencies all along the “Left” Coast as well as tucked away in the Northeastern corner of the United States, specifically from New York City to Boston, to the point where it was appropriated by the culture warlords of the Republican Party, twisted to suit their purposes in a campaign of fear and culture conflict, until the myth, regrettably, has come to be perceived as a reality.

What was sad about all this, is the fact that this demographic - commonly known as the old “working class” and its union association (in the event of the industrial North and Midwest) – was effectively thrown under the political bus by the Democratic reformers of 1970. The union bosses, they deemed too politically corrupt and too ignorant, for their liking; and the sweaty, undereducated working class, too dumb and roughewn for their refined tastes. They were almost derisive in their dismissal. What were these people going to do? Vote Republican? They’ll carry on voting Democratic. Fuck’em.

But they didn’t, did they? Some succumbed to Lee Atwater’s Southern Strategy; others became Reagan Democrats. Most watch Fox News now. Why?

In Deer Hunting with Jesus, two episodes stick raw in my memory. Bageant speaks with several working class people living in and around his old neighbourhood of Winchester, Virginia, just the wrong side of the railroad tracks – people now in their fifties or sixties, working dead-end jobs at box stores which line the strip mall landscape along the interstates which weave through the Piedmont of the Blue Ridge. They work for minimum wage and they work like dogs – some at one job for sixty hours a week, some at three. That’s the difference between rednecks and po’white trash, Bageant explains – not that the Coastals would differentiate.

A redneck will work until he’s ready to be dropped in the grave and genuinely wants nothing more than his due from the government. In fact, he’s suspicious of the government, and that’s down to his Scots-Irish heritage, as further explained by James Webb. These people have an inculcated heritage of pride handed down, generation-by-generation, to them from their forefathers who left the poorest part of the British nation for a new life in the colonies. These people don’t trust the government as far as they could throw the proverbial stick. They’ll take Social Security and Medicare as their due, but want little else.

A po’white, on the other hand, is someone to be viewed with shame, someone so lazy or ineffectual that he has to accept government hand-outs in the form of welfare and is actually proud of it.

In Bageant’s book, he interviews several childhood friends, all of whom are suffering from various physical ailments and medical conditions, mostly brought about by poor diet and lifestyles. Face it, these days, poor people are morbidly obese. The cheapest food is the most fattening food, and precious few of them have the extra money for a gym subscription. As would be imagined, many of these people are insufficiently insured medically or aren’t insured at all. When asked by Bageant how they would feel if they had government-sponsored healthcare, free at source, but funded by higher taxes, most responded positively. Hell, they didn’t care who implemented the damned thing, Republican or Democrat, they’d be in favour of it. Hands down.

Yet, according to most people, this demographic seems the most adverse to any sort of “socialised medicine,” if for no other reason than it might be a harbinger of the infamous “death panels.” Why is that, do you think? Why would these people respond positively to such a suggestion of single-payer healthcare from Joe Bageant, but would vehemently poo-poo the idea when presented by a politician or a political operative, most likely from the Democratic party?

Possibly, for the same reason that these selfsame people gave to Joe for voting Republican, against their interests. They’re not stupid, they reasoned, although they reckoned “those Washington people” had them pegged as such. They knew damned well that both parties treated them, positively, as potential votes in an election year and, negatively, as nuisance constituents any other time; but they at least saw the Republican candidates for office when the time came, and other times, they knew the operatives the GOP sent amongst them as local people who spoke their language – used their vocabulary and dialect and sounded like them. That’s probably why the anomaly of a nice Jewish boy like Eric Cantor, with a broad Tidewater Virginia drawl and the drawn out courtesy culture in which we were all raised (“Yes, sir” and “No ma’am”) is able to represent a largely rural constituency in the Shenandoah Valley, each of whom could probably count on one hand the number of Jewish people they’ve known in their lives, and that ONE person would be Eric Cantor.

Bageant also talks about how blacks and redneck whites work side-by-side in shitkicking, low-paying and soulless jobs daily, without much of any thoughts about race or racial differences, but how their white betters, first the old land-owning elite and now their corporate successors, have played this difference off against each other in what has resulted in being tantamount to trickedown racism. Divide and conquer, as they say. But on the rare occasions when people wake up and realise that the difference isn’t in skin colour, but in those who have, as opposed to those who don’t, the result has been astounding. Barack Obama turned Virginia blue for the first time in three decades, didn’t he? Yes, some smartass would say, but that’s mainly down to North-to-South migrations into urban areas like the sprawling suburb of Northern Virginia. Well, I’m a Fauquier County girl from the Tenth Congressional District, represented by that inestimable Republican Frank Wolf, and Fauquier County, largely rural, has been the blue thorn in Wolf’s red ass for the thirty years he’s been in Congress.

The other thing remarkable about Bageant’s observations is how cleverly the Republican party has used religion and culture to imbue this demographic with a false sense of self-worth. The GOP operatives highlight, pejoratively, the elite condescension of the Coastal elites toward the South, the rural Midwest and the old working class of the Rust Belt. These people are made to believe that such liberals look down upon them strictly as a second-class and almost subhuman proletariat. Sometimes, I’m sorry to say, various high-profiled spokesmen for the ueber Left reinforce this impression.

Bill Maher often refers to the Midwest as “flyover country”, and in a recent editorial on Real Time, ridiculed the South as being filled with Civil War re-enactors and losers intent on endlessly celebrating a one hundred fifty year-old act of treason. Yet James Webb repeatedly points out that a large contingent of armed forces personnel come from the South, including a huge number from West Virginia, mostly kids – black, white and Latino – from one-horse towns whose high schools aren’t geared to promoting college enrollment and who are often faced with the choice of operating a meth lab, gutting chickens in the local processing factory or the military.

And since the great Democratic reformation of 1970, the only Democrats to make all the way to the White House, have been two bubbas and a black man, and the current incumbent has very Southern and very Scots-Irish roots from his mother’s side of the biological equation. In fact, since 1900, bar two, all of the Democrats who successfully attained the Presidency were Southerners. Could it be that these affable sorts were able to communicate more effectively with the working classes? I even think Barack Obama, for all the television punditry would deny, communicates with ordinary people of any background, more effectively than any other President since FDR. At least, Obama speaks to people as adults; it’s not his fault that most of America hasn’t progressed beyond adolescent reasoning.

The religious aspect promoted by the Republicans is mostly that of the dangerous Dominionist dynamic – convincing these basically good Christian people that, because they’re Christian, they’ve been chosen by the Lord to ascend to his side, come the Judgement Day. They are, effectively, the Chosen -whilst the overtly secular Left take on the aura of the anti-Christ. Thus, they’re able to promote the Left’s agenda of pro-choice (read pejoratively: abortions) and human rights (read pejoratively: gays coming out of the woodwork) as evil and wrong. Thus, a Glenn Beck is able to convince his audience of millions that Christianity really shouldn’t be about social justice at all.

It doesn’t matter that the efforts of the Democratic Party might bring you affordable healthcare free at source, or that their efforts provided free public education, paved the roads and brought electricity to thousands of rural homes in the past; it doesn’t matter that this is the party who’s traditionally protected the rights of working class people and working poor for donkey’s years, pun intended … this party is now promoted, cynically, by the Right, as anti-God, anti-foetus and anti-America, fronted by a man who – nudge nudge wink wink – doesn’t look like an American, doesn’t sound like an American, doesn’t have a name like an American and doesn’t even want to lead like an American.

There’s a culture war, all right; and it’s not enough that this culture war exists between the Right and the Left, between Democrats and Republicans. It exists within the Democratic Party, itself. When people who purport to be Democrats, lump everyone in the South into the category of unreconstructed Confederates, itching for the opportunity to seceed once again, they’re throwing an insult not only in the faces of Southerners who are Democrats and who come from a Democratic heritage, whose family stayed with the party rather than claiming Dixiecrat or faux Republican heritage, but it’s a slap in the face of Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and Al Gore. It’s a slap in the face of people like Ann Richards and Molly Ivins.

In the wake of the disastrous Midterms last year, during the time when the Coastal elites of the Democratic party were feeding fodder to the 24/7 cable chattering classes about Obama’s caving on the temporary tax cut extensions for the wealthy, I was glad that, no less than Chris Matthews and Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, brought up the subject of the working class and the working poor and Obama’s mention of them in his press conference where he outlined the rationale for his compromise and, in doing so, royally pissed off the ueber elite from those affluent safe constituencies.

More and more, I hear the pundits wonder why the President doesn’t do well amongst white working class males, or even amongst the rural working class, in general. The President, one-on-one before these people, does fine. It’s the rest of the people who’v become the collective voices of the Left, the ones who give the impression that these people aren’t worth the bother, who do the damage. In the 2004 Presidential campaign, Howard Dean chomped at the bit to be able to speak to Marlboro Man of the South, who drove a pick-up, adorned with a Confederate flag and a gunrack. Dick Gephardt and John Kerry thought he’d gone mad. Books have even been written about how the Democrats can achieve by effectively writing off the South.

But just imagine the power drive and the loyalty if we invested half as much energy into putting ourselves amongst these people, speaking their language and listening to their needs as constituents and citizens as we do deriding them? Look at any small town in the South or the rural Midwest. You’ll see a Republican party headquarters staffed by local people known to all. You see a Democratic headquarters pop up every four years and staffed by eager college kids from outside the area who disappear the day after the election.

People say the middle class is in danger. I say the middle class is a myth today. If you have to work to live, you’re working class. Embrace that idea as positive, and come home to the Democratic party.

Already this year, the Left has lost James Webb to resignation and Joe Bageant to death. Virginia will miss the pair of them. As far as I’m concerned, I’d rather have one James Webb and one Joe Bageant fighting my corner than a thousand fragrant designer-clad Katrina vanden Heuvels.

Hoos Here?

I'm here, even if no one else is. I'm an expat Virginian, who - for her numerous sins - is condemned to ride out eternity in the UK, having married a Brit at the beginning of the Reagan era in the US. Ex-teacher and political junkie from the Left, am I, and I'm following the sad tradition of Virginia women for embroiling themselves romantically with British men. I even live in Kent, where - thirty-odd miles up the road from me, my ancestor Pocahontas (the first American wife) lies in the ground of the appropriately-named Gravesend. She died here. Thirty miles northwestish and you find the castle once owned by Nancy Astor, a Virginian who became the first woman elected to the British Parliament - no other Brit woman had either guts or gumption. She's buried in Britain too, and I had the privalege of breaking the glass ceiling at the formerly all-male university found in Nancy's hometown of Charlottesville. Well, here's one Virginia girl who's not going to end her days pushing up daisies in the Motherland.

I've suffered perpetual homesickness for over 20 years. I've also suffered the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune of being an American abroad in the Bush era. Before I married and came to the UK, I was an Anglophile. Nothing to tarnish the image of a nation admired like living amongst the natives. There are loads of myths abounding in the US about Britain. Like: The British are unfailingly polite. (They're not ... They're bloody rude. Ruder than New Yorkers, in fact). They're cultured. (They have some of the lowest educational standards in Western Europe. Face it. We have rednecks; they have chavs). Chav is an anonym for Council House and Violent. Chavs make rednecks look intelligent. At least, a redneck is violent and brutal after provocation; with chavs, that's a way of life. And the women are the worst.

And then we have the prevailing assumption that Americans, as a whole, are stupid. This isn't an idea that originated within the last 8 years of the Bush dictatorship. It's something that's been rammed down my cultural throat for over 20 years. Americans are stupid. They're bimbos. They don't know the geography of their own country, much less the rest of the world. Look at'em .. the majority don't have passports. This is true; the majority don't. But the Americans who do and who do manage to travel abroad, aren't often arrested for getting blind drunk enough to piss and puke in public and then to start fights of varying degrees of violence. And, again, that's just the British women.

I've worked as a linguist here in the UK, for diverse companies, since arriving. I speak 3 other languages, in addition to English - Spanish, French and Italian. My job has been to communicate with countries speaking those three languages, for lazy (but otherwise educated) Brits who simply can't be assed. I wish I had a dollar bill for everytime somebody has asked where I was from and then marvelled at the fact that I was articulate in four languages, much less that I was intelligent. I've even been told I wasn't like the 'typical' American. Well, what IS the typical American to these bozos? They meant, really, I'd been here for so long that I was becoming like them. Perish the thought! But it speaks volumes that the view of the majority of people here, from the BBC pundits on down (more about them in a future blog) to the lowest chavs, think that Americans are of sub-standard intelligence.

Well, that's as such my means of a pretty dire introduction. I'm fairly homesick tonight so I'm in a pretty downsided mood. Hope someone pops in out of curiosity to read these ramblings.