Code
The other day, I wrote a piece about regional DFL activists and media figures Strafficking in what I perceive (correctly, I think) to be Administration talking points.
Pat Kessler - WCCO’s long-time Capitol correspondent and one of Minnesota’s foremost political journalists - notes that he’s been sending the following clarification to emailers asking about the appearance on KFAN that started the brouhaha:
You need to know I did not call health care opponents racists.
What I said Saturday was that some of the tension around the debate over President Obama’s policies is ‘about race’- some; not all or even most, but some.
I also referred to ‘code words’ and phrases, and I could have been clearer. I did not mean that everyone who uses such language intends it to frighten or disparage black people. However, it is a matter of historical fact that certain rhetoric has had that impact in the past, and that some black people might — and do– interpret it that way today.
Well, fair enough, as far as it goes.
But - and I’m not aiming this at Kessler, specifically - there’s another set of code words and phrases at play here. There’s a solid case to be made that the biggest divide Obama brings out in America is class, not race.
Class is all over the place these days. From Obama’s two-tiered healthcare plan and the privately-educated elites’ assault on vouchers and school choice to Elizabeth Gates’ snarks about Sgt. Crowley’s eye liner, the Obama Administration is all about class divides; the nation’s self-appointed brain trust has gotten the hoi-polloi to anoint one of them (of a conveniently PR-worthy race) as president, and now they’re getting their due, exorcising their white liberal guilt at the wheel of the biggest spending machine in history.
And the campaign against dissent is dredging up - and creating - all kinds of code words to keep the peasants down and in their place. Dissent from Obamacare, from Porkulus and the Eternal Deficit is compared with a regime that murdered tens of millions and made toothbrush mustaches forever out; gigglingly linked with a mild but lurid sex act generally associated with homosexual relations; lumped with a hare-brained “birther” conspiracy that every significant dissenter has repudiated; put on watch lists and impugned with the slander that it is sympathetic with likes of Timothy McVeigh and Gordon Kahl, even with the idea of killing the President.
In short - dissent is called the province of the ignorant, depraved and, let’s face it, “racist” masses that the government needs to protect the rest of America from.
America has a racist past, it’s true. Unlike every other significant nation on earth, America has spent the past 150 years wrestling with that past, in its own imperfect way.
Maybe all that prejudice and hate need to go somewhere; the people who dare to dissent while middle-class and unconnected with clout are the unlucky, and absolutely permissible, targets.
Cross-posted and comments welcome at Shot In The Dark.
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