Trent Lott, at a party honoring the 100th birthday of Strom Thurman, made a hesitating and ambiguous statement about how, if Trent Lott had been elected President, we wouldn’t be having the problems we are now. I took it as a stupid comment, an attempt at the rhetoric of praise. Lott’s thinking, as shown in his hesitation, was clearly a desire to praise the Presidential bid there on Lott’s résumé. And it came out incompetently.

A reasonable reading of the statement might well, if not should, include its potential racist implications: Lott ran, many moons before, against Truman on a platform of segregation. But an educated person -- meaning the few with a real education -- would immediately recognize that this was an implication. It was not explicit in the statement. Lott did not say “string up those negros.”

Yet that’s how it was increasingly read. The story took a few days to germinate. Over the course of a week, it became a journalistic avalanche, the main focus of virtually every political show. The sheer amount of ink and airtime devoted to the story was like that of O.J. Simpson. Worse, the coverage increasingly changed from questions like “do you think this was a racist comment?” with generally muted responses, including from black groups, to questions like “why would Lott say something like this?” with antagonistic responses, even from Republicans, who were increasingly eager to depose Lott as a party leader and distance the Republican party from any potential label of being racist. Democrats wanted Lott to stay and the story to continue; Republicans wanted Lott gone to kill the story. And so Lott resigned as leader, though remaining in the Senate, and the story died.

Lott certainly didn’t help his case. He went on Black Entertainment Television, in a much-trumpeted appearance, and suddenly came out in favor of affirmative action and for designating a national holiday for Martin Luther King, Jr. -- the civil rights leader all whites love precisely because of his safety, his unerring non-violence that makes him seem a huggable teddy bear of a symbol compared to, say, Malcolm X (who I find a more powerful inspiration) or the Black Panthers, who get nicely swept under the rug. Asked about his change of opinion on this latter matter (surely a relatively trivial one), he absurdly claimed to have learned more since his previous negative vote on the issue. Confronted about this absurdity, he absurdly claimed to have learned more since his prior vote. And I don’t doubt it. But what he meant was that his mind had changed, that the passing of time had caused him to accept more readily the effects of the civil rights movement, which he lived through, and to appreciate greater the non-violent, religiously-based rhetoric of King. Ironically, Lott had painted himself into a corner, making him the ideal Republican candidate for socially-minded Democrats, since the whole controversy might flare again if he failed to support virtually any racial equality-minded legislation. Had they been smart, the Democrats would have backed off, spoken softly and in considered tones, talked of Martin Luther King’s spirit of reconciliation. Lott was, in essence, a man going on his knees before the inheritors of King and admitting his past mistakes -- and to strike, rather than embrace, such a man is not only irreligious and deeply anti-humanitarian, but unpractical.

The good element in the whole affair was that it slowly began to provide an opportunity to talk about subtle racism and the way it plays a part in politics. Former President Bill Clinton made an eloquent, though partisan, statement listing several cases of Republican pandering to racists in recent years, including President George W. Bush speaking at the notorious Bob Jones University. Talk of code words for blacks and racist policies began. Reporters and Republicans provided lists of Republicans making such statements, pointing out that a Democrat had done so as well. At its best, the dialogue was able to talk about this subtle form of racism. One often needs a paring knife to determine when someone is accurately perceiving the fact that American blacks do poorer in school, collect more money from the government (from welfare and urban investment programs), and are the beneficiaries of federal programs (like affirmative action) -- and when someone is mentioning such facts in coded language that suggests racism.

Many, probably including Lott, may have been racists in the past. What is the racist to do as society changes? Like Lindberg and so many defending Nazi Germany prior to Japan’s bombing of Pearl Harbor, such voices are usually converted. Most former racists, especially in public life, have had their ideologies reconstructed. But it is human nature to continue to think one’s past opinions and attitudes reasonable for the time, given the facts of that time, even while having abandoned them. It was not necessarily un-American to defend Nazi Germany prior to Pearl Harbor, yet (like Lindberg) vigorously defend pursuit of that war after the attack.

We are prisoners of history. Those of us who seek to avoid what some call presentism -- or what I call temporalism -- seek to avoid judging the past by present standards. Yet many continue to live from that period, and the trajectory of a mind is more likely to be altered than magically transformed. We should not seek, as history has taught us, to oust those in the losing camp from public life. Many reconstructed Puritans harbored sympathies for the cause long after the Restoration which they had come to accept, if not utterly embrace. So what do we do with such people, with reconstructed racists who see segregation as a “discredited policy” and not as a moral outrage, the rhetoric so different while the stance is so similar? At best, the discourse on Lott’s comment offered the first moment in American history where this topic was actually vigorously interrogated en masse.

This is America. We do not imprison -- or do so only rarely and wrongly -- people for words, no matter how much we detest them. We retaliate with other words. We are free to be racists and free to condemn racism. We are free to vote people whose attitudes we fear or think wrong out of office. A party is free to select its leaders through due process. And, fortunately, Lott was not literally crucified -- though he was figuratively, and wrongly so -- because Lott is not alone, his comments far removed from the virulent hate-mongers of the past. The real discussion was the subtleties of language, of reconstructed racism, and of the process of intellectual historical changes in general.

Lott’s resignation changed all that. The discussion, just burgeoning into a bit of subtlety, was cut off. C’est fini. Unfortunately.

Had the conversation continued, with Democrats embracing the spirit of King and Lott not budging to Republican pressure to step down, we might have debated more the Republican points that Democrats engage in the same rhetoric. Republicans do appeal, in coded language and actions, to Southern racists. But Democrats pull the race card and use scare mongering over Republican racism.

King is dead, in more ways than one. In an era of affirmative action and the deposition of Lott for an ambiguous statement, our black leaders rarely have lynchings to protest. Instead they go to St. Louis and block highways over the absence of black companies doing roadwork for the city, despite that (as the city pointed out) no bids from black companies were received; the city surrenders, paying kill fees to hire black companies, so fearful are they of being charged with racism. As Jeff Jacoby of the Boston Globe has pointed out amidst the Lott affair, Al Sharpton, the black leader running for President -- a fact which has caused much laughter while his endorsement, as representative of blacks, is still fairly well-sought -- has done far worse than Lott. According to Jacoby, Sharpton’s crimes are threefold:

1. In 1987, he repeatedly insisted that 15-year-old Tawana Brawley, a black girl, had been abducted, raped, and smeared with feces by whites, including one Steve Pagones. No evidence was ever produced, though Sharpton refuses his much-covered crusade, inviting Pagones to sue if it’s not true. Much less covered was the fact that Pagones did sue for defamation and won, though Sharpton still refuses to apologize.
2. In 1991, after a Hasidic Jew accidentally hits with his car and kills 7-year-old Gavin Cato, a black boy, black anti-Semetic riots erupt. Sharpton speaks at the boy’s funeral, denouncing the “diamond merchants” -- using the same kind of coded language Lott and his ilk use -- with “the blood of innocent babies” on their hands. Sharpton organizes demonstrators to march through a Jewish neighborhood chanting violent slogans, and a Jewish rabbinical student, Yankel Rosenbaum, is surrounded by a mob who stab him, reportedly shouting “Kill the Jews!”
3. In 1995, after having his rent raised, the Jewish owner of Freddy’s Fashion Mart in Harlem logically passes on the raise in rent to his black subtenant. In typical fashion, Sharpton steps in, calling the black “this brother” and the Jew “some white interloper” raising rent to “expand his business.” Sharpton’s organization pickets Freddy’s Fashion Mart, resulting in customers visiting the store being cursed and spat on. Finally, one of the protesters enters the Jewish store, shoots four employees, and sets the store ablaze, killing seven employees by fire.

In the immortal words of idiots everywhere, “whatevah!”

I personally find politicians far too tempered, too focus group-tested, in their rhetoric: I don’t want politicians who are overly careful in their rhetoric. I prefer J. Bullington Bullworth or Pat Buchanan or Hugh Long or Rush Limbaugh or O’Reilly -- though I detest the politics of some of these characters - or even the more careful John McCain over any politician speaking carefully to demographics. Americans love such figures precisely for this reason: we buy their books and listen to their radio shows or watch them on TV even when we disagree. I’d even vote, on sheer principle, for such men with whom I often staunchly disagreed. But in politics, there’s too much data to be ignored, too many experts on demographics and poll numbers not to pay attention. Data, you see, wants to be listened to. So what we get is the George W. Bush type (and, to some extent, the Bill Clinton type), smartly claiming to be an outspoken speaker from the heart while demonstrably putting on an expert-derived face, changing his tone and rhetoric to appeal to the specific audience being addressed. It’s not that it’s bad to do this - it may well be smart - but it has horrible cultural effects.

We couldn’t trust Trent Lott’s statements to BET not because he was a snake but because our whole political system lacks the outspoken personalities, the crusading spirits, that it was expected to have by the founding fathers, who lived before the advent of the party system. Europe has everyone from outright communists to outright fascists in their representative bodies; Italy has a prostitute. How ironic that, in the land of free expression, we have the pre-packaged soundbyte, politicians whose every word seems chosen not based on belief but on belief mediated through years of intensely analyzed polling data and demographics, and a culture that misinterprets vigorous debate as discord.

Focus group this: fuck it all. Speak and write to history, I say, and let the chips fall where they may. Because it’s not just rhetoric to say that one can win the world and lose one’s soul.

YOUR ASSIGNMENT

Browse around this site. There a lot here, and it deserves your attention.

I'm going to do my damndest to get up to at least 52 columns by 14 March 2003, Apollonian Bacchanalia's one-year anniversary. There's at least one more episode of The Matriarchy (a hefty work) left to get online, as well as quite a number of episodes of The Subjective Recollections of the American Artist in France. There's also a lot of miscellaneous columns, in various states of writing, waiting for final approval or revision. And there's a list of topics waiting to be addressed. We'll see.

I've also got some big plans for this site, though I'm hoping they'll wait to call upon me (this is how I work) until after Apollonian Bacchanalia's anniverary.

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