Anniversary

On this date in 2010, I launched this blog with this post.

I would like to be less polemical on this anniversary, but the times are very much out of joint. It’s all-hands on deck against the multi-pronged radical Republican assault against our liberties.

Back in 2010, the terrible manifestations of racism and nationalism that stain our history were, I assumed, just that, history. Appalling history. You occasionally ran into Madison Grant’s name at the American Museum of Natural History, and then left that institution with a bitter taste in the mouth over its refusal to examine its own legacy as a bastion of  American “race science,” so popular a century ago, and so influential on the Nazis.  But, otherwise, traces of that old monster outside of the political sphere  were much less frequent than they used to be.

Politics, of course, is a nasty business of wrestling for power. The Republican exploitation of the dog-whistle of race since Nixon’s Southern Strategy is fait accompli. To be fair, Clinton Democrats proved themselves subtle exploiters of race, too, but at an even higher pitch (“super-predators” and all). And the Trump-trumpeted “Obama is a Muslim!” line amongst the Ignorant Army was another bit of racial sleaze — a twofer, as it were, attempting to delegitimize the nation’s first black President.

But now: the murder of Indian Americans by someone who seemed to assume that all brown people are Muslims; the rash of bomb scares at Jewish community centers; the vandalizing of Jewish cemeteries; and the continuing governmental assault on legal residents, visa-holding visitors, and of course, the most vulnerable of undocumented populations. This was all unleashed by Trump, who in word and deed — “Mexican rapists”; “Muslim ban”;  “inner city” crime rates skyrocketing — let the hellhounds loose.

The transformation of passport-stamping functionaries at the airport into jack-booted thugs has been terrifying.

For, alas, under the orange aegis of Trump, who turns out to be a long-time spouter of ubermensch garbage, Jeff Sessions, Stephen Miller, and Stephen Bannon have brought back long-discredited racialist notions with a vengeance. (And one uses the word “vengeance” specifically here when referring to the Confederate dwarf Sessions.) An old Nazi would lift his eyebrow at the notion of the Russian and American rights uniting in a kind of pan-white, fundamentalist nationalism (the Nazis thought the Slavs were subhuman, you’ll recall), but fascism shows a powerful ability to be flexible, and only brings out the long knives to handle internal differences later.

Frederick Douglass had a tragically still-relevant take on sickening prejudice. (It literally sickens and warps the hater, a point James Baldwin stressed as well.) Douglass called it “a moral disorder, which creates the conditions necessary for its own existence, and fortifies itself by refusing all contradiction. It paints a hateful picture according to its own diseased imagination, and distorts the features of the fancied original to suit the portrait. As those who believe in the visibility of ghosts can easily see them, so it is always easy to see repulsive qualities in those we despise and hate.”