"I Do Not Remember It," Said O'Brien

For those who are too young to remember the Reagan/Bush years or those who are old enough but  have mercifully/conveniently forgotten them, an easy, enjoyable way to brush up is to read Molly Ivins's collections of her journalism and commentary from those days.  I recently reread Molly Ivins Can't Say That, Can She? (Random House, 1991), and today I'm halfway through You Got to Dance With Them That Brung You (Random House, 1998).  As you can see, I'm out of sequence, but it's okay because of these passages I found.

Describing Berkeley, where she'd taught a journalism class, she wrote:

Diversity is such a political buzzword these days that you can forget what it actually means until you spend time in Berkeley. A stroll across campus or along a Berkeley street is like some PC lesson in multiethnic, multicultural diversity. Black, brown, Japanese, white, Chinese; ashrams, sari shops, Tina Turner Buddhists chanting ram-rom-om, bagel shops run by Pakistanis, croissant shops run by Vietnamese, the Black Muslim Bakery; gay and lesbian knitting classes, Little League teams that look like a junior division of the United Nations, Saint Joseph-the-Worker Elementary School featuring Roman Catholics of every nation, skaters with turquoise hair and rings in their noses; God Hill, where all the theological seminaries are clustered.

This was originally published in 1997, but it should sound familiar today.  I realized after I'd read it that, while it sounds like a pleasant environment to me, conservatives would find it revolting. This passage could almost be used as a diagnostic for what Corey Robin calls "the reactionary mind." To be sure, not all conservatives would be repulsed, and some liberals would feel at least a twinge of repugnance; some others might say delicately that they understand why some people might feel that way.  But it is surely a litmus test for the GOP base.

To be fair, though, those who desire cultural purity would also object to mongrel Berkeley as Ivins described it, and they aren't all white Republicans.  They turn up among American Indians, for example, and I wince whenever my Mexican friends claim to be 100% hecho en Mexico, especially since a 100% Mexican is most likely a mongrel, just like a 100% American. You find it among LGBTQ people, like the gay men's baseball team that wanted to exclude bisexual men.  These are people who might not think of themselves as conservative in the same sense as Donald Trump or William F. Buckley, but they have a very important trait in common with them.

Someone on Twitter asked me if I wanted to see America become "darker."  Yes, I said without hesitation.  He (or someone else -- there was a chorus of them and I didn't bother to try to tell them apart) asked if I didn't agree that a "browner" America was at odds with freedom.  I replied that I didn't think so, but that history seems to show that a whiter America is at odds with freedom.

Next passage from Ivins, following directly on the first:

The right wing, ever behind the cultural curve, is now accusing the left of fostering “identity politics,” which means a pernicious harping on one’s ethnic heritage. Berkeley is well beyond identity politics. For one thing, everyone seems to have more than one affiliation. Japanese Hispanics, gay Lubavitchers, Finnish acupuncturists, Irish-African-Americans (that’s quite a Saint Paddy’s Day party). I am told by administrators at UC-Berkeley that the student body is 60 percent “other.” Mostly you have to guess. Samoan? Goan? Aztec? At faculty parties I brag that I have a student from Nebraska whose mother makes casseroles with Cheez Whiz.

Conservative?  Even more so!  This sort of blurring boundaries bothers the Right a great deal. (Though not, as I noted above, only the hard core GOP base; panic over porous boundaries turns up in groups that would ordinarily be counted as anti-conservative, even Left.)  Race-mixing, confusing genders, the failure to maintain and protect borders or boundaries is according to them the kind of degeneracy that brought down the Roman Empire.  If you want to believe that differences are "natural," whether because a deity laid them down or because they're in our DNA, it's unnerving to find people prancing insouciantly past the boundaries you thought were immutable and impenetrable.  Unnerving, but not any kind of natural law that needs to be respected.

The Worst and the Dimmest

This morning Democracy Now! rebroadcast part of their 2006 interview with the late Daniel Berrigan.  I've mentioned that interview before, to pick on Berrigan for hanging on to a juicy quote from Robert McNamara until the next day so he could ask a secretary to write it down in shorthand.  But for Memorial Day I want to return to the context of that quotation, which was the US invasion of Vietnam, then reaching its peak of aggressive violence.

Berrigan met McNamara

at a social evening with the Kennedys in about '65 and after this very posh dinner, which was welcoming me home from Latin America. One of the Kennedys announced that they would love to have a discussion between the secretary of war and myself in front of everybody, which we did start. And they asked me to initiate the thing, and I said to the secretary something about, “Since you didn't stop the war this morning, I wonder if you’d do it this evening.” So he looked kind of past my left ear and said, “Well, I’ll just say this to Father Berrigan and everybody: Vietnam is like Mississippi. If they won’t obey the law, you send the troops in.” And he stopped. ... And this was supposed to be the brightest of the bright, one of the whiz kids, respected by all in the Cabinet, etc., etc., etc. And he talks like a sheriff out of Selma, Alabama. Whose law? Won’t obey whose law? Well, that was the level at which the war was being fought.

McNamara has come to be treated as a tragic figure by the American mainstream, which always treats US aggression and terror as blunders, mistakes by a well-meaning giant: war just keeps following us home until we keep it.  But the glimpse into McNamara's mind in the remark quoted by Berrigan is fascinating, both in his dismissive contempt for dissent and in its moral monstrosity.

Let's extend McNamara's analogy and compare Vietnam to Mississippi.  Who can forget how, when Mississippi refused to obey the law, Washington promptly overthrew its more-or-less elected government and replaced it with a brutal dictator who staged sham elections, threw white supremacists into prison to be tortured and murdered, and when popular resistance emerged, carpet-bombed the state with a fury not seen since World War II?  Who can forget the shocking photograph of a white Mississippian being shot in the head by a member of the occupying regime?  Or the heart-rending photograph of white Mississippian children as they ran, naked and screaming, from a US napalm attack on the cotton fields of Jackson County?  But if you won't obey the law, you pay the price; that's America.

Now let's get serious.  Washington's response to Mississippi's resistance to the law was considerably milder than its response to Vietnamese defiance -- which was not, in fact, disobedience to "the law"; that would better describe the US trampling on a full range of international agreements in order to impose its will on Southeast Asia.  In general the government was basically sympathetic to white supremacists, and intervened only half-heartedly against racist obstructionism and terror; think of Dwight Eisenhower's remark to Justice Earl Warren that "white southerners 'are not bad people. All they are concerned about is to see that their sweet little girls are not required to sit in school alongside some big overgrown Negroes.'"  (Actually Warren "sanitized" the quotation, which didn't keep it from pissing Eisenhower off; what the great man actually said was "big black bucks.")  For those too young to remember, here's actual photographic evidence of one of those big black bucks (in the foreground) and some of those sweet little girls.

Generally, what concerned the US government was not racists' defiance of the law, nor white supremacy itself, but that American racism made us look bad in the eyes of the world, and would give the Communists fodder for propaganda.  These worries weren't enough, however, to keep the government from dragging its feet and hoping the problem would go away by itself it the government ignored it long enough.

Another point about McNamara's response to Berrigan: it seems to count against Jon Schwarz's claim that conservatives aren't as good at constructing analogies as liberals are.  There are those who would argue that McNamara was No True Liberal, but as Berrigan suggested, McNamara was one of the Kennedy team marketed as liberals, The Best and Brightest, both at the time and in today's liberal hagiography.  I'm not saying that conservatives do construct accurate analogies, only that liberals aren't very good at it either.  Nor, since McNamara probably thought he was making a funny, are liberals any funnier than conservatives, except as targets of laughter rather than makers of it.  Effective humor, and certainly effective satire, Goes Too Far.