Prometheus 6

Yeah, I saw that bit about Ed Rendell praising Minister Farrakhan, and how no one asked him or Hillary about it, while Obama, who has never done any such thing, gets grilled over and over by the same reporters as though he hadn't answer the question before. I considered it all...keeping in mind the news doesn't do a damn thing new, that its job is to frame advertisements with stories that fit current events into familiar patterns...and realized nothing was ever going to be done about all that. I figured, not picking it up right out of the box, I couldn't help raise the story's profile any higher and there is no effective (as opposed to correct) argument against it that can be posed so I let it pass.

Now it's time for a summary of the facts involved, and the evidence shows Colbert King was the right one to do it.

[F]or me, the unpleasant tone that lingers is the exit poll in which 1 in 10 white Pennsylvania voters said a candidate's race mattered. Those voters went with Clinton by a proportion of 3 to 1.

Clinton's top strategist, Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell, said something like that could happen.

Which is why I wasn't bother by his saying so. Even defended him a little...so what if everyone disagreed with me?

 

That sad exit-poll result, however, didn't come close to matching, in impact, the political deception displayed during the campaign.

And I don't mind disagreeing with Mr. King, even after lauding his op-ed. What he wrote was complete and accurate, from his description of events to his indictment of Mrs. Bill's moral turpitude.

But in the end I don't think it mattered.

...back to that exit poll.

It suggests that whether a tax-cutting, fiscally conservative African American Republican named Swann or an Ivy League-educated, upwardly mobile black Democratic U.S. senator named Obama is on the ballot, some whites, as Rendell warned, can't get past his color. And that's the case although black Pennsylvanians have historically and consistently marked their ballots for white candidates.

People have come away from the Pennsylvania primary exhausted, frustrated, angry...I'm not counting Hillary supporters as people for the moment...and the more I consider it, the more I begin to feel some gratitude.

One of my fundamental operating priciples is that dealing in truth is the only way to succeed other than accidentally (some folks think 'truth' is 'anything I can assert that causes the repercussions to miss me'...they are wrong).

In one of Derrick Bell's books, I can't remember which, he had a bit of speculative fiction about an old fashioned race riot. White crowds were crashing buildings looking for Black folks to beat the shit out of, and causing a lot of property damage in the process. White folks started hanging signs reading "Nigger-free" on their houses. Even...especially...when they were hiding Black friends to keep them safe. They turned away Black folk for fear of their own property being damaged. Turned out Black folk renting apartments in their houses and hung their signs.

Prof. Bell's speculations can be pretty disturbing, but they're like great science fiction...vary one thing and follow the repercussions. And with few exceptions, his variances are quite reasonable and the models he generates with them have extraordinary explanatory power.

And the stories are no more fictional than those told by people who hold Obama's race against him. "I want to know if you believe in the flag." I don't know what that means. It's a challenge for which no adequate response exists...and it's a shield against having to come up with a reason you know is not publicly defensible...and a shield against being proved wrong because your real reason is never exposed.

They hide. But that doesn't matter. This is punching all holes in the American Myth of the Individual. You are seeing just what identity groups folks are willing to defend, how important those identity groups are to them. You are seeing how one of their leaders' placing someone's name in an article with someone else's is enough to stampede many into associating them.
 You are seeing people act more as variants than as individuals.

Though these facts are bad, that you have fresh evidence of it is a good thing. And it comes right when all the folk who actually experienced the Civil Rights movement are getting on in years.

Again.

Round and round we go...