Monday, August 31, 2015

Not Your Grandfather's Racism

While waiting for the next black male to be, ahem, "shot while resisting arrest", let us turn our eyes to the current Repugnican front-runners, to see which of them is the prettiest in the land.

Donald Trump, in all his nativist glory, ejected a Univision reporter (one of the most respected journalists in the US Latino community, as well as in his - formerly - native Mexico) from one of his town hall meetings because Jorge Ramos asked him if he thought all this "Mexicans are rapists, murderers, drug dealers and thieves" talk might be misconstrued by some. This would include the moron who suggested Mr. Ramos go back to his own country - apparently unaware that the US IS Mr. Ramos' country. Mr. Ramos was invited back on the condition that he keep his damn mouth shut.

The Donald, of course, wants to end birthright citizenship, which would impact a whole lot more than a few Latinos in this nation. We're talking every immigrant from Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Haiti, Iraq, Iran, to name but a few places where we (us, the US, that is) made life such a hellhole, that they came here to escape the oppression that we either supported or made worse by being as culturally insensitive as we possibly could, driving the local rulers insane, or condemning absolutely everything about Western culture, making life untenable for US supporters in those nations. So they came here.

And he wants to send them back.

Others have different ideas:

Pyush "Bobby Brady" Jindal thinks that, so long as someone comes to America and adopts everything that's bad about America, as well as a proper American accent, well, they can stay. If all they're going to do is pick our food, well, fuck them, send 'em back; taking jobs away from Americans, after all (who don't actually want to do those jobs all that much). If you're a Hindu, you should convert to Christianity, change your name to something innocuous and bland (maybe "Gilligan"), and make sure you talk like an angry fifth-grader.

Mr. Christie has now doubled down on treating legal immigrants the same way that Fed-Ex tracks packages. When Chris "the apple has fallen a bit far from the tree" Wallace mentions that these folks don't have numbers tattooed on their wrists (you know, the ones the Jews in the Holocaust DID have), Mr. Christie reiterates that yes, people aren't packages ("Don't be ridiculous" - really?), but we should still figure out how to track people like Fed-Ex tracks packages. RFID chip, implanted when they pass through customs, Mr. Christie?, or maybe we could hide them in jelly doughnuts as a gift when they arrive (but then, how many chips would YOU have roiling around in your guts, Mr. Christie?)

Mr. Walker wants to review the possibility of putting up a wall between us and Canada. 5,525 miles of a wall. I think the Canadians might approve of this, since a few of their (already low-count) gun homicides seem to be perpetrated by Americans who cross the border. But the pricetag? Who can say? It will probably have to be sourced to someone like Halliburton, so that Dick Cheney's walking, talking corpse can make another few billion to leave to his daughters when they can finally figure what kind of metal the bullet has to be in order to kill him.

That these candidates are taken seriously by anyone in the mainstream media is, of course, concerning, but unfortunately we have to take them seriously, since such a large part of the population has polled that they'd vote for 'em. That should always give one pause. To know, not just believe, that a large part of this country (which claims to be "not racist") is this racist. How quantifiable IS racism anyway? If you think that we're NOT a racist country because we elected a black President, understand that when more people vote, the wind almost always swings democratic. After George W Bush, everyone wanted the Dem in office - they didn't care if he/she/it was black or white or green or Satan. We ended up with a very cool cat, to say the least, and my favorite president so far this century.

What I'm hoping is that we do elect Bernie. He seems to be polling pretty damn well. Clinton is, I'm sorry, so hated by the Right that they will do everything they can to dump mud or blood on her head, until enough people believe it, and then vote for whatever asinine twat finally made it out of the clown car. O'Malley is one of the worst tools for fixing racism in this nation. He invented the whole CrimeStat/ComStat methodology that has proven so disastrous to community policing. And Joe Biden? I'm not sure what he's thinking, and I know he really wants the job, but they're going to nail him for kissing Barack Obama's you-know-what for eight years. They will pile as much filth on him as they would Clinton, simply because he represents the Obama legacy.

Clinton could still win it if The Donald decides to run as an Independent, thus splitting the Republican vote between the stupid and the self-deluded. I leave it to you to decide who those are.