DagSeoul: Positions, Populations, Punk, Poetics

dagNotes: The Old White Stand By…Blame It On The Blacks.

Thinking about Rick Santorum’s racist dog whistle to the Iowa Republican voters. He claims he doesn’t want to use other people’s money to enrich black people. Overtly racist language, of course. I’d not expect anything less from the Catholic conservative. I’m surprised and dismayed to have heard from more than one white friend that there’s an excuse for Rick Santorum’s statement, or that it’s politics as usual. I’m learning that many of my liberal white friends are not willing to betray their whiteness. Something about calling out white supremacy in everyday life seems inappropriate to many of them. It’s ok to attack nationalists and fascists, but everyday white folks and “respected” leaders is not nice. I hate that racist civility.

That white people continue to color wealth-distribution is a problem insisting that black America is so corrupted that they cost “us” too much. An argument implying black people are a financial drain on US wealth (thus potential for equality, i.e. white people like to say, “it’s their fault,”) is crazy considering how many black men we purposefully and willfully incarcerate each year, at great cost, and our inhumane sentencing policies that are unjustly applied in states nationwide. That sort of grand expense is cool, but the small amount of revenue spent on useful and successful, necessary welfare-programs is supposed to be unfair.

That’s white supremacy. It’s not veiled, it’s public policy, it’s explicit and obscene.

motherjones:

Yes, that is two children sharing an ice cream cone with a hammer and sickle in the background.

It’s the illustration for this:

“If anything, the knock on [Tim Pawlenty] seems to be that, with a few exceptions, he’s a little too ordinary. One of those exceptions came in 2003, when the newly elected Republican governor selected Cheri Yecke, a little-known Bush administration veteran, to produce new educational standards for what students should—and shouldn’t—learn.

The battle that followed put Pawlenty at the center of a culture war conflagration. Members of Yecke’s handpicked standards committees dismissed sharing and cooperation as “socialist” ideas, suggested replacing “We Shall Overcome” with “Dixie” in a unit on protest songs, and advocated downplaying the impact of slavery on the nation’s antebellum economy—lest it sour students on the virtues of the free market.”

Down With Tyranny’s posts on Rep Paul Ryan are essential reading.  Get there now.  Read. Share. (My link is to the latest.  Be sure to take a look at the other, earlier posts.)

Paul Krugman’s piece in the times is a good one.

David Brooks was on Real Time with Bill Maher last weekend defending Conservativism from the right wing antics of the Republican Party. I often hear from my Conservative friends that I shouldn’t confuse Conservatives with Republicans. It’s a bit self-righteous and precious, and hides a more complex truth. The claim is an implicit refusal to do anything at all to change the popular Conservative movement and its tactics, which are managed by the Republican Party and a growing, strong far-right-wing movement. So while conservative intellectuals, like Brooks, explicitly denounce the members of the Conservative movement who behave improperly and hurt civic discourse, they nevertheless politely refuse, hesitate is to kind, to act against it.

I think the damage to discourse has been done. The Conservative movement has been working since the 80s to control educational and market institutions via legislation and local activism. Academics and researchers are already forced to be quiet for fear that local conservative groups, at the service of the national movement, will smear them and their work. Even I experienced conservative plants in my classrooms at Metropolitan State College of Denver, of all places, during the Academic Rights nonsense pushed by David Horowitz in the early 2000s.

We’ve been forced by centrist culture to accept conservative binarism into intellectual discourse, to acknowledge paradox-denying common sense into our pragmatism, to permit ridiculous religious dogma into our educational discourse, et al. And while we all seem to agree that the minority who insists we continue moving to the right is, in fact, bad for our culture, our nation, we continue to do nothing about it.

I don’t know if there’s much we can do about it except by putting our careers at stake and telling the truth in spite of the potential smear campaigns. I promise to continue to do so.