One simple fact unites the "birther" phenomenon, the Sonia Sotomayor and Henry Louis Gates controversies, and the right-wing crusade against health care reform in America: The one hope Republicans have of derailing the Obama presidency and stopping the progressive agenda is by tapping into the ignorance and fear of under-educated and ill-informed white Americans (aka "low-information voters"). Despite America's great wealth and advanced material development as a nation, abject ignorance remains a way of life for many Americans even today, and the rise of Obama has many of our most ignorant fellow citizens scared out of what few wits they possess. Lest I be accused of racism or elitism for my comments, I will mention that I hail from the very same white, working-class, small-town culture that I criticize here.
Consider the "birthers": From where I sit, it seems apparent that only a fool could buy into the theory that Obama is some sort of "Manchurian candidate" spirited into America from darkest Africa by evil leftists bent on turning the good ole USA into some kind of Islamic socialist republic. Obama has provided his Hawaiian birth certificate (the same "certificate of live birth" anyone gets when ordering a copy of one's birth certificate from one's home state), we have seen Obama's original birth announcements from two Hawaiian newspapers, and the Republican governor of Hawaii has stated unreservedly that Obama was indeed born in her state. None of this satisfies the birthers, however, who insist that no such proof has been produced. There is no rational basis whatsoever for birther claims against Obama, yet birther numbers are growing particularly among southern whites, many if not most of whom now believe or suspect that Obama was not born in the United States. If this isn't ignorance, then I'd like to know what is.
The birther controversy is but the latest incarnation of the racial and cultural prejudices that have followed Obama since he began his presidential campaign. No one demanded birth certificates from George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, or any previous American president, and no one will demand a birth certificate from our next white president. This is happening to our current president, not because of any missing birth certificate, but because he is black and because his name is Barack Hussein Obama. Anyone who says otherwise is either a liar or a fool.
The controversies surrounding Obama's nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court and his comments on the arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates likewise reveal a deep pit of ignorance in the white American populace. Both have been used by a few clever conservatives to convince a lot of not-so-clever conservatives that they are in danger of losing "their" country to militant blacks and Latinos led by Obama. In Sotomayor's case, an obviously moderate judge respectful of the law has been caricatured as a militant racialist out to harm white people. Pandering to a shrinking GOP base composed increasingly of under-educated whites in rural areas of the South, the Midwest, and the mountain states, Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee spent far more time in Sotomayor's recent confirmation hearing grilling her on her "wise Latina" remark than studying her judicial record. In the case of Henry Louis Gates, arrested in his own home on charges that have since been dropped, Obama's comments on the matter have likewise been twisted to suggest that he is an "uppity" black man with a chip on his shoulder. As we know, few people are less popular among ignorant white people than "uppity" black people from places like Harvard: a testament not only to the bigotry but also to the gross anti-intellectualism, anti-urbanism, and anti-cosmopolitanism rampant in right-wing circles. You know there's something wrong in America when having a good education is counted against you.
The Republican crusade against Democratic health care reform is likewise based on ignorance and fear. Most blatant recently in these regards is the story currently circulating that health care reform includes a plan to euthanize senior citizens as a form of health care "rationing." This story is a complete falsehood, but has that stopped the less well-informed members of our senior population from believing it? Of course not. Unfortunately, Democrats will have to dedicate considerable resources to battling this fiction; and faced with the truth many of the willfully ignorant will still choose to believe a lie. Even before this particular tale began circulating, Republican propaganda against health care reform was based largely on xenophobic lies about the "socialized" health systems of Canada and Western European countries, eagerly consumed by Americans who really, really want to believe that anything Canadians or Europeans do is inherently evil: Of course they euthanize their grandparents, just as they eat their children, have sex with their pets, and go around socializing things that ought to be privately owned. I fully expect that at some point an obviously racial element will appear in the health care debate just as in others, if indeed it has not done so already (I can see it now: "...Obama wants to give free health care to 'welfare queens' and 'illegal Mexicans'! Obama plans to euthanize white people and send their organs to Kenya...!").
Uniting all right-wing claims against Obama is their dependence on the ignorance and on the racial and cultural fears of under-educated and ill-informed white Americans (aka "Joe Six-Pack"). There is not a single conservative line of attack against Obama that any rational person schooled in critical thinking could possibly take seriously. These are Joe Six-Pack's charges: Obama is not a "real American." He is a secret Muslim. His middle name is Hussein, and the other parts of his name aren't very American, either. He is an angry, uppity black man who hates white people and who got into Columbia and Harvard only because of Affirmative Action. He is a socialist who wants to kill your grandma and grandpa. He is an elitist city-slicker who is coming to take away your guns and your Bibles and replace them with copies of the Holy Quran and The Communist Manifesto. He eats arugula instead of good ole American iceberg lettuce, spicy brown mustard instead of down-home yellow, faggoty French crepes instead of apple pie. He pals around with terrorists and gets secret messages from ACORN through his teleprompter.
If educational levels were equally high across America, the Republican Party would have no base outside the ranks of the very rich and a few twisted souls serving as research fellows in right-wing think tanks. If ignorance were eliminated in America, the GOP as it exists today might not exist at all, and would certainly have little if any hope of ever winning a national election. GOP leaders in Washington are a disgrace for their racist and xenophobic hate-mongering, their crude anti-intellectualism, their wanton disregard of the facts, and their eagerness to exploit the irrational fears of people lacking in the critical thinking skills to recognize lies as lies. Equally at fault are news outlets like Fox News and CNN which, since the 2008 Democratic primaries, have treated the "cultural concerns" (i.e. prejudices) of certain working-class whites as legitimate cause to oppose Obama, and as "concerns" that not they but Obama should feel obligated to address. When the Jeremiah Wright controversy exploded during the primaries, these news outlets behaved as though Obama somehow owed Joe Six-Pack a comforting explanation for Wright's remarks, for Obama's presence at their utterance, and for why after 400 years of slavery and second-class citizenship a black man such as Wright might be a little angry. As African Americans and Americans of all races enjoyed their first-ever opportunity to nominate and elect an African American president, these news outlets fixated instead on poor Joe Six-Pack and his cultural anxieties (i.e. his threatened sense of white entitlement). Today, these same news outlets treat the birther controversy and charges of racism against Obama, not as the gross stupidity that they clearly are, but as legitimate topics of "debate."
Personally, I've grown sick and tired of Joe Six-Pack and his cultural anxieties. Joe Six-Pack's petty prejudices, his willful ignorance, and his paranoid fantasies do not deserve to be treated as legitimate "concerns" or as serious topics of "debate." Given the internet, cable television, free public libraries, and an increasingly diverse America offering many opportunities to learn about different cultures, Joe Six-Pack has run out of excuses for being a low-information voter. Joe Six-Pack needs to grow up, get an education, and come live in the 21st century with the rest of us.
Mark C. Eades
http://www.mceades.com
