Political Theatre category archive

In the St. Petersburg Times, Bill Maxwell considers the pipedream, popular during the late presidential election, that Mr. Obama’s candidacy somehow indicated that the United States had entered some kind of “post racial” era.

It was a pleasant fantasy for those who wanted to pretend to themselves that racism was somehow over; a lot of the pipedreamers were white folks, who want the white history of chattel slavery and oppression to just somehow disappear,

But anyone who pays attention to day-to-day life knows it just ain’t so. Public racism may no longer be fashionable in polite society, where it was accepted less than my lifetime ago, but racism and bigotry live with us still. Usually, they are undercurrents to public discourse, but they still sometimes come forth as over-currents.

An excerpt from Mr. Maxwell’s column:

Many whites, the “birthers” in particular, are so angry that a black man is in the White House, they continue to challenge Obama to prove he is a natural-born American citizen. Their street demonstrations have come with virulent racial epithets and crude placards.

Former President Jimmy Carter, alluding to the attacks on Obama, told students at Emory University last year that he believes race is a huge problem for the nation’s first black president: “I think people who are guilty of that kind of personal attack against Obama have been influenced to a major degree by a belief that he should not be president because he happens to be African-American. It’s a racist attitude.”

Then, the tea party entered the fray with its attacks against Obama. Because some of the movement members’ language was laced with racism, the NAACP declared in a report released in October that the tea party was “permeated with concerns about race” and that some of its affiliates “have given platform to anti-Semites, racists and bigots.”

Now comes a must-read new book from the University of Chicago Press, Obama’s Race: The 2008 Election and the Dream of a Post-Racial America, by Michael Tesler and David O. Sears, showing that the 2008 election was more polarized by racial attitudes than any other presidential election. The authors argue that there were two distinct sides to this racial divide: resentful opposition to and racially liberal support for Obama. No postracialism in that equation.

Unfortunately, he doesn’t go into what evidence the book uses to support its thesis and I was unable to find a scholarly review of the book (a scholarly review would have dissected its arguments; apparently, the book is too new for detailed reviews to have hit the web).

Nevertheless, given that the 2008 election represented the first time that a black man was a credible candidate for the nomination of a major party–let alone the nominee and ultimately the victor in the election–I would not be surprised if that election was. indeed, “more polarized by racial attitudes than any other presidential election.”

The only other one I can see being in contention would be the election of 1860.

At Pscyhology Today, Alison Rose Levy considers at TSA patdowns.

It’s the first item I’ve stumbled over that tries seriously to address the issues of sex and sexuality that underlie some of the unease with the procedure. In most fulminations I’ve read, those have been implied, but not stated.

Earlier this week, Congressional staffers averted their eyes, too embarrassed to watch Transportation Security Administration (TSA) staff demonstrating a patdown.

(snip)

Experiencing or even witnessing a patdown may be disturbing to healthy members of a community for good reason — because this behavior is defined as sexual abuse by the legal and psychological professions; the “Encyclopedia of Forensic and Legal Medicine” lists as sexual abuse “fondling of breasts and genital areas.”

This incident raises questions about why TSA personnel consider the patdowns “not too bad,” while others are shocked. Does the TSA harbor a culture of denial around the invasiveness of these behaviors?

Field sums up Sarah Palin’s “support for our North Korean allies” statement quite nicely:

. . . there in lies the problem: She is a intellectual lightweight who has been elevated to a status by her followers that she cannot live up to. And,of course, she knows this, she has to be aware of her limitations. But it’s too late for her to come clean now. She is like a grifter who is too deep into the con to reveal her true self.

Thoreau explains:

I really wish I was traveling for Thanksgiving. I want to join in the security line revolution. I think I’d actually refrain from lecturing the groping pervert, and instead make this really awkward. “Oh baby! Yes! Right there! Uh-huh! That! Yes!” Then, when finished, blow a kiss and slip him my phone number.

No doubt, if this happened, it would lead to TSA-mandated pre-flight enemas all around:

Things being the way they are, if I were a mediocre al Qaeda plotter I’d now be trying to find some mentally pliable and unfit recruit to carry a cardboard suppository or cartridge in his rectum. Not because it would actually reliably work but because of the news and reaction it would generate.

(snip)

The reaction in the United States would be wonderful to watch unfold.

“See what I can make those people do to themselves,” the man would say to his comrades. Merriment all around.

The purpose of a terrorism as a tactic is to create fear leading to the breakdown of order and to overreaction in response, thus weakening the polity.

In the cases of Michael Smerconish in the Philadelphia Inquirer and Richard Adams in the Guardian, the tactic has certainly succeeded.

Given that one’s chance of dying in a car wreck are far greater than those of dying in a terrorist attack, one wonders whether they view driving with the same calculation of danger that they apply to travelling by air.

One doubts it.

Afterthought:

Mr. Adams’s analyses are subject to question. According to his column, he considers Charles Krauthammer, whom I find a vitriolic polemicist (and that’s on his good days), to be “sane and rational.”

Andrew Murray considers the War in Afghanistan and concludes that it has become all about face–saving face. A nugget:

No – the blood and treasure now being wasted in Afghanistan is an investment in nothing more worthy than saving Nato’s face. If the myth of Anglo-US military invincibility were to be punctured in Afghanistan, one of the world’s least developed countries, where would the world order be?

That may seem scary. But then it is the same world order that gave us the crash of 2008. Poverty, unemployment and eye-watering cuts are the down-payment the British people are being asked to pay for its maintenance. Afghan and Pakistani civilians are paying a still higher price.

Another way of putting it would be to say, as my mother used to say when she tired of my questions, we’re still there, well, just because.

Brendan writes a letter.

Addendum:

Pat-Down Put-Down
By Madeleine Begun Kane

You’re a teen and can’t get to first base?
You’re a fondler, but fearful of Mace?
Well a pat-down career
Can be yours. (Front and rear.)
Be a TSA Feel-Her-Up Ace.

Mild innuendo and out the other:

Read more »

In an ideal world, this would have happened in Newton.

In the Guardian, Patrick Porter considers the likely effects of trying to be the MPs for the world. He writes from a UK perspective, but his thoughts are worth considering.

Part of the mythology that feeds the idea of being using, or “projecting,” as its proponents like to say, military around the world to control what persons in other countries do, is the myth of the “surgical strike.”

Mr. Porter argues that both the costs and the likely effects of these projects are frequently misstated:

As it happens, plenty. As a matter of cost, it generates expensive and protracted commitments. Entanglement and intervention usually cost more and take longer than we think. President Bill Clinton said US troops would be in Bosnia for only 12 months, but they were there for 10 years. The Taliban, we were told years ago, were a busted flush. The overestimation of our power and the underestimation of resistance has been a signature tune of the war on terror.

And there are other dangers. What if, in appointing ourselves as world police, we are agents of chaos rather than order? Our activism will probably have perverse results, unintended consequences and blowback. It could create accidental guerrillas. It could drive neighbouring countries into new confrontations with us. Democracy promotion can promote communal violence or unwelcome new regimes. Evidence of these dangers litters the decade.

Confident activism carries an added danger of moral hazards. Adroit armed groups can exploit and escalate conflicts to draw us in, using their victimhood strategically to wag the dog.

The column is worth a read.

A drone is not a scalpel. It is a flying bomb, and all the false analogies in the world will not make it anything other than a flying bomb.

And war is not a game. Unlike in games, players in wars get only one life.

A Conservative Birmingham City (UK) councillor has been arrested over allegations he called on Twitter for a female writer to be stoned to death.

It should give us pause, on both sides of the Atlantic, how quickly members of the right wing leaps to thoughts, even in jest, of death for those who disagree with them.

Ring in the new Hobbesian reality in LaLaLand:

Hope has faded for Half Moon Bay to overcome its budget deficit after the defeat of a crucial sales tax measure, the city’s last chance to retain its own police department.

“The city is going to have to contract for police services, period,” Half Moon Bay City Manager Michael Dolder said after an emergency meeting last week at which City Council members contemplated having to cut roughly $1.2 million out of the city’s general fund by June — money they were counting on before voters defeated Measure K, a 1-cent sales tax increase that would have raised as much as $1.4 million for the city each year.

“Because we are already there” is not a reason. It’s a rationalization.

November 11, 2010 | Posted by: Frank | Posted in: Political Theatre | Bookmark this post

Via Bartblog.

Gary Younge, in the Guardian, states over the obvious, but does so quite well. A nugget:

The Tea Party is not a new phenomenon. It’s simply a new name for an old phenomenon – the American hard right. Over the last two years the term has provided a rallying point for a coalition of disparate groups, most of which have been around for many years. Minutemen (anti-immigrant vigilantes), birthers (who deny that Obama was born in the US), Promise Keepers (Conservative Christian men), Oath Keepers (military and police, retired and current, who vow to resist unconstitutional government “by any means necessary”), Fox News watchers, Glenn Beck lovers and Rush Limbaugh listeners who had no unifying identity before.

Having a name helps. It has offered a political identity to a significant number of people who were either not active or might not have understood themselves to be in any way connected. That name has helped reorient the stated priorities of the right away from social issues and towards fiscal ones. But this is no more than the old whine in new bottles.

Field points out contradictions:

So let me get this straight; MSNBC suspends Keith Olbermann for donating money to dumbocratic candidates, and their rivals, Radio Rwanda, allows their on air personalities to run for republican office? I swear liberals are getting softer and softer by the day. You all have got to get hard core like the republiclowns. Do you think Radio Rwanda would fire one of their biggest earners over some s^&t like this? Hell News Corp gave over a million dollars to that racist- right out of central casting- Haley Barbour, and didn’t even sweat it.

I haven’t paid a lot of attention to Keith Olbermann’s being suspended for daring to support candidates. I sometimes find Olbermann entertaining, but rarely watch. By the time his show comes on, I’ve put away my outrage for the day.

Nevertheless, the idea that reporters and commentators (and Olbermann has been as much a commentator as a reporter) shouldn’t have opinions or express in a legal way legitimate political positions in their private lives seems rather silly, especially in view of the Foxes who rampage daily in the henhouse.

As John Cole pointed out

An old NCO once told me that as a leader of men–never make a rule you can’t enforce, never make a rule you won’t enforce, and never make a rule that makes you look like an idiot if you do enforce it.

Tthis week’s On the Media thoughtfully explores the issue of forbidding news staffs to express, in private, political positions.

A good portion of 21st-century news consumers no longer believe in objectivity. They know it isn’t possible. And yet the public expects reporters to always play it down the middle, delivering the facts and only the facts, unencumbered by bias. But to what lengths should reporters go? Can they report fairly on beats that encroach on their personal lives? Should they vote? Brooke canvassed an array of (objective) sources and compiled this report.

Follow the link to the website for the story (transcript to be posted Monday afternoon) or listen here: