Disguised?

I was in an online conversation about the disparaging comments about African delegates to the United Nations that then-Governor of California Ronald Reagan made to President Nixon. One of the interesting pieces of the conversation touched on the fact that, so far as has been revealed, Mr. Reagan never repeated those sorts of comments. There are no other recordings of him making them to anyone else, and no such comments in his personal papers.

So... Was Governor Reagan making these comments to President Nixon because he understood that the President would approve of them?

I suspect that this defense is going to be employed sooner or later, and, given what we know right now, it's plausible. Assuming, that is, that anyone who wasn't genuinely a bigot, but might reasonably be one, would ever knowingly falsely signal that they were one. Or, perhaps to be more precise, would they do this in the late 1960s?

I know a number of people for whom the answer is "no." I, for my part, am not so sure, because it seems that there could be a worthwhile advantage in convincing someone, especially in a presumably private conversation, that one agrees with them, regardless of what one actually thinks of their position.

Not, I believe, that it will make much of a difference. The battle lines in this are likely to be ideological, rather than factual, as is often the case.

Hydration

The expressway exits near my home have traffic lights at the ends of their off-ramps, and this creates places for the down-and-out to panhandle passing cars. Some of the spots have been claimed by "regulars," who may be found there on a more-or-less consistent basis; others are more first-come, first served. While this Summer hasn't become unreasonably warm yet, the midyear months in the Puget Sound area are often unrelentingly sunny, the several cloudy days that we've had over the past four weeks are quite unusual. And standing out in the sun all day, holding a sign asking for help, seems sure to make one thirsty. And so, at this expressway exit, the spot where the panhandlers usually set up shop is becoming marked by a growing collection beverage bottles.

Connected

I'd come across this old David Horsey cartoon, and it reminded me of the initial messaging of the Obama presidency. Clearly, this isn't the tack that President Trump and company have been taking. And that's at least in part to President Trump having an instinct that President Obama did not. That the fear, prejudice, anger and resentment that Mr. Horsey casts as people's security blankets are an integral part of who they are, and giving them up without attaining satisfaction for the perceived wrongs that birthed them feels like losing.

President Trump is often cast as a racist because he's clearly taken sides in respect to racial tensions in the United States, but I think that he's always alert to resentments and prejudices as tools that he can use. When the President tweeted: “Sweden has let our African American Community down in the United States,” it was cast as a cynical ploy, born of the idea that Black voters were gullible enough to fall for it. But I think that President Trump has learned to connect with people through their resentments. And while his political base prevents him from attempting to connect with Black voters by validating any resentments they may have over domestic injustices, citizens of Sweden aren't a part of that base. Accordingly, the President is free to seek connection on the basis that ASAP Rocky is being mistreated by racist Swedes. And I suspect that he'll do the same wherever he believes that there is political or economic advantage to be gained.

But President Trump is not new in this. He may do so more openly than prior politicians, but seeking friendship (however ephemeral) by casting oneself as the enemy of someone's enemy is an old game in politics. And as long as people define themselves, at least in part, by who their enemies are (in other words, forever), the path to power that is offered will remain attractive.

Look Both Ways

You can never be too careful when crossing the street.

Stick or Stone?

Sticks and stones, according to the saying, may break one's bones, but words will never hurt one. It's a convenient aphorism that's often deployed when children complain that some or another child has called them a name. But it's rarely, I suspect, an effective one. And this, I believe, is mainly because for all that adults are willing to tell children that words don't really matter, they'd never really believed it themselves.

President Trump, when he said that certain unnamed United States Representatives should go back to their "home countries," kicked off yet another coffeepot conflagration. And a lot of discussion has been ignited over whether or not the President is racist. While I understand that it's something that a lot of people want to talk about, I think the focus on whether or not the term "racist" applies, either to the President directly or to his comments draws attention in the wrong directions.

When I was in high school, many of my classmates had no qualms about calling me "nigger" to my face. The common understanding of the reason for this was that those classmates were unreconstructed racists. But as I grew older, I started to realize that perhaps it had nothing to do with racism at all, rather, it was the fact that I was put out by being called nigger that prompted many of the people around me who used it. Or, to be more accurate, it was the expectation that I would be put out by being called nigger. In other words, a certain set of my classmates would call me nigger because they understood that this was an effective was to get under a Black person's skin.

And I suspect that President Trump, who reminds me of some of my more unpleasant classmates in other ways as well, is working under this same logic. When he Tweeted: "Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came. Then come back and show us how it is done. These places need your help badly, you can’t leave fast enough," I suspect that this had nothing to do with their ethnic backgrounds. Rather, he was calling them out as "un-American" in a way that was easily at hand, and would resonate with the people who supported him. While the first is a guess on my part, based on past experience, “when the crowd at Trump’s rally in Greenville, North Carolina, on Wednesday trained their eyes on Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, chanting ‘Send her back!’ in a play on Trump’s own words from a few days before,” the latter was proven.

Given this, does the label of "racist" make any particular difference? I understand those who feel that spades must be identified as spades, but the battle lines here were drawn some time ago, and the rhetoric has had its effect. The President's supporters have, once again, their proof that the President resents who they resent. Whether the President's resentment is real or feigned, in support of them or for reasons of the President's own, is beside the point at this stage. Representative Omar (and the other members of "The Squad") represents something threatening and un-Americans to them, whether that be the encroachment of non-Europeans/non-Christians or the abandonment of America's peculiar implementation of Capitalism, and the President's Tweets showed that he understood that. Race was tangential, not central, to that. Likewise, the American Right is coming to expect the charge of racism whenever it clashes with a non-White public figure, so much so that the term is losing any force that it may have had. Not that such force was universally useful in any event. Like any large collection of people, the American Right is diverse enough that it can be expected to have constituencies that will respond in a number of different ways to any given stimulus. There were always going to be people for whom the term "racist" simply wasn't important. I expect that President Trump is one such. He's unlikely to be motivated to put more work into his messaging, or be less direct in showing his followers that he understands their concerns, simply because Democrats call him on it.

Eventually I learned to disinvest in what my classmates would say about me. Not because it offered me any control over the situation; I'd come to understand that when it came to the verbal slights that were thrown in my direction, there was no control to be had. Instead, there was a certain peace. Not being caught up in something that I couldn't influence allowed me to shift my attention to more important things. To be sure, maybe for the people who find the charge of racism important, it is the highest item on their list of priorities. But if it's not, that energy may be better spent.