Heads are Exploding!
… and other casualties in the ‘War on Whites’
by Thomas Adcock
Copyright © 2014 – Thomas Adcock
NEW YORK, near America
As the late and gloriously sardonic New York radio host Steve Post often observed, “Just when you think you’ve scraped the bottom, you find you’re only scratching the surface.” Such is the situation nowadays in the absurdist capital of America, Washington, D.C., from whence came a recent warning of imminent racial conflagration. Sounding the alarm was Congressman Morris Jackson Brooks Jr., of Huntsville, Alabama.
“Mo” Brooks, as he prefers to be known, is an egg-white, sarsaparilla-swilling avatar of his state’s impolite traditions: Ku Klux Klan worldview, imbecility, police thuggery, gun-humping, inbreeding, and flag-waving general falderal. Naturally, he is a lavishly praised “conservative,” the mainstream media misnomer given to tough-talking white lunkheads and corporate hey-boys of the confederated Republican Tea Party.
In the matter of weary refugees pouring across the Mexican border—unaccompanied children fleeing certain violence and a high probability of murder in their home countries of Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador—hear what Mr. Brooks said on August 4, as part of a “conservative” disquisition broadcast over right-wing radio:
“This [immigration] is part of the war on watts that’s bein’ launched by the Democrat Party (sic),” the congressman informed listeners, in his catfish-caught-sideways-in-the-mouth manner of oration. By watts, Mr. Brooks meant whites, as the complexion is usually pronounced. “And the way in which they’re launchin’ this war is by claimin’ that watts hate ever-body else. It’s part of the strategy that Barack Obama implemented in 2008, continued in 2012, where he divides us all on race, on sex, greed, envy, class warfare—all those kinda things.”
Gracious, I do declare. Rescue me, sweet Jesus, from this blackest of perfidy!
Meanwhile, Mr. Brooks is silent on the seemingly longstanding police “war” on non-watts. In the past few weeks, battles included:
- A posse of white New York City police officers beat up on an unarmed black man and diabetic grandfather for the high crime of selling loose cigarettes on a street corner, ultimately killing him by means of a patently illegal choke-hold.
- In Los Angeles, a squad of white police officers surrounded a black, mentally-challenged, unarmed teenager they had splayed on the ground for the purpose of “investigating” why he was crossing a street, whereupon one officer shouted to another, “Shoot him!,” thus ending the street crosser’s life.
Yet another unarmed black teenager was gunned down by members of the majority white police department of Ferguson, Missouri, a majority black community adjacent to the majority black city of St. Louis. The crime: walking in the middle of a street. As I write, angry residents of Ferguson are victims of police swat teams togged out in combat gear as they maraud through town firing off tear gas bombs, brandishing machine guns, and joy-riding atop armored trucks with rooftop 360-degree swivel mounts for machine guns.
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In the interest of civility, here’s a question: Oughtn’t Mr. Brooks seek opportunity for public reflection on his spittoon-appropriate rhetoric? Sad to say, here’s the answer: Forty-eight hours after revealing war against His People—by the congressman’s notion of logic, a dastardly plot by America’s first African American president—Mr. Brooks doubled down with another blast of peckerwood pomposity. This time, his oration came via right-wing television, where he bemoaned “reverse discrimination,” a vacuous locution widely in use among certain persons of the American racial majority who nonetheless see themselves as oppressed.
While state and federal laws protect most subsets of the American polity against most biases, Mr. Brooks told Steve Malzberg, his Caucasian comrade and copacetic TV interviewer, “What’s the one race that can be discriminated against? All watts! Watts are treated differently. You kin discriminate against ‘em.”
The foregoing remarks are not Mr. Brooks’ maiden slogs through the muck of prejudicial codswallop. On June 29, 2011, in a tête-à-tête with reporter Venton Blandin of Huntsville’s WHNT-TV, he declaimed on the topic of “illegal aliens,” the official Republican Tea Party pejorative for impoverished, undocumented, swarthy émigrés engaged in the slimiest, most humiliating, and lowest-paid of U.S. employment options.
“As yo-uh congressman,” Mr. Brooks told the WHNT viewing audience, “I’ll do anything short of shootin’ them. Anything that’s lawful. It needs to be done because illegal aliens need to quit takin’ away jobs from A-mur-icans.
Lest one think Mr. Brooks an unlettered Alabama shit-kicker, I should note his scholastic bona fides: a bachelor of arts degree from the renowned Duke University of North Carolina, where he earned a dual major in economics and political science, and a juris doctor degree from the University of Alabama School of Law. Accordingly, I would merely remove the word unlettered to describe a man reminiscent of an old chestnut: If law school is so hard, how come there are so many lawyers?
Add to the anxieties of Mr. Brooks and His People are a pestiferous pair of fearsome facts. According to demographic projections by the U.S. Census Bureau, racial and ethnic minorities now make up half the under-five age category of the American population, and by the year 2043 white people will constitute a minority group.
Further in explaining the increasing incidence of heads exploding from sea to shining sea, consider the following:
• A black president and his family—Harvard-educated mom and dad, two pretty girls that Mr. Brooks undoubtedly grew up calling “pickaninnies,” and Grandma from a middle-class black neighborhood of Chicago—now reside in the White House. And—horrors!—there are at least three substantial possibilities for future “minority” presidencies: Governor Deval Patrick of Massachusetts, a black Democrat; former Secretary of State Colin Powell, a black Republican (of the rapidly disappearing sane variety); and Congressman Joaquin Castro of Texas, a Latino Democrat.
• America’s top law enforcement officer, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, Holder, is black.
• The most widely known scientist in America is Bronx-born Neil deGrasse Tyson, of African American and Puerto Rican parentage. The much admired, much honored astrophysicist is director of the Hayden Planetarium at Manhattan’s Rose Center for Earth and Space. Additionally, he is a research associate at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, and host of the extravagantly reviewed “Cosmos: a Spacetime Odyssey,” a weekly science show on cable TV’s National Geographic Channel.
• Jeh Johnson is the African American secretary of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security; as such, he is a key figure in White House development of policy related to the exodus from the aforementioned Central American republics of some fifty-two thousand unaccompanied Latino children who have crossed the Texas border from Mexico in surrender to American authorities. Mr. Johnson’s first name, pronounced “Jay,” is homage to a Liberian tribal chief who saved his grandfather’s life when Dr. Charles S. Johnson, a sociologist, was on a League of Nations mission to Liberia in 1930. A commercial litigation attorney by profession, Jeh Johnson was the first black partner of his powerhouse Manhattan firm.
• Hollywood’s Lupita Nyong-o, winner of last year’s Academy Award for her supporting role in the movie “Twelve Years a Slave,” is a graduate of Yale University who holds dual Mexican and Kenyan citizenship. She lives in Los Angeles, California. Readers of the American celebrity magazine People recently voted her the world’s most beautiful woman.
• As a young man, John Robert Lewis was chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coördinating Committee during America’s civil rights struggles of the 1960s. Twice, he was nearly beaten to death by police officers and their bigot brethren in Mr. Brooks’ state of Alabama—first in 1961 in Birmingham, when he lay unconscious in a Greyhound depot after a white mob attacked the racially integrated bus he rode, an attack willfully ignored by the city’s police department; then in 1965 in Selma, when club-wielding Alabama state troopers cracked open his skull as he and six hundred demonstrators knelt in prayer on the Edmund Pettus bridge on a Sabbath that became known as “Bloody Sunday.” As a boy growing up in Pike County, Alabama, Mr. Lewis’ family church was firebombed by local Kluxers.
In September of last year, John Lewis accepted formal apology for Alabama violence—not from Mo Brooks, but from Kevin Murphy, the current chief of police in Birmingham. During a ceremony at a black church in Birmingham, which Congressman Brooks did not attend, Chief Murphy removed a badge from his coat and gave it to the civil rights icon as a gesture of reconciliation. Mr. Lewis, who said he was “unworthy” of the honor, has kept the badge in his own coat pocket ever since.
Today, Mr. Lewis represents the city of Atlanta, Georgia, in the U.S. House of Representatives. In receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2011, the nation’s highest civilian honor, Barack Obama declared John Robert Lewis the “conscience of Congress.”
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Unidentified champion of the “watt” race
Among Ku Klux Klan haters, it is common practice to etch passages from the Holy Bible onto the barrels of their rifles and pistols; perhaps nothing is more American than the combination of deadly violence and that old-time religion. Of late, the favored scriptural extract is from 2 Corinthians 4:6: “For God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, has shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.”
I am familiar with Kluxers. As a young newspaperman back in 1969, and possessed as I am today of a face as fair as Irish buttermilk, I joined a KKK “klavern.” My purpose was a six-part exposé of a pathetic gang of Michigan clodpates determined to blow up buses used to transport black children from crummy public schools to the good ones reserved for white children. (As a result, the gang’s “exalted Cyclops” spent a bit of time in a state penitentiary.)
To a man—and woman—my fellow Kluxers christened their weapons with biblical wit and wisdom. The klavern “kleagle,” a sad-sack who unwittingly recruited me, was particularly fond of the Book of Corinthians.
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In April of 2008, presidential hopeful Barack Obama was scorned by rivals in his own Democratic Party for what he said about working-class residents of Pennsylvania, read white folks. Between Pennsylvania’s two largest cities, Philadelphia in the east and Pittsburgh in the west, the state heartland is largely a Klan-infected moonscape of shuttered factories and crushed dreams. There is a saying about that stretch of three hundred-five miles (490.85 km): “Between Philly and Pittsburgh, it’s Alabama.”
Shortly after a campaign swing through Pennsylvania-Alabama, and much in need of funds, Mr. Obama met with a clutch of financial angels in swanky San Francisco. His remarks there, in private council, reflected discouragement in what he’d seen of post-industrial Pennsylvania—remarks soon tactically misconstrued by Hillary Clinton, his principal rival for the Democratic Party presidential nomination.
“You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania [and] like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for twenty-five years and nothing’s replaced them,” Mr. Obama told his affluent audience.
In a blaze of prescience, he added, “Working-class jobs fell through the [Bill] Clinton administration, and the [senior] Bush administration…[E]ach successive administration has said that somehow these communities are going to regenerate—but they’ve not. And it’s not surprising then that [people] get bitter. They cling to their guns or religion—or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them, or anti-immigrant sentiment…as a way to explain their frustrations.”
We know of these comments because of a secret tape recording, the text of which was published by the online Huffington Post magazine.
Mrs. Clinton seized on this genuine sympathy, twisting its meaning to her political advantage with well-rehearsed reproof she employed to undercut Mr. Obama.
“I was taken aback by [his] demeaning remarks about people in small-town America,” Mrs. Clinton said of Mr. Obama, in a lament delivered for the TV cameras. “His remarks are elitist and out of touch.”
Later in 2008, Mrs. Clinton’s pique paid off with a handy victory in Pennsylvania’s preliminary election contest, although she ultimately lost her party’s nod to Mr. Obama, if not her talent for mock outrage.
Surely, the president deserves a Kevin Murphy-style public apology for the way he has been maligned—by Hillary Clinton back in ’08, in the heated nadir of intra-party politics, up to the latest conniption of hateful lunacy from the mouth of Mo. In between, it’s been nonstop blind opprobrium for practically whatever Barack Obama says or does.
Here’s another aphorism, this one applied to the obstructionist Republican Tea Party and coined by the president himself: “If tomorrow afternoon I was to walk on the water, from one side of the Potomac River to the other, they’d say, ‘See, he can’t swim.’”
Fat chance Mr. Obama’s detractors will apologize. They will first die of extinction, as noted in this space in March of last year when Republican Tea Party grandees gathered in clandestine session at a Washington steakhouse on the very evening of Mr. Obama’s first inaugural in January 2009 to conspire against him, for no evident reason beyond the color of his skin. (See culturmag.de)
Meanwhile, Mr. Brooks’ partisans in the do-nothing House of Representatives talk up presidential impeachment for unspecified abuse of public authority—or else a lawsuit against Mr. Obama for unspecified “lawlessness.” Scholars at legal academies throughout the country, including even those at Mo Brooks’ alma mater in Alabama, offer salient analysis of the latter nonsense: With the possible exception of ambulance chasers, no American attorney is apt to associate himself or herself such complaint, and no U.S. court of law is apt to entertain complaint from litigants with zero legal standing, meaning the caucus of crazed hemorrhoid sufferers in Congress.
Speaking of the crazed, the egg-white Senator John McCain appeared on CNN-Television’s Sunday morning program “State of the Union” to yet again get away with shockingly ignorant criticism of President Obama. Well—shocking only if we overlook Mr. McCain’s main contribution to the 2008 election he lost to Mr. Obama: the selection of an Alaskan ignoramus named Sarah Palin as his own Republican Tea Party presidential running mate.
In an especially spiteful denunciation of the black man who bested him back in ’08, spiced with a soupçon of sedition, Mr. McCain said of the president’s mustering U.S. military forces to provide humanitarian aid to present and future victims of war crimes in Iraq, along with fighter jet air cover for Kurdish resistance to genocidal commandoes of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria: “That’s not a strategy, that’s not a policy. That is simply a very narrow and focused approach to a problem, which is metastasizing as we speak.”
Mr. McCain was allowed by a servile interviewer to echo his earlier benighted opinion—that President Obama should not have withdrawn combat troops from Iraq in late 2011. In point of fact, the immediate past president—George W. Bush, a member of Mr. McCain’s own Republican Tea Party—negotiated and signed the Status of Forces Agreement with the government of Iraq in December 2008, prior to Mr. Obama assuming office. Under that agreement, the U.S. was legally obliged to withdraw forces by end of year 2011—which the new president accordingly executed. Note: Mr. Obama tried to extend the agreement’s troop exit date, but the attempt failed when the Iraqi government refused to grant immunity from (deserved) war crimes prosecution to American soldiers and officials of the Bush regime. Note further: the U.S. should not have invaded Iraq in the first place.
But facts have little or no place in the theatre of hatred that so captivates one of only two major political parties in America. Like the exploding heads of white bigots, facts are casualties in the minds of those at war with what better angels they might have.
There shall be no apologies proffered to Barack Obama. Instead, he will author one hell of a presidential memoir. I shall be among the very first to place my order with his publisher.
— Thomas Adcock is America correspondent for CulturMag
