This Darkness Got To Give

So, it started to rain last night just as we set out for St. Edward's State Park. So, no Red Stick Ramblers. Our best laid plans having ganged aglae, we repaired to Kirkland's Cactus! restaurant and sat under the eaves sipping Patron tequila and eating ceviche and chorizo tamales. Not a bad consolation prize at that. Less traffic, too...

I'm sitting here listening to "Katrina" -- Dr. Michael White's brilliant jazz dirge -- and pondering the McCain campaign's accusation that Barack Obama introduced race into the campaign with a "negative, abhorrent, nasty, vicious comment." (Obama said Republicans would try to scare voters by questioning his patriotism and "funny name" and by pointing out he doesn't "look like those other presidents on those dollar bills.") 

Now, race has been an issue one way or another in every American presidential campaign since the Constitution artificially boosted southern political power by counting slaves as three-fifths of a person at the same time that it disenfranchised them. Exploiting white resentment toward blacks has been a central tenet of Republican national ambitions since 1968, a strategy that they've honed and refined ever since. As recently as 2000, the presidential election came down to a choice between between two members of the southern aristocracy (even if one was a bit of a carpetbagger). 

The MSM has taken McCain's part by reporting the matter narrowly, as if it were a matter of McCain personally raising the issue of race in the first place. The Republicans have become adept at using surrogates -- witness the Willie Horton and Swift Boat campaigns -- to do their dirty work for them, but the MSM doesn't bother to examine this. Instead, pundits focus almost gleefully on the possibility of McCain successfully appealing to white resentment. 

The very fact that white resentment is there to be exploited proves the enduring power of racial demagoguery in this country. After all, affirmative action and welfare -- the two lynchpins of white resentment -- have largely been gutted. And yet the resentment abides. In his fine book Grant and Twain: The Story of an American Friendship, Mark Perry points out that both men abhorred racism at the same time that they couldn't see it in themselves. When a man doesn't see himself as caught up in a problem, he can resent the idea that it exists or that he has any responsibility for addressing it. In the convoluted psychology of white resentment, some whites will see voting against Obama because he is black as a blow for racial equality. That's what the McCain campaign wants to tap into with its overheated rhetoric. We can only hope that they are preaching to a small enough choir. Otherwise, Dr. White's dirge is for all of us...

Friday's Choice: The Grateful Dead perform "New Speedway Boogie" to an appreciative audience: