The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Democrats Celebrate Their Heritage

Posted on | June 18, 2020 | 1 Comment

 

And by “their heritage,” of course, I mean, slavery:

Tuesday at USA Today there was a fascinating “fact check” article covering that idiotic spectacle put on by Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, and several other congressional Democrats last week in which they donned African kente cloth scarves and knelt on the floor of Emancipation Hall for some eight minutes and change in some sort of morbid tribute to George Floyd.
Because kente cloth, by the standard of this stupid moment in American history, is quite reminiscent of, and therefore pays homage to, the African slave trade. And therefore those wearing it also support the African slave trade . . .

Or so we must conclude, judging by contemporary standards. Many years ago, when I was first accused of “white supremacy” — !!! — my reaction was to wonder if words still have any meaning.

Whatever my Thought Crimes might have been, certainly I was not so foolish as to advocate, or even to imagine, resurrecting Jim Crow segregation or some other policy that might truly deserve to be called “white supremacy.” I have never endorsed any such policy, because it would be utter folly to do so. It is absurd to think that any sizeable percentage of Americans in the 21st century would support a return to segregation, or the disenfranchisement of racial minorities. For better or worse, we must live within the circumstances of political reality. Anyone who wants to go off into some kind of neo-Nazi fantasyland (“Wolves of Vinland”) is free to do so, but they are pursuing a delusion.

Because I am not a “white supremacist” in any meaningful sense of that phrase, I can laugh at my SPLC hate-list membership, and no intelligent person nowadays takes the SPLC seriously. They destroyed their own credibility by making such accusations so promiscuously and, while it is sometimes amusing to play this “gotcha” game against liberals, the whole point is to illustrate the absurdity of the game.

Refusing to kowtow to political correctness can get you in trouble, but the alternative — Pelosi and Schumer with their kente-cloth public ritual of self-abasement — requires a surrender of human dignity. I have nothing to say to any white person who imagines that such spectacles are the kind of help black people need, except seek psychiatric treatment.

Crazy people are dangerous, and progressive kooks are leading the Democratic Party down the road to perdition. There is no reason that the rest of us ought to follow them down that road, even if our refusal to join them means that we will be smeared as racists. It wasn’t me who hired Derek Chauvin as a cop. Minneapolis is more than 1,000 miles west of here, and I am not eligible to vote in Minnesota. So if the police hired by the Democrat-controlled government of Minneapolis engage in acts of racist brutality, certainly I cannot be blamed. The responsibility is not mine and, because no one in Minneapolis gives a damn about my opinion, I am not obligated to say anything about their problems. What I have said on the topic has mostly been about calling attention to certain facts that the liberal media don’t want us to notice.

At any rate, if the wearing of kente cloth is a celebration of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, what about old Beatles songs?

Did you know that Paul McCartney once wrote a song celebrating slavery? Well, neither did he. It took about half a century after “Penny Lane” was a hit for the Beatles before historians decided that this street in Liverpool was a legacy of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Sir Paul wrote the song as a nostalgic ode to Penny Lane as the scene of childhood happiness “beneath the blue suburban skies.” The Liverpool-born musician could not have known, while composing the cheerful tune in the mid-1960s, that scholars would one day conclude Penny Lane was probably named in honor of James Penny, a local mariner who made his fortune in the slave trade in the 1700s. Historians have not been able to prove this as a certainty, but the mere possibility was enough to inspire vandals to deface a sign in Liverpool with graffiti: “RACIST Lane.”
History is a horror show for liberals, who only look to the past in search of grievances they can exploit in their remorseless quest for political power. The liberal has a quasi-religious faith in Progress, which means that yesterday — another McCartney song title — was self-evidently worse than today. The past was a bad time, according to liberals, who see nothing there but oppression. Your nostalgia for the pleasant memories of childhood is almost certainly racist, and probably also sexist and homophobic. . . .

You can read the rest of my latest column at The American Spectator.




 

Category: American Spectator, Crime, Racism

Comments

One Response to “Democrats Celebrate Their Heritage”

  1. News of the Week (June 21st, 2020) | The Political Hat
    June 21st, 2020 @ 8:46 pm

    […] Democrats Celebrate Their Heritage And by “their heritage,” of course, I mean, slavery […]