M2RB: Roberta Flack, 1972
“The First
Time Ever I Saw Your Face I Was Pleasantly Reassured by How Pasty White
It Was.”
By Mark Steyn
American
racism is starting to remind me of American alcoholism. At the founding
of the republic, in the days when beer was thought of as “liquid bread”
and a healthy nutritional breakfast, Americans drank about three to
four times as much as they do now. Today the United States has a lower
per capita rate of alcohol consumption than almost any other developed
nation, but it has more alcoholism support groups than any other
developed nation — around 164 groups per million people. France, which
drinks about 50 percent more per capita than America, has one-twentieth
the number of support groups. The French and Italians enjoy drinking,
the English and Irish enjoy getting drunk, and Americans enjoy getting
drunk on ever more absurd stigmatizatory excess. At Walmart they card
you if you “appear to be under” — what is it up to now? 43? 57? And the
citizenry take this as a compliment: Well-preserved grandmothers return
from failed attempts to purchase a bottle of wine with gay cries of, “I
was carded at Costco! They’ve made my weekend!”
And so it goes with American racism: The less there is, the more
extravagantly the racism-awareness lobby patrols its beat. The Walmart
carding clerks of the media are ever more alert to those who “appear to
be” racist. On MSNBC, Chris Matthews declared this week that Republicans
use “Chicago” as a racist code word. Not to be outdone, his colleague
Lawrence O’Donnell pronounced “golf” a racist code word. When Senate
minority leader Mitch McConnell observed that Obama was “working to earn
a spot on the PGA tour,” O’Donnell brilliantly perceived that
subliminally associating Obama with golf is racist, because the word
“golf” is subliminally associated with “Tiger Woods,” and the word
“Tiger” is not so subliminally associated with cocktail waitress Jamie
Grubbs, nightclub hostess Rachel Uchitel, lingerie model Jamie Jungers,
former porn star Holly Sampson, etc., etc. So by using the word “golf”
you’re sending a racist dog-whistle that Obama is a sex addict who
reverses over fire hydrants.
While we’re on the subject of GOP white supremacists, former
secretary of state Condi Rice spoke movingly of her rise to the top from
a childhood in segregated Birmingham, Ala. But everyone knows that’s
just more Republican racist dog-whistling for “when’s Bull Connor gonna
whistle up those dogs and get me off stage?” Meanwhile, over at the Huffington Post, Geoffrey Dunn, author of The Lies of Sarah Palin
(St. Martin’s Press, 2011, in case you missed it), was scoffing at
Clint Eastwood’s star turn at the convention — “better known as the
Gathering of Pasty White People,” added Mr. Dunn, demonstrating the
stylistic panache that set a-flutter the hearts of so many St. Martin’s
Press commissioning editors. Warming to his theme, Mr. Dunn noted that
Clint had been mayor of “the upscale and frighteningly white community”
of Carmel, Calif..
To judge from his byline photo, Geoffrey Dunn is not only white but
“pasty white.” So too is Lawrence O’Donnell. If I recall correctly from
the last time I saw his show (1978 — the remote had jammed), Chris
Matthews is not just “pasty white” but “frighteningly white.” I happen
to be overseas right now, so perhaps that’s the reason that all these
“upscale and frighteningly white” American liberals seem even crazier
than usual in their more-anti-racist-than-thou obsessions. To me, the
word “Clint” is racist dog-whistling for “Play ‘Misty’ for Me,” which is
racist dog-whistling for “Erroll Garner,” which is racist dog-whistling
for “black pianist way better than Liberace.” Clint took The Bridges of
the Frighteningly White Madison County and gave it a cool Johnny
Hartman soundtrack. Clint introduced the world to Roberta Flack’s killer
song “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face.”
But, as Geoffrey Dunn can explain, that’s racial code for “The First
Time Ever I Saw Your Face I Was Pleasantly Reassured by How Pasty White
It Was.” Also, Clint starred in The Eiger Sanction, a mountaineering thriller set on an Alp that was “upscale and frighteningly white.”
On the matter of those racist dog-whistles all these middle-aged white liberals keep hearing, the Wall Street Journal’s
James Taranto put it very well: “The thing we adore about these
dog-whistle kerfuffles is that the people who react to the whistle
always assume it’s intended for somebody else,” he wrote. “The whole
point of the metaphor is that if you can hear the whistle, you’re the
dog.” And a very rare breed at that. What frequency does a Mitch
McConnell speech have to be ringing inside your head for even the most
racially obsessed Caucasian MSNBC anchorman to hear the words “PGA tour”
as “deep-rooted white insecurities about black male sexuality”? That’s
way beyond dog-whistling, and somewhere between barking mad and frothing
rabid.
Still, now that “golf” and “Chicago” — along with “Clint,” “Medicare,”
“debt,” “jobs,” “foreign policy,” and “quantitative easing” — are all
racist code words, are there any words left that aren’t racist? Yes,
here’s one:
“Negrohood.”
Not familiar with it? New York Assembly candidate Ben Akselrod used
it the other day in a campaign mailout to Brooklyn electors, arguing
that his opponent “has allowed crime to go up over 50 percent in our
negrohood so far this year.”
Like Messrs. Dunn, Matthews, and O’Donnell, Ben Akselrod is
frighteningly pasty white, and a Democrat, and so presumably has highly
refined racial antennae. Had a campaign staffer suggested that Mr.
Akselrod’s opponent was wont to wear “plus-fours” and had a “niblick,”
obviously such naked racism would have been deleted in the first draft.
But the more subtly allusive “negrohood” apparently just slipped
through.
Mr. Akselrod now says it was a “typo.” Could happen to anyone. You’re typing “neighborhood,” and you leave out the “i,” and the “h” and “b,” and the “o” and “r” get mysteriously inverted. Either that, or your desktop came with Al Sharpton’s spellcheck. And then nobody at the campaign office reading through the mailer spotted it. Odd.
It’s only the beginning of September. So we’ve got two more months
of this. I don’t know how it will play in the negrohoods of Chicago —
whoops, sorry, I apologize for saying “Chicago” — but let me make a
modest observation from having spent much of the last few months
traveling round foreign parts. When you don’t have frighteningly white
upscale liberals obsessing about the racist subtext of golf, it’s
amazing how much time it frees up to talk about other stuff. For
example, as dysfunctional as Greece undoubtedly is, if you criticize the
government’s plans for public-pensions provision, there are no Chris
Matthews types with such a highly evolved state of racial consciousness
that they reflexively hear “watermelon” instead of the word “pensions.”
So instead everyone discusses the actual text rather than the imaginary
subtext. Which may be why political discourse in the euro zone is
marginally less unreal than ours right now: At least they’re talking
about “austerity”; over here we’re still spending, and more than ever.
Time’s Mark Halperin wrote this week that “Obama can’t win
if he can’t swing the conversation away from the economy.” That’s a
pretty amazing admission. The economy is the No. 1 issue on the minds of
voters, and, beyond that, the central reality of Obama’s America. But
to win the president has to steer clear. That doesn’t leave a lot else.
Hence, the racism of golf, the war on women, the carcinogenic properties
of Mitt Romney. Democrat strategy 1992: It’s the economy, stupid.
Democrat strategy 2012: It’s the stupidity, economists.
— Mark Steyn, a National Review columnist, is the author of After America: Get Ready for Armageddon. © 2012 Mark Steyn
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