The hate that race produces

Oct 11, 2008 Letters

DEAR EDITOR,
What has been something of a long time coming seems at last to be seeping into the consciousness of the establishmentarian media system in the United States of America.

The talking point in the news cycle took a brief segue from the economic avalanche threatening to inundate the US and the world, to focus attention on hate-induced rhetoric that has been spewing forth liberally from supporters of John McCain and his running mate, Sarah Palin.

The media had, heretofore, studiously avoided deliberating the inconsistency in the support gap between Democrat Barack Obama and Republican John McCain, and that between general confidences expressed in polls about which party could do better economically for the nation.

Recent outpourings by some of McCain and Palin’s supporters seem to be forcing them to address a thorny issue that might illuminate the reasons behind such a pattern of inconsistency.

It all started after the last debate, when poll figures seemed to suggest that Obama/Biden were being given greater consideration by undecided and independent voters than that being accorded the McCain/Palin ticket.

Sarah Palin, kicking off her heels and putting on her barracuda lipstick, harangued supporters at a rally in Carson, California with assertions that Barack Obama “pals around with terrorists”. She was referring, of course, to Obama’s ties with reformed 1960s radical Bill Ayers.

Ayers is said to have belonged to a radical fringe group that supported bombings in the US during the stormy and divisive Vietnam protest era. Today he is a Distinguished Professor of Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Barrack Obama was 7 or 8 years old when Ayers was violently expressing his hatred over America’s foreign and domestic policies.

Since then, Ayers has cleaned up his act, so much so that Chicago’s Citizen of the Year Award was bestowed upon him by Mayor Richard Daley in 1997 for his work with troubled inner city schools.

Obama and Ayers’ paths intersected while the former was Chairman of the Annenberg Foundation, a not-for-profit charitable organisation, and Ayers was engaged in educational activism in Chicago.

These circumstances were seized on by the McCain/Palin ticket to associate Barack Obama with terrorism, and question the very foundation of his “Americanism”.

During a Town Hall meeting in Wisconsin, a McCain supporter said that she read somewhere that Obama was an Arab.

The animosity being expressed for Obama by many in the gathering was way beyond what is customary and expected in Presidential campaigns, and compelled John McCain to chide some of them, for which he was soundly booed.

Right wing talk shows and Internet blogs had long been purveyors of the most insidious rumours adversarial to the reputation of the Democratic Candidate, often and deliberately mispronouncing his name as Osama.

The sum total of the “Swiftboat” attacks on Obama/Biden, and McCain/Palin’s inability to move the polls in a positive direction have resulted in the media being forced to commence talking in public about one of its most sacred cows; that is, the magnetic influence race and ethnicity has on the actions of those with cultural links to racial and intolerant belief systems.

In an era when 68.3% of Americans disapprove of the job the Republican President is doing, when those once described as his base have the economy teetering on its hind legs, and when main street America is being stuck with a US$4700 billion bill to bail out greedy Wall Street America, the conventional wisdom is that the Democratic ticket should have been leading by double-digits. The Candidate is cleaner, in terms of a past, than many of those of recent times.

The skeletons in his closet seem pale in comparison to what is glossed over by the press, in terms of his competitors and predecessors.

Sarah Palin is reported to have addressed an Alaskan Independent party convention twice in the past decade.
Her husband was a registered member of the secessionist group between 1995 and 2002.

All things being considered, it is amazing that shots are being taken at Obama over his religious association with Reverend Wright and Bill Ayers; while so little notice is given to the actions of those who associated with secessionist organisations.

John McCain attacked Barack Obama for criticising America’s bombing of civilian targets in Iraq, when the same John McCain criticised American bombing of civilian targets in Serbia, during the Serbian/Kosovo conflict.

The most difficult thing for most nations to deal with is the prejudice that informs the actions and choices of large segments of its majorities.

And in the US, it is like pulling teeth to get the establishmentarian media to conduct objective examinations of this reality.

Barack Obama, based on current state of affairs in the US and his performance throughout the primaries and presidential election campaigning, should indeed be leading McCain in the polls by double-digits.

Obama has displayed unrivalled class and statesmanship in dealing with the double-standards in terms of analysis and personal accounting.

He has had thrice to disown and deny his relationship with a friend and religious leader. All he has left to give now is his blood.

But even that will not persuade the 20% or so of Americans who could never conceive of voting for a black man, much less one with an Arab and Muslim name.
Robin Williams