Pap the Teabagger

In a column last week in The Financial Times, Gary Silverman pointed out that Huckleberry Finn's father, Pap, sounded like a member of the Tea Party. (Thanks to Tom Belton for calling this to my attention.)

Pap is an unabashed racist and "whenever his liquor began to work, he most always went for the government." Pap is fearful, afraid the government will take away his meager belongings. When a free black man appears in his town, Pap flies into a rage. This black man is a professor from a midwestern state, has a mixed race background, dresses well and "could talk all kinds of languages, and knowed everything." Pap wants the man sold into slavery.

Living back before the Civil War, Pap would not have been a Republican, but times have changed. Frightened racists are today the backbone of the Tea Party, and that makes them central in Republican primaries. The Tea Party, unfortunately, is as American as apple pie.

THE HELP reviewed

The most popular movie in the USA is "THE HELP." At first glance this film about race and women's relationships might seem to be an odd pick for number one, but it packed our little theater on a Monday night. The movie was compelling and entertaining, and I recommend it with reservations.

THE HELP is a key American story, one that we enjoy again and again, working out (I think) feelings about ourselves and our history. We insist on this story in the same way that children may insist on hearing repeatedly a tale about how a duckling gets lost and then gets found. It's a safe way to deal with something uncomfortable and make sure it ends well every time.

This is the generic story (found in THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS, HUCK FINN, AVATAR, THE BLIND SIDE, etc.) A member of the dominant culture comes to value those in the dominated culture and helps them, and rewarding friendships develop. The story's protagonist, of course, is the helper from the dominant culture (the culture that buys the most movie tickets).

Black intellectuals have criticized THE HELP--which sets out to show fictional black servants telling their own stories--as being unrepresentative of reality. I have to say this: the blacks strike me as being more real than the whites in the movie. The whites are mostly cartoon figures. I would not want to see this movie with a Tea Party audience.

I wonder what black viewers without doctorates think of the film. I suspect they enjoy it, as I did.

For me what kept THE HELP from being first rate was its sentimentality. That's often what separates the rest from the best. Everything gets slightly softened. The movie is comfortably moving, unlike life. That adds to popularity. The black intellectuals have a point, but this glimpse into how people treat one another--I've seen Latina house cleaners treated badly in Healdsburg--has value. And the movie kept the audience interested.

Juan Cole on Qaddafi

My guess is that the great majority of American voters remain unacquainted with the segment of the American Internet Left that once again mourns the overthrow of a mass murderer, this time the dictator of Libya for 40 years. I write of the tyrant Qaddafi (whose name has been spelled at least nine ways).

These mourners are, to borrow a descriptive term from Juan Cole, daft.

Let's look at what Cole had to say about the claim that the Libyan war was about oil. "That is daft. Libya was already integrated into the international oil markets, and had done billions of deals with BP, ENI, etc., etc. None of those companies would have wanted to endanger their contracts by getting rid of the ruler who had signed them. . . . Moreover, taking Libyan oil off the market through a NATO military intervention could have been foreseen to put up oil prices, which no Western elected leader would have wanted to see, especially Barack Obama, with the danger that a spike in energy prices could prolong the economic doldrums. An economic argument for imperialism is fine if it makes sense, but this one does not, and there is no good evidence for it . . . and is therefore just a conspiracy theory."

But why do most of us on the Left oppose dictatorships to begin with? It's not as if what we call Western Democracies are responsive to their citizens. If they were, the United States would have a single payer health care system. Western Democracies are obviously oligarchies run for the benefit of the rich--but the rest of us do have, on occasion, some small impact on decisions. Built into our governance systems is a bit of flexibility not found in the rigidity of dictatorships. We can and do change--to a degree--with the times. That's better than nothing. It's better than a dictatorship.

At least some of American mourners of Qaddafi suffer from Obama Derangement Syndrome. They blame the war on Obama, giving little credit to the ordinary citizens of Libya, armed with handguns and axes, who attacked the dictator's tanks. Qaddafi's fall is Obama's fault, they totally believe, and so is everything else.

Obama Derangement Syndrome

The Republicans are having a hard time deciding which butthead to run for President. They have Mitt, an artificial man something like Nixon but without Nixon's gravitas. No one likes him. They have Michele, a primitive religious nutter who stares into the wrong camera with confused, half mad eyes. And now they have Rick Perry, my favorite because when he was a new legislator in Texas he wore tight pants--his nickname was "Crotch." You gotta love "Crotch Perry for President!"

Meanwhile the Democrats try to cope with the Obama Derangement Syndrome (ODS). Those suffering from ODS believe that Obama was born in Kenya (the Right) or that Obama is a Republican (the Left). Right and Left ODSers agree on one thing: that Obama is a Fascist. There is no known cure for this malady, and it's a bummer, man.

PROF. WISDOM

About 50 years ago I came across a pamphlet written by Prof. Wisdom, the master of an unnamed discipline. In the pamphlet Prof. Wisdom argued that the Irish had descended from Neanderthals. Well, my grandmother came over on the boat from Ireland, and I enjoyed the pamphlet and showed around through the years on the assumption that it was false. It wasn't. It turns out the the Irish (and the rest of Europe) carry between 1% and 4% Neanderthal DNA. The only people lacking this DNA are Africans. And that is one of the things that make us different from the non-human apes.

Playing Hard to Get

Some progressives argue that we can move President Obama and the Democratic Party by playing hard to get. That's a strategy I've seen work in the past. Doris Day used to do it to Rock Hudson. And it was amazingly successful, even in cases where Rock Hudson was gay.

Yes, today we're living in the age of Paris Hilton and hard-to-get wasn't the motto of (even) Elizabeth Taylor, but if the strategy worked in romantic comedies in the 1950s, why won't it work in American politics in 2012?

I have to admit that playing hard to get never worked for me or for anyone I know, but there's always a first time.

The Obama Mystery

We used to argue about G. W. Bush--was he shrewd in a vicious way or merely a stupid burned-out dry drunk or perhaps something else entirely? I never found a convincing answer that explained his murderous behavior, other than the obvious fact that he lacked decent parents. (I know I treat the Bush family badly, but so did Mother Nature.)

Now we wonder about Obama. What makes him tick? He's been accused of being racist, Republican, Kenyan, detesticulated, dumb, etc. None of that rings true. But Obama does remind me of Eisenhower, another President whose approach to solving a problem was to seek the middle. We all have lifelong strategies for coping--Obama's is to seek the middle between black and white. Under pressure he reverts to his basic problem-solving strategy.

If you're old enough, you can remember Eisenhower, a Republican, accepting in a half-hearted way the changes of the New Deal. During WW II, Ike's job was to keep a balance between the opposing strategies of Montgomery and Bradley. Ike mediated from the middle. Later he kept us out of wars but sent in the CIA assassins, much as Obama sends in drones. When Joseph McCarthy attacked Ike's beloved army and his mentor, George Marshall, Ike fumed in private but kept out of the conflict, letting others cope with it.

I expect history to find Eisenhower, as President, above average--the modern average being a half-demented ignoramus. Obama is also above average, but doomed to negotiate the middle with the Wall Street Oligarchy who, in turn, have to negotiate with radical right teabaggers too stupid to feed themselves soup.

What a great system of governance we have.