Let's see what I can write in the 20 minutes before i have to teach a couple of classes. I'm pretty sure you can describe Mark Morford at the San Francisco Chronicle's website, sfgate.com, as Charles Pierce in training. Today he offers us a column that starts out being about the Donald Sterling issue and wadners into the politics of white privilege, taking no prisoners. His thesis?
It’s simply this: old, wealthy white males no longer rule the universe like they used to. They are no longer free to roam like unchecked king of the beasts, safe in the knowledge that the social architecture supports and encourages their every bigoted whim and egomaniacal burp. Obviously? Not even close.
What else? Below the divider doodle, please.
Here's the "diary me" quote:
The Tea Party was born of this exact shift. Theirs is a relatively small, but very vocal gaggle of aging white Southerners clinging desperately to the last vestiges of what made their America “great” – sexism, racism, xenophobia, homophobia, repression, isolationism, guns, sexual dread, anti-science lug-headedness, mal-education and a total lack of fresh salads.
Is this not as precise as anything that has been said about these people? Okay, I think he's off on "Southerners" considering Steve King, Sarah Palin, Richard Mourdock and the host of other people we have in the non-Southern parts of the country who have drunk the tea party Kool-Aid, but the stuff in boldface (my edit of this) is a good summary of their belief system.
"Rich" in his title is probably not as correct as it could be either, and I'm not letting it go entirely. But interesting that he traces Sterling's clueless bigotry, well-established over the last, oh, twenty years of Clipper ownership and being in the public eye as a result, to the same place that led to the origins of the tea party. And perhaps that's the issue with "rich". "Clueless."
Indeed, the shift wrought of the Obama Age is messy and imperfect as any upheaval of power in American history. But it’s palpable, and it keeps making itself known in laudable fits and starts. And the good news is, according to the increasingly mixed-race, female-driven demographics of the nation, it’s never shifting back. Sorry, Fox News. And your dad.
Of course, the shift, as we know, isn't complete. Consider the attempts by the reactionaries to roll back women's reproductive rights and the efforts of the Roberts Five on the Supreme Court to make this democracy into an oligarchy in which rich people call the shots (Citizens United, McCutcheon). But this can't go on forever, can it?
It's all based on fear of change. As it has been in this country since the development of the Biblical defense of slavery in the 1830s. People who are afraid SOMETHING will be taken away from them, even if that's their influence rather than anything tangible. Look at the professional homophobes who think we're trying to take MARRIAGE away from them. It's certainly not time for schadenfreude yet. But this column tells me there's hope that the time is coming.
Sorry I have to post and run here. I might be able to check in around 1:50 PM and again a little after 3, but otherwise, probably not until 5:30. I just wanted you to learn about Morford, who has been amusing me for quite some time.