Dear Mr. Wise (may I call you Tim?) --
Thank you.
Thank you for being willing to call things what they are. Thank you for being unafraid to cut through to the heart of the issue.
In short, thank you.
In long -- well, that's over the jump.
(UPDATE: Wow, the Rec List! Wasn't expecting that. Thanks!)
Your diaries, such as your latest one and the one preceding it, are brilliant. They strip away a lot of the hazy benevolence through which we view the origins of our current condition.
They strike a chord with me, in large part because of this:
Not too long ago, as part of a drive to make people aware of the plot to steal away our Medicare and Social Security in the name of "deficit reduction", I wrote a piece for The Seminal titled "Scratch a Deficit Hawk, Find a Racist", in which I described how the Southern Strategy is actually an alliance between business interests and bigots to use racism to get white Americans to vote for cutting corporate taxes and social spending -- and thus against their own best interests. It was well documented, with the infamous words of Lee Atwater himself describing how the plan worked (and still works to this day, years after his death):
"You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger.’ By 1968 you can’t say ‘nigger’ — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.
"And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me — because obviously sitting around saying, ‘We want to cut this,’ is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than ‘Nigger, nigger."’
There it is, the smoking gun, the Rosetta Stone.
If people need to understand modern politics, they need to know the stories behind two things: The Powell Memo (where Lewis Powell, who would later be joined by William Simon and Richard Scaife, sets forth the blueprint for conservative takeover of the media as well as colleges and various other institutions tasked with delineating objective reality) and this little bit of verbiage from Lee Atwater.
And yet, this was a wee bit much for the people behind the effort. Oh, no, can't go around calling deficit hawks racists! No no no no! Even though their "fixes" for the deficit almost never include anything that would involve real pain to anyone who is rich and white. Nope, can't make that causation chain. Naughty, naughty!
But you do, and you do it well. And for that, I thank you.