in the same river?
I’m always surprised that a trait as common as white-skin pigmentation is all the information required for someone to start spamming out crazy right-wing emails to new acquaintances.
I have reconnected with an old high-school classmate (graduation date for both of us: 1971.) We have spoken by phone and communicated via a few emails. That; apparently, was all it took to get me on his email list. The kind of messages one receives through the medium is well known by anyone living in the connected world.
But the last email struck me a little differently because my first diary on Kos was about immigration. Not a week after that entry I get an “immigration” email from my old new-friend – and it gets right to the heart of the real immigration debate in this country.
I have tried to plug it into this message so you can see it - but I am having technical difficulties with that. Maybe I’ll figure it out in the future but I’m guessing many of you have already seen it. In a nutshell it’s a caption juxtaposed with the cowboy actor Sam Eliot. The caption is a story that old Sam tells about a seeing a Muslim with a backpack full of bombs and a Mexican with a backpack full of drugs – and bottom line – they both drown in the Rio Grande River and old Sam doesn’t care too much. And why would he: Aren’t all Muslims terrorists and all Mexicans drug mules?
This message, and others like it are rampaging through the wired-universe of the Republican Party base almost hourly – it is hateful, racist and ubiquitous among the same people who love Jesus and think women’s vaginas need more probing. This is who they are.
One of my biggest problems with Mitt Romney, Fox News, and the corporate boys down at the Wall Street Journal is their thinking that a disconnect may exist between their code filled cable news rhetoric regarding race and immigration - and the insanity of their base.
I assume they truly believe their discussions about self-deportation, illegal’s as criminals, and mosques at ground zero – don’t feed any oxygen into the constantly burning embers of racism and hatred, well evidenced by the spam mails piling up in their bases’ inboxes. I assume they believe that - - because they still believe less regulation of bankers and a tax cut for Mitt Romney would be good for me…go figure!
But here’s the problem with racism through code – it’s dulls the sensation, it’s a condom for your emotions, and it’s not even ribbed. Real old-school racism should cause pain – it needs to burn away the flesh and leave brittle bones and a barren soul. That’s why I prefer Rush Limbaugh to code talkers like Romney, Fox News, and Wall Street Journal. I prefer to get direct doses of racism, not oblique references that become raw meat for screen humping dogs to chew on.