There is great sadness at the end of Helen Thomas's long and valuable career. Her nasty comments allowed her critics their final moment of triumph. As if all the good she had done, speaking truth to power, attempting to hold presidents accountable when so many of her supposed peers were resorting to mere sniveling sycophancy, was for naught. Every good she had attempted could be dismissed. She had revealed a latent bigotry. It was that for which she would be remembered.
There is no excusing Thomas's comments. They were hateful, insensitive, and historically obtuse. That she had never before publicly revealed that side of herself is irrelevant. That she is very elderly and may have been emotionally exhausted matters not a whit. Those comments made her immediate retirement necessary. There was no going back. The entire episode called to mind the forced retirement of baseball executive Al Campanis a couple decades earlier.
Campanis also was toward the end of a long, distinguished career. Campanis also will be remembered less for all the good he did than for the way his career ended. Campanis had played baseball with Jackie Robinson. In the many years after his playing career, he had worked for the organization that had integrated baseball, and he had helped nurture the careers of many young black players. But on live television, one night, he made what were indisputably vile, racist comments. He had never before revealed such bigotry. He was elderly, and on that night he appeared to be a bit worse for alcohol. Friends and colleagues, many of them black, defended his honor and integrity. But his words could not be ignored. The meaning of his words could not be ignored.
Bigotry can be most insidious when it lies just below the level of consciousness. Despite never before having revealed that side of themselves, both Thomas and Campanis did reveal themselves as harboring bigotry. They were elderly and tired. They were caught at moments of weakness. But what bubbled to the surface in those moments of weakness was what always had been simmering inside them, veiled by layers of personal and social strength. Both Thomas and Campanis may not even have been conscious of their bigotry. That's the real story about the ugly ends of their distinguished careers.
Bigotry lies just below the surface in many of us. Below the level of consciousness. Strip away the veneer of what we consider civilized deportment, and it will appear in more of us than most people realize. It occasionally shows itself in flickering glimpses. Romanticizing the Confederacy. Attempting to forget the internment of the Japanese during the Second World War. Ignoring the continuing suffering of the descendants of those that survived the genocide of this continent's native peoples. Omission can be every bit as revealing and damaging as commission.
Bigotry reveals itself when the GLBT community is criticized for demanding basic rights, and people are shouted down and told to be patient with what is characterized as their special agenda. When immigrants are blamed for lost jobs or increased crime, despite statistics proving they are responsible for neither. When people confuse Israel with Jews, or call AIPAC, which enjoys support from but a minority of the American Jewish community, the "Jewish lobby." The ease with which the Bush Administration used a terrorist attack executed by a small band of Saudis and Egyptians, and planned in Afghanistan and Germany, to foment a pandemic hatred that ended up directed at a nation of Arabs and Muslims that had had absolutely nothing to do with that attack. The welfare "reform" signing ceremony that used black women as props for the photo op. The irrational fury unleashed by the election of this nation's first black president.
At the most extreme end, students of German history will discuss the external conditions that helped foster the rise of Nazism. The entire country had been humiliated and crushed in a war, and the terms that ended that war were economically devastating. That many German Jews had made enormous contributions to German culture and society became irrelevant. In desperate times, a previously largely veiled bigotry exploded into the open. But any student of the Nazi era also will tell you that the bigotry that exploded in Germany was paralleled in many of the countries Germany ended up occupying. What had been barely dormant below the surface needed but degrees of collective psychological stress to reveal itself in violent collective derangement.
The lesson of Helen Thomas should not be taken as a statement only about Helen Thomas. It is a lesson about human nature. It is a lesson about all of us. It is a lesson about the fragility of the very fabric of what we call civilization. When thinking about Helen Thomas, we must also think about ourselves. Because we, too, if we are lucky, will find out what it is to be elderly. Some of us already are finding out. And we, as a nation, are, as a nation, under great stress. And that stress may grow much more severe before it begins to dissipate.