[x Denver Fishwrap]
"A Homogenous Nation"
By Mike Keefe
[Mike Keefe has been the editorial cartoonist for The Denver Post since 1975. His cartoons have appeared in Time, Newsweek, Business Week, US News and World Report, The New York Times, USA Today, and The Washington Post; and in over 200 newspapers across the country. Keefe attended both the University of Missouri-Kansas City and Stanford University.]
Copyright © 2009 Mike Keefe
Violence governs life in Iraq (with more than a million dead) and Afghanistan (with the fatality-count climbing) and violence gains ground in The Land O'The Free & The Home O'The Brave. We have become The Land O'Violence. As the late culture critic, Northrup Frye, was wont to say: "They became what they beheld." If this is (fair & balanced) fear & loathing, so be it.
[Vannevar Bush Hyperlink — Bracketed Numbers — Directory]
[1] Angry Bob Calls Us The Land O'The Violent (Neither Free Nor Brave)
[2] The Blowhard Calls Out The Silent Majority
[x NY Fishwrap]
[1]—Back To Directory
The Way We Are
By Bob Herbert
Tag Cloud of the following article
Stephen Johns, known as “Big John,” was opening the door for a man he thought was just an elderly visitor to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington when he was shot dead on Wednesday afternoon. Mr. Johns was a security guard. The bullet that killed him was a reminder of the continuing menace of bigotry and violence that pervades this country — and that we insist on underestimating.
The authorities have identified an 88-year-old, hard-core white supremacist, James von Brunn, as the killer. Our knee-jerk tendency is to comfort ourselves by declaring that this guy is so freakish, so far out of the American mainstream, that he is not representative of much of anything. Sane people are not violently obsessed with blacks and Jews. The murder was a tragic aberration. After all, this is a country that only recently elected an African-American president.
So let’s mop up the blood from the museum floor, and try to keep matters in perspective.
The problem when we think in terms of freaks and aberrations is that there are so many of them, which calls into question just how freakish or aberrational they really are. Was it an aberration when, according to authorities, Scott Roeder went into the lobby of a Lutheran church in Wichita two weeks ago and shot Dr. George Tiller to death? Hardly. The murder of Dr. Tiller, who was the nation’s most prominent provider of so-called late-term abortions, was the fourth assassination of an abortion provider in the U.S. since 1993.
Three Pittsburgh police officers were murdered in April by a man with a high-powered rifle who, according to authorities, was later linked to racist and anti-Semitic items posted on white supremacist Web sites. The man was identified as 22-year-old Richard Poplawski. According to the Anti-Defamation League, Poplawski, who wore a Nazi-style tattoo, believed Zionists were running the world and that President Obama was planning to crack down on gun ownership.
The madness is not limited to white supremacists by any means. A 23-year-old U.S. Army private, William Andrew Long, who had just completed basic training, was shot to death on June 1 outside a recruiting center in a suburb of Little Rock. Investigators said the man accused of killing him, a Muslim convert named Abdulhakim Muhammad, asserted that the killing was justified because of the treatment of Muslims by the U.S. military.
In 2002, a pair of snipers — John Allen Muhammad and his teenage accomplice, Lee Boyd Malvo, both black — spread terror as they roamed the Washington, DC-area cold-bloodedly killing people. Their motives were a jumble, but a primary motive, according to Malvo, was to kill white people. Ten people were murdered before the pair was captured.
The truth, of course, is that there is nothing aberrational about hatred and murderous violence in the U.S. They are two of the most prominent touchstones of the culture, monumentally tragic flaws that have permeated the nation’s history from its earliest moments and that plague us still today.
Americans kill each other at roughly the rate of 16,000 a year! From racial violence to family violence to gang warfare to street crime to mass murder — the blood never stops flowing.
The white supremacist crowd is up in arms, literally, in large part because the tide has turned against them. In addition to the presence of Mr. Obama in the White House, racism and anti-Semitism are no longer tolerated as overt factors in American life. And demographic trends show whites becoming a steadily smaller percentage of the overall population.
But we should not pretend that things are better than they are. Racism is still a powerful force in the U.S., so powerful that the president, an African-American, is barely willing to mention race unless he absolutely has to.
And murderous violence is as much of a problem as ever.
The social fabric is extremely delicate and fragile. Forces bent on destruction, even if they are a tiny portion of the population, can tear it to pieces. With a black president, an extreme economic crisis and the fear generated by the continuing threat of international terrorism, the United States is exceptionally vulnerable to these virulently destructive forces.
We need to be vigilant. When I first heard about the murder of Mr. Johns and the violent desecration of the Holocaust museum, I thought of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and how much we miss his moral leadership. He fought not just for civil rights, but against violence and injustice of all kinds, and he warned us of the debilitating effects of unnecessary warfare.
“He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it,” said Dr. King.
The bullet that silenced him seemed to come out of nowhere, suddenly, aberrationally, like the bullet that destroyed Stephen Johns. Ω
[Bob Herbert joined The New York Times as an Op-Ed columnist in 1993. His twice a week column comments on politics, urban affairs and social trends. Prior to joining The Times, Herbert was a national correspondent for NBC from 1991 to 1993, reporting regularly on "The Today Show" and "NBC Nightly News." He had worked as a reporter and editor at The Daily News from 1976 until 1985, when he became a columnist and member of its editorial board. Herbert received a B.S. degree in journalism from the State University of New York (Empire State College) in 1988. He has taught journalism at Brooklyn College and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.]
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[2]—Back To Directory
Hate in a Cocoon of Silence
By Charles M. Blow
Tag Cloud of the following article
We were warned.
An April assessment by the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis said pointedly: “Lone wolves and small terrorist cells embracing violent rightwing extremist ideology are the most dangerous domestic terrorism threat in the United States.”
Slowly, but steadily, these bigots are slithering from beneath their rocks, armed and deadly.
The most recent was an octogenarian-hater named James von Brunn, who, officials said, opened fire this week in the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, killing a security guard.
Just as disturbing as the incidents themselves are the lineups of family, friends and neighbors who emerge to talk about the vitriol they heard and the warning signs they saw. I always want the interviewer to stop and ask them this simple question: “And when he said or did that, how did you respond?”
I would ask: What did you say or do as the shooters retreated into their xenophobic silo and consumed the bile slouching about the Internet? What did you say or do as the darkness in their hearts obscured the light of their reasoning, and the vacuum of hate consumed them?
My suspicion is that far too many do far too little.
While many might say that they would be quick to condemn and excoriate such hatred, they can often passively condone and fail to expostulate the hater when they see it firsthand.
That’s the gist of a January study that was written about in ScienceDaily. It was led by Kerry Kawakami, a psychology professor at York University in Toronto, and it found that although people predicted “that they would be very upset by a racist act and would take action,” their actual reactions were “much more muted.” Why? Because people are “much less willing to pay the emotional cost” of the confrontation than they thought they would be.
The authorities won’t be able to stop every “lone wolf” with a gun and a gripe. But we, as a society, can do a much better job of creating an environment where hateful beliefs are never ignored and suspicious behavior never goes unreported.
In 1963, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote in a letter from a Birmingham jail, “We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people.” That’s still true.
Hateful people are loud — to disguise their cowardice and shame. But good, decent people are by far the majority, and we dare not be silent. There can be no family too close and no friend too dear for hatred to go unchecked. Allowing it to do so diminishes the better, more noble parts of ourselves.
These confrontations won’t be easy, but doing the right thing rarely is. There is someone reading this column who knows someone who could be the next shooter. What will that reader do? Ω
[Charles M. Blow is The New York Times's visual Op-Ed columnist. His column appears every other Saturday. Blow joined The New York Times in 1994 as a graphics editor and quickly became the paper's graphics director, a position he held for nine years. In that role, he led The Times to a best of show award from the Society of News Design for the Times's information graphics coverage of 9/11, the first time the award had been given for graphics coverage. He also led the paper to its first two best in show awards from the Malofiej International Infographics Summit for work that included coverage of the Iraq war. Charles Blow went on to become the paper's Design Director for News before leaving in 2006 to become the Art Director of National Geographic Magazine. Before coming to The Times, Mr. Blow had been a graphic artist at The Detroit News. Blow graduated magna cum laude from Grambling State University in Louisiana, where he received a B.A. in mass communications.]
Copyright © 2009 The New York Times Company
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Copyright © 2009 Sapper's (Fair & Balanced) Rants & Raves
