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More ugly noises...
Among American columnists, two of those I have the highest regard for are Alexander Cockburn and Pat Buchanan. Not that I agree with much of what they say: but Buchanan is independent and rigorous, never afraid to be controversial, and rarely pulls the lazy columnist's trick of quoting other journalists; and Cockburn is a genuine investigative journalist in the grand old tradition that actually goes to see what is going on and then writes about it. And then there are two of my favourite comic-strip authors, Johnny Hart (BC, The Wizard of Id) and Frank Cho (Liberty Meadows). All of these people publish their work through an outfit called the Creators Syndicate; and so, in the end, my attention was drawn to the Creators Syndicate website.
Syndicates are a typically American kind of press agency, which makes up for the lack of a truly national American Press by distributing editorial material - columns, comics, editorial cartoons - to America's myriad of local daily newspapers. When I opened the Creators Syndicate website, I started poking around their other columnists. I found that, though there seems to be a slight majority of what might be called conservative columnists, the syndicate really represented all kinds of authors, from Reaganites such as Mona Charen to all-purpose left-wingers such as one Judy Price. It must make company parties rather interesting.
I found people I would agree with, people I would disagree with, and a few people I would cross the road to avoid. I found infuriating individuals on both sides. However, I found one thing I really did not expect, in this day and age, to find; not, at least, in the mainstream press, not among people on both sides whose opinions are more or less respectable, more or less reasonable, more or less informed by all the experiences of the last several decades.
There is one columnist - I will not mention the name - whose very photograph leaves an unpleasant impression: unsmiling gimlet eyes behind thick,nerdish glasses, a face between the class dork and the class bully. And as I went through one of his column, I had to remind myself that I was awake, at my desk, and that it was 2005.
I will just quote a few passages:
"...the festivities arrived a bit early this year, in the arrest of 79-year-old former Klansman Edgar Ray Killen for the 1964 murders of three civil rights workers in Mississippi. The murders, of course, were notorious at the time and are immortalized by Hollywood in the 1988 anti-white film "Mississippi Burning," which manages to smear every white man and woman in the state (and, by implication, everywhere else) by virtually stating that whites are by nature genocidal..."
The film, of course, does no such thing - apart from anything else, its heroes are mostly white. But it does accurately report that the vast majority of whites in Alabama at the time were aligned, whether out of belief or of fear, on Ku Klux Klan positions, and that political murders always went unpunished. The columnist goes on: "It's therefore not too surprising that the media reaction to Killen's arrest has been one of almost universal gloating. To bust a 79-year-old white Southerner for racial murders is almost as much fun as deporting 80-year-old concentration camp guards to communist countries to stand trial for war crimes, and that amusement has worn thin in recent years..." The writer does not realize, or does not care, that this sort of argument aligns Southern white folks with Nazi mass murderers.
The columnists then goes on to compare the case with another: that of a black man who, at the same time, had been convicted of the murder of a white woman and the attempted murder of two others. The columnist, who carefully avoids describing Killen's murders, gives a long account of "another killer of the same era -- one who long ago was tried and convicted and today even acknowledges his guilt". Somehow, the fact that this black man does acknowledge his guilt, whereas Killen has always denied his and even had the nerve to become a preacher, makes him rather more than less odious in the columnist's eyes. The man in question is Wilbert Rideau, who committed his crimes at 19, and who now, after 44 years in jail, has been set free. Let us remark in passing that Rideau has made excellent use of his time in jail and has bcome, by all accounts, an outstanding moviemaker, nominated for Oscars and other awards. Let us also notice, what the columnist scrupulously avoids telling us, that Rideau was the longest-serving single prisoner in his whole state.
I will spare you the rest of the column; but the second-to-last sentence fairly takes your breath away. "What Killen is supposed to have done was not only murder but also an act of political and racial resistance, and that sort of thing has to be stomped on, regardless of how little evidence remains after 41 years." In other words, the columnist admits that Killen's murders were both racial and political; and manages to state that this should have gone in his favour rather than otherwise. Murders which are "acts of political and racial resistance" (such as those being perpetrated as we speak, in Iraq, against the Shia majority, by the Sunni and Baathist minority) ought to be treated, in his view, with more, and not less, leniency, than ordinary criminal acts. That this is the reverse that any legal order, let alone a democratic one, can tolerate, does not even seem to cross the mind - if that is the right term - of this subversive, anti-democratic racist, this enemy of law and order, this theorist of political terrorism.
This sort of thing goes on on the Internet all the time; I know, I've met it, we've all met it. But to find it, not on some ranting, ill-designed little website with twenty readers, but on a respectable board advertising for business with regular organs of the press - the respectable and often respected vehicles of public opinion in whole communities - is genuinely horrifying. I do not know enough of the United States to know whether this sort of thing has always gone on, in provincial newspapers and communities, unnoticed by the conservative or liberal majority; but I have a suspicion, a fear, that it is something that is raising its ugly head now, encouraged by the victory of something that calls itself "conservative" - although, whatever my view of Bush&co., it seems at least clear that it has nothing to do with the love of political violence and racial resistance of this columnist.
P.S.: I have avoided naming the sod in order to deny him publicity. But I assure you that such a man exists and makes his living as a columnist in today's United States of America, a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Syndicates are a typically American kind of press agency, which makes up for the lack of a truly national American Press by distributing editorial material - columns, comics, editorial cartoons - to America's myriad of local daily newspapers. When I opened the Creators Syndicate website, I started poking around their other columnists. I found that, though there seems to be a slight majority of what might be called conservative columnists, the syndicate really represented all kinds of authors, from Reaganites such as Mona Charen to all-purpose left-wingers such as one Judy Price. It must make company parties rather interesting.
I found people I would agree with, people I would disagree with, and a few people I would cross the road to avoid. I found infuriating individuals on both sides. However, I found one thing I really did not expect, in this day and age, to find; not, at least, in the mainstream press, not among people on both sides whose opinions are more or less respectable, more or less reasonable, more or less informed by all the experiences of the last several decades.
There is one columnist - I will not mention the name - whose very photograph leaves an unpleasant impression: unsmiling gimlet eyes behind thick,nerdish glasses, a face between the class dork and the class bully. And as I went through one of his column, I had to remind myself that I was awake, at my desk, and that it was 2005.
I will just quote a few passages:
"...the festivities arrived a bit early this year, in the arrest of 79-year-old former Klansman Edgar Ray Killen for the 1964 murders of three civil rights workers in Mississippi. The murders, of course, were notorious at the time and are immortalized by Hollywood in the 1988 anti-white film "Mississippi Burning," which manages to smear every white man and woman in the state (and, by implication, everywhere else) by virtually stating that whites are by nature genocidal..."
The film, of course, does no such thing - apart from anything else, its heroes are mostly white. But it does accurately report that the vast majority of whites in Alabama at the time were aligned, whether out of belief or of fear, on Ku Klux Klan positions, and that political murders always went unpunished. The columnist goes on: "It's therefore not too surprising that the media reaction to Killen's arrest has been one of almost universal gloating. To bust a 79-year-old white Southerner for racial murders is almost as much fun as deporting 80-year-old concentration camp guards to communist countries to stand trial for war crimes, and that amusement has worn thin in recent years..." The writer does not realize, or does not care, that this sort of argument aligns Southern white folks with Nazi mass murderers.
The columnists then goes on to compare the case with another: that of a black man who, at the same time, had been convicted of the murder of a white woman and the attempted murder of two others. The columnist, who carefully avoids describing Killen's murders, gives a long account of "another killer of the same era -- one who long ago was tried and convicted and today even acknowledges his guilt". Somehow, the fact that this black man does acknowledge his guilt, whereas Killen has always denied his and even had the nerve to become a preacher, makes him rather more than less odious in the columnist's eyes. The man in question is Wilbert Rideau, who committed his crimes at 19, and who now, after 44 years in jail, has been set free. Let us remark in passing that Rideau has made excellent use of his time in jail and has bcome, by all accounts, an outstanding moviemaker, nominated for Oscars and other awards. Let us also notice, what the columnist scrupulously avoids telling us, that Rideau was the longest-serving single prisoner in his whole state.
I will spare you the rest of the column; but the second-to-last sentence fairly takes your breath away. "What Killen is supposed to have done was not only murder but also an act of political and racial resistance, and that sort of thing has to be stomped on, regardless of how little evidence remains after 41 years." In other words, the columnist admits that Killen's murders were both racial and political; and manages to state that this should have gone in his favour rather than otherwise. Murders which are "acts of political and racial resistance" (such as those being perpetrated as we speak, in Iraq, against the Shia majority, by the Sunni and Baathist minority) ought to be treated, in his view, with more, and not less, leniency, than ordinary criminal acts. That this is the reverse that any legal order, let alone a democratic one, can tolerate, does not even seem to cross the mind - if that is the right term - of this subversive, anti-democratic racist, this enemy of law and order, this theorist of political terrorism.
This sort of thing goes on on the Internet all the time; I know, I've met it, we've all met it. But to find it, not on some ranting, ill-designed little website with twenty readers, but on a respectable board advertising for business with regular organs of the press - the respectable and often respected vehicles of public opinion in whole communities - is genuinely horrifying. I do not know enough of the United States to know whether this sort of thing has always gone on, in provincial newspapers and communities, unnoticed by the conservative or liberal majority; but I have a suspicion, a fear, that it is something that is raising its ugly head now, encouraged by the victory of something that calls itself "conservative" - although, whatever my view of Bush&co., it seems at least clear that it has nothing to do with the love of political violence and racial resistance of this columnist.
P.S.: I have avoided naming the sod in order to deny him publicity. But I assure you that such a man exists and makes his living as a columnist in today's United States of America, a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
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You know, I didn't get it at first. I couldn't figure out whether the guy you quoted was being sarcastic or not. Then this horrible thought "Oh my God, I think he's actually serious!"
I'm still not entirely sure. I find it hard to believe this sort of thing can still get published, as you say, on a respectable board. But then again, I've had a sheltered life.
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