Chuckie Watch 80: Chuckie makes a joke

Chuckie's been thankin' about the New Year and all.  So he has some homespun advice for himself.  You know, be a better husband and father, be better at pretty much everything he does, blah, blah: Thoughts on the New Year 12/26/04.

I want to have the courage to stand against what I think is wrong and for what I think is right, no matter if my beliefs are not popular.

No surprises there.  Chuckie does have a lot of opinions that are unpopular, though you would think a wannabe guru of Patriotic Correctness would claim to be mainstream.  But it's part of the preferred posture of dogmatic conservatives to see themselves as constantly persecuted by the ever-present liberal establishment.  Even having a Republican Party led by the likes of Shrub Bush and Tom DeLay controlling all three branches of the national government with a high level of party discipline doesn't seem to diminish their sense of persecution.

But, to prove he has a sense of humor, Chuckie came up with this New Year's wish for himself:

I want to be sensitive to the needs of the poor, sympathetic to the plight of the downtrodden and an enemy of injustice in whatever form it may take.

Soon, I have no doubt, Chuckie will be telling us how Social Security oppresses the poor and is unjust to, I don't know, somebody or other.

In theory, this could mean that Chuckie will start contributing to defense funds for people denied proper representation or sentenced to the death penalty.  But I'm pretty sure that won't be happening.  Let's look back at one of Chuckie's older pronouncements, under his otherwise undated "pre-2000" section: Smoke and Mirrors.  Chuckie hadn't figgered out how to make paragraphs back then.  So the sentences are just strung together.  Or maybe he was trying to go for a Faulkner effect.  But I'm also pretty sure that Chuckie don't read much Faulkner most of the time.

What kind of animal could ride into a neighborhood and start indiscriminately shooting? I guess the same kind who pulled the triggers in Littleton and strangled the life out of little Jon Benet Ramsey. In mybook if people want to act like animals then they should be treated like animals. It’s time to take the gloves off. I’m talking about raids, search and seizure, mandatory life prison terms, and letting our police forces shoot back at any time they feel threatened. This situation has escalated into a war and should be treated as such.

Back in those days, you remember we had a really sinful president who had a half-baked affair!  Those were really grim days, when the president's conduct was undermining the moral fiber of the nation and leading to random shootings and child murders and stuff.  Today, we have a real Christian preznit who starts an illegal war and sets up torture chambers across the globe, showing troubled young folks here at home what respecting the law looks like.

This kind of Chuckie rant, bubbling as it is with Christian love, is actually fairly typical of people wanting to promote violence at hatred.  Serbs and Croats in the Balkans, Sunnis and Shiites in Iraq, Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda, they nurture themselves on stories about the cruel horrors inflicted on them by the Other Side, the Evil People.  Some of the stories are even true.

Generations of white Southerners entertained themselves with these tales about bloody-minded, over-sexed Negroes who committed endless atrocities against pure white folks, especially the helpless womenfolk.  The purpose of these stories was the same as their counterparts everywhere, to demonize the enemy group and justify cruely and violence against them.  Look at what Chuckie says there about a vaguely-defined group of criminals (he gets a bit more specific about who they are later).  He says we should treat Them "like animals", we should "take the gloves off" with Them, we should let "our police forces" just kill Them any time the cops claim to "feel threatened", we should treat Them like we're at war.

Let's see, what would that look like?  Oh, yeah, we know exactly what it looks like.  The Abu Ghuraib photos are some of the most famous images in the news in 2004.

Since Chuckie starts off worrying about an incident in which (according to his account, he doesn't give a source or specifics), "spraying about forty rounds of ammunition into a group of people who were minding their own business."  I wonder how Chuckie feels about bans on automatic weapons, or gun licensing, or waiting periods on gun purchases?

When will this nation ever get back to the reality of personal responsibility? For over thirty years we have been coddling a portion of the public under the guise of letting them catch up with the rest of society. We have overlooked theirfaults and blamed the lion’s share of their short comings on environment and prejudice.

Now, let's see.  Who could Chuckie have in mind here?  Chuckie's a little vague here.  But he seems to think it's clear who he has in mind, and ole Chuckie's just a tad defensive about it:

And I don’t want to hear from some wet behind the ears bleeding heart accusing me of being a racist. I lived through the Jim Crow days of separate and unequal societies, I know what prejudice is and thanks to God I got over it, completely over it, thank you very much. So don’t point your self righteous finger in my direction. If you really want to know the truth dear liberal, you are the true racist, with your condescending attitudes and belief that anything will go away if you just throw enough money at it.

Chcukie is 68 now.  This is the language he and virtually every other white person of his age would have learned or at least heard endless times growing up in the South.  This reminds me of what Simon Wiesenthal once said about the Austrian Jörg Haider, whose parents had both been dedicated Nazis during the Third Reich (quoting from memory here):  "Die Sprache von Zuhause, die ist geblieben" - the talk he heard at home has stayed with him.

"Jim Crow," of course, refers to the segregation laws that were in effect from the 1890s to the 1960s.  The last I heard, no one seemed to be really sure where that particular name originated, but it was widely used as a shorthand for segregation.

Chuckie's little burst of outrage here is a pretty good example of good-ole-white-boy racism in action.  He's defensive, blustering and self-rigteous in attitude.  He denies any kind of prejudice, which was actually common for even very bigoted white folks in the South during the Jim Crow days.  Nothing new there.  The talk usually went something like, "Ah'm not prejudiced.  Ah support segregation because it's good for the nigras."

It's also typical these days for defensive and bigoted white Southerners to say vaguely that "a lot of bad things happened" or that "segregation" or "Jim Crow" was bad, but we've put all that behind us now, and us white folks get along just fine with the blacks now, or some such thing. (By the way, it's also typical of bigots to seize on a phrase like "defensive and bigoted white Southerners" and say that the person using it is "stereotyping all Southerners."  This would only be true for someone who was such a complete moron, or such a generous-minded Yankee,  that they couldn't distinguish between a bigot and a normal person.)

That's also straight out of the segregation-era script.  Everyone could find some other whites to disapprove of their racial attitudes.  Families that liked to think of themselves as middle-class, for instance, stressed that one shouldn't say "nigger," whereas working-class whites may not have been so inhibited.  So things like this were taken to be evidence of good will toward "the nigras" (that was considered polite, "Negroes" was a bit formal), even by people who could swallow segregation and even defend it self-righteously against the Yankee liberals and their "condescending attitudes", as ole Chuckie says.

I've seen quite a bit of comment lately about what's become a favorite conservative theme, that liberals are supposedly affluent snobs who look down on ordinary people, while wealthy "free market" conservatives who oppose unions, the minimum wage and Social Security as just regular folks.  In American politics, this kind of thing got it's start with William Henry Harrison's presidential campaign of 1840 ("Tippecanoe and Tyler too"), where the representatives of entrenched wealth pretended they were as down-home as any Jacksonian Democrat.  I don't want to underestimate it.  But it strikes me that these days, it's the kind of thing that mainly fools those who want to be fooled.

Oh, and the Liberals are the "real" racists, Chuckie says.  Also boilerplate segregation talk.  Those uppity nigras who wanted to vote and be treated like American citizens were racists, and them there race traitors and outside agitators were promoting racism.  If any good Southern white folks were racist, it's because the blacks are causing it.  No, the Serbs don't hate the Croats, it's the Croats who cause all the problems!  (Insert your favorite ethnic conflicts and repeat indefinitely.)

And there's that idea of being persecuted by the liberal conspiracy again.  The snobby, out-of-touch, racist liberal conspiracy.  This persecution complex is by no means the exclusive preserve of white Southererns who grew up during segregation.  But they were particularly fond of that particular posture.  And if the Serbs are the Croats can whine any more intensely than some old unreconstructed Mississippi segregationist, I hope I never get to hear any of it.  Conservatives accuse liberals and various ethnic advocacy groups of practicing the politics of vicitimization.  But nobody in the country has ever indluged in that particular brand of politics more than Southern segregationists.

Oh America, when will you wake up and smell the carnage?

Given Chuckie's rants the past couple of years, Iraq is way too far away for Chuckie to catch any scents from there.