Sorry if this makes the comments thread a bit complex, but I think both Derrick Jackson’s The GOP’s Poerverty Gambit and H.D. S. Greenaway’s Protesting too much on “gulag’ are things people should read today.
I will offer some snippets from each below the fold, along with a couple of comments of my own. Let me simply whet your reading appetite with the final line from Greenaway, who writes primarily for the International Herald Tribune:
I urge all to red both pieces in their entirety, but then, I always do that.
Both pieces deal to some degree with the question of rhetoric — how language is used, the effect it has. The issues MAY seem to be totally unrelated. I would argue that both pieces deal with how language had been distorted by Republicans. This is more than merely a framing question a la Lakoff. These are important issues of our commimtent as a society to justice, and of how we present ourselves at home and abroad.
Let me begin with several snippets from Greenaway. First, the beginning:
”Absurd,” said the president of the United States. ”Reprehensible,” said the secretary of defense. And the vice president said he was ”offended.”
What could be the basis for Amnesty’s indictment? The Amnesty report says: ”The US government has gone to great lengths to restrict the application of the Geneva Conventions and to ‘re-define’ torture. It has sought to justify the use of coercive interrogation techniques and the practice of holding ‘ghost detainees,’ people in unacknowledged incommunicado detention, and the ‘rendering’ or handing over of prisoners to third countries known to practice torture.”
And there you have it. The United States is engaged in a long-term effort to persuade an alienated Muslim world that the United States stands for justice. By allowing systematic torture and indefinite detention to sully our system, we have handed our enemies the most perfect recruiting tool we could devise, for it exposes all our high ideals about democracy to the charges of hypocrisy.
Greenaway is clearly far more in tune with how the U.S. is seen overseas than are most pundits here in the U.S., as anyone who reads foreign press consistently can attest. Not that this administration or anyone in Congress will insist on proper accountability.
Jackson’s focus is somewhat different. Let’s look at the very beginning of his piece to see how language use makes a difference:
Today’s pimps are conservative politicians who run off at the mouth about poverty-stricken nominees of color. Janice Rogers Brown, the conservative and African-American California Supreme Court judge, was finally confirmed this week to the federal appeals court in the District of Columbia. Her confirmation came after a host of Republican senators made her childhood part of her qualifications for the job.
Jackson has taken the denigratory phrase “poverty pimps” often used to criticize those who the Right views as bleeding hearts and turned around and applied it to their use of personal history to “pimp” the chance of Janice Rogers Brown. BTW — this is NOT a new tactic — think back to Pinpoint, Georgia and Clarence Thomas under the presidency of Bush 41. Jackson discusses how this tactic was used for both Clarence Thomas and Alberto Gonzales. First he discusses how the policies supported by these people would make that kind of advancement nigh impossible for others to achieve:
The judge is just the latest black or brown face to betray the ”color-blind” game of the Republicans. They eviscerate affirmative action and job training programs for the masses of African-Americans and Latinos under the guise of ”merit,” then they turn around and stereotype black and brown nominees as being up-from-poverty to obscure their conservative views.
Then, after reminding us about the prior usage, in the cases of Thomas and Gonzales, he notes the effectiveness of the tactic in what we then read in the socaled MSM:
Jackson, who is himself Black, closes his piece with a comparison of the Republican support for Priscilla Owen and janice Rogers Brown:
”Priscilla Owen graduated at the top of her law school class and then earned the number one score on the Texas bar examination . . .”
The support of Brown began:
”Janice Rogers Brown, the daughter of an Alabama sharecropper, attended segregated schools and came of age under the shadow of Jim Crow culture . . .”
The shadowy culture of the Republicans is out in the open again. For Owen, the first words were about merit. For Brown, the first words were about race and poverty. That is Jim Crow in the 21st century.
But it is more than Jim Crow. It seems historically that the only minorities the Republican party is now willing to support and promote are those who disavow the very programs that allowed many minorities, often including themselves, to become successful. We have seen this with Thomas and Gonzales, we can clearly see it in Rogers Brown. The few exceptions, like Colin Powell, who continue to support affirmative action, are restricted to policy areas suc as foreign relations where the issue is viewed as not relvant, so that they can be ignored.
I will be curious to see if this diary generates any interest, and if so, what comments are appended to the thread. Some may discuss both articles, some only one. Clearly I think both pieces are worthy of reflection.
And now, off to my last day of school for the year (the kids left Wednesday — I still have to sign out and then go to a celebratory lunch). Hope these articles are of value to some.
