Extremist Folly of the Week #2: Healthcare Squabbles
Looking for proof that the U.S. desperately needs to put a third (i.e., moderate) party in power? Look no further than the maddening trench warfare in Congress over healthcare reform.
Republicans are clinging stubbornly to the “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” school of reasoning, which conveniently omits the inconvenient truth that contemporary healthcare is entirely unaffordable for anyone without insurance… and nearly as unaffordable for anyone who has to PAY for insurance.
Meanwhile, the Obamacrats have been promoting the creation of a totally overhauled, top-heavy, government-run medical establishment: a grotesque exercise in excess that would gum up the vital pipeline of medical care and impose unacceptable restrictions on our choice of physicians and treatments. Naturally, their proposals are accompanied by billowing clouds of paper (1000-plus pages of mostly indecipherable verbiage that few lawmakers have actually read) and a general haziness of focus probably designed to conceal the socialistic nature of their grand plan.
The New Moderate feels obligated to ask why nobody on either side of the aisle has proposed a simple, federally-subsidized health INSURANCE program for people who aren’t already covered by their companies. Well, I guess I just answered my own question: it would be too simple. Imagine: no vast government-run medical bureaucracy… no disastrous medical expenses for anyone foolish enough to get seriously ill. Just a simple extension of medical insurance at a nominal cost to everyone who needs it. End of story… if the moderates were in charge.
Beware of Angry White People
The pressure has been building for decades now, slowly but inexorably. The pent-up gases, the coiled springs, whatever metaphor you’d like to use… that which is suppressed must eventually find expression. Now and then, that expression will take the form of an explosion. That’s what concerns me.
White people are getting angrier. Until recently they haven’t felt free to express their anger. They had been inhibited and intimidated by potential accusations of racism, and nobody wanted to be branded with that scarlet label. But I think we’re starting to see some ominous cracks in the dam (to use yet another obvious but not altogether inappropriate metaphor).
Think I’m sounding a premature alarm? Just look around. Right now our most popular media pundits are Angry White People: veteran radio bloviator Rush Limbaugh, madcap comedian-alarmist Glenn Beck, Harvard-educated anti-immigration populist Lou Dobbs, perennially outraged patriot Sean Hannity, and of course that “fair and balanced” oracle of the evening, Bill O’Reilly. Even more to the point, their audiences are Angry White People.
The loopy anti-Obama “Birther” movement is composed almost entirely of Angry White People. So was the constituency for that disarmingly adorable Alaskan upstart, former Gov. Sarah Palin. When African American eminento Henry Louis Gates, Jr., irrationally accused working-class Cambridge cop James Crowley of racism, you could feel the collective blood pressure of Angry White People soar into imminent-stroke territory.
I think Angry White People are at least partly justified in their Anger. Since the 1960s they’ve found themselves at the butt-end of virtually every argument about race. They’ve been castigated as overprivileged, insensitive oppressors. They’ve been ridiculed for their lack of cool and their inability to boogie. They’ve seen inner-city kids get the red-carpet treatment at Yale while their own progeny had to settle for Brickville State. They’ve watched as aggrieved minorities used the race card to defend O.J. Simpson and silence the opposition — while still managing to portray themselves as victims. And now, for the first time, a critical mass of Angry White People would appear to be saying “Enough.”
A few days ago I stumbled across an e-mail from the Sierra Club. Unlike most such e-mails, I actually took the time to read this one. Maybe it was because the headline proclaimed, “Yep, We’re Too White.”
The headline amused me at first. Turns out that the Sierra Club’s new Asian American president, Allison Chin, proudly affirmed her commitment to greater “diversity” within the century-old environmental organization. Well, hey, why not? This is 2009. Obama’s in the White House. I can’t expect the Sierra Club to consist entirely of brie-eating, NPR-listening white liberals in Birkenstocks, even if I’ve grown weary of our national tendency to sort everyone by racial affinity.
Then I clicked on the “Comments” link. Whoosh! Talk about explosions! Angry White Sierra Clubbers had festooned the message board with Angry White Invective, of which I’ll provide just a sampling:
“Well, pardon me for being white – would you like me to leave so you can have more diversity?”
“Enough of this crap already! Remove me from your records please! I am so sick of all this garbage!”
“You make being white sound like a bad thing.”
“Is there a place I can go to apologize for my skin color?”
“Get a grip you lefty bigoted racist.”
“Please, I am sick and tired of hearing about diversity.”
“I may have to help out your demographics by taking my despicable ‘whiteness’ elsewhere.”
“Will this catering to those who won’t do for themselves never end?”
“What a bunch of politically correct bull—t! We terrible white people are guilty only of caring and sharing more than other races do.”
I’d say it was the headline that triggered their wrath. But the wrath had been a long time building, and now here it was, out in the open for everyone to gawk at, like the spectacle of an overheated mom spanking her four-year-old in a shopping mall — among a group of predominantly enlightened and “progressive” white people, no less. These weren’t your classic wild-eyed, white-hooded American racists. They seemed to be virtuous, long-suffering citizens of good repute who had simply reached the limit of their tolerance.
This seismic shift in white sentiment is both overdue and dangerous. It’s overdue because white people should have been free to voice their resentments long ago. They weren’t. They kept a tight lid on their wayward thoughts and expected them to dissipate eventually. They didn’t.
The emergence of white wrath is dangerous because the Internet Age has, for better or worse, liberated us from our inhibitions over expressing unsanctified ideas. We can hide behind fictitious screen names and rant from the safety of our laptops. We can sway others of our ilk who might have been repressing their rage for half a lifetime. Before long, that rage could spread through the populace like some sinister influenza virus. This is precisely how ugly mass movements arise.
So do we try to clamp the lid back on, or do we let the poisons out? The New Moderate thinks we could use a cultural safety valve: enough freedom to express and release resentments as those resentments register in our minds, so they won’t explode in the future. I’m glad we’re finally talking more freely about race from the white perspective. For too long, only the sentiments of Angry Black People seemed to matter. But we have to make sure that Angry White People don’t become Angry White Bigots.
President Obama “gets” it, I think. In his remarkable address at the National Consititution Center in Philadelphia a year ago, he acknowledged the frustrations of white people who continually find themselves at the receiving endof racial animosities. If Obama can maintain that kind of equipoise at this evening’s ballyhooed White House “teachable moment” with Prof. Gates and Sgt. Crowley, he’ll be doing his part to defuse white anger. It’s absolutely essential that Gates isn’t the only one permitted to do the “teaching” tonight.
From now on, communications on race in America must be a two-way street. Otherwise, those Angry White People could find themselves even angrier.
Extremist Folly of the Week #1: the “Birthers”
Yep, those wifty right-wing anti-Obama beanpods have earned themselves our first-ever Extremist Folly of the Week Award. (Lefties can breathe a sigh of relief for now.)
Who are the Birthers, you ask? Just a surprisingly resilient grassroots cult whose members insist that Mr. Barack H. Obama entered this world on foreign (i.e, Un-American) soil. So what, you ask? Well, if you’ve ever opened a civics textbook, you know that the U.S. Constitution has restricted the presidency to native-born Americans since its inception in 1787.
But hasn’t Obama furnished a copy of his birth certificate, attesting to the fact that he was lawfully born in the State of Hawaii back in A.D. 1961? He certainly has. But that trifling piece of evidence hasn’t stopped the Birthers from pressing their claim.
No national politician of any consequence has taken them seriously. We moderates shouldn’t, either. And yet…
I’ve learned that we should never underestimate the strange and wild power of the fanatical fringes, left or right. No matter that their beliefs might remind us of those deluded souls who claim to see the Virgin Mary’s profile on a slice of toast. At bottom it’s all a matter of faith, beyond disputing.
An instructive example: I’ve never been to India. I’ve heard that the Taj Mahal is located there, but I’ve had no way to verify that information personally. (I mean, how do I know it’s not in Cleveland? I’ve never been there, either.) If I made the journey to India myself, I honestly believe I’d stumble across the Taj Mahal. But until then, I have to take it on faith.
I’ve never seen Obama’s birth certificate, either. Unlike the Birthers, I’m taking it on faith that the document attests to his lawful birth on U.S. territory. Unlike me, the Birthers take it on faith that he’s a foreigner. Nothing will convince them otherwise, so the Birther movement persists.
A handful of mostly local politicoes have fanned the flames by addressing Birther rallies and letting their kooky constituents cry out for blood. Should we be concerned? I am. I’m concerned about the obsessiveness of their quest. I’m concerned that they really want Obama removed from office, by hook or by bullet. They don’t even seem to care that Joe Biden would take his place.
Obama Makes Nice with Cambridge Cop
President Obama and Cambridge, Mass., police officer James Crowley have buried the hatchet — thankfully, not in each other’s skulls. In a special press briefing today, Obama announced that he had spoken to Sgt. Crowley by phone and made peace with the embattled cop.
Without going as far as to apologize for saying that Cambridge police “acted stupidly” in arresting Harvard eminento Henry Louis Gates, Jr., President Obama manfully ‘fessed up to escalating the brouhaha over Gates’s arrest.
“Because this has been ratcheting up and I obviously helped to contribute to ratcheting it up,” Obama admitted to the press, “I wanted to make clear in my choice of words I think I unfortunately gave an impression that I was maligning the Cambridge Police Department or Sgt. Crowley specifically. And I could have calibrated those words differently And I told this to Sgt. Crowley.”
This could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship. In their phone conversation, Sgt. Crowley suggested that Obama invite him and Prof. Gates to the White House to share a few beers. Obama relayed the invitation to Gates, though we weren’t privy to the aggrieved scholar’s response, assuming it was fit to print.
It’s unlikely that the three pals will end up swaying side-by-side and singing “Kumbaya,” but I have to admit that the talk of a reconciliation gladdens my heart. Unlike a lot of politicians (his predecessor, in particular), Obama is sufficiently secure, reasonable and generous to admit mistakes and change course when a change is warranted.
No doubt he’ll be catching flack from both sides now: from the lefties who will chide him for knuckling under to popular sentiment… and from the right-wingers who probably suspect that his contrition today was a crass act of damage control.
Obama will survive the ordeal. Getting slammed from both sides is, for better or worse, the mark of an independent mind. We moderates can feel his pain, and this moderate applauds him for having the courage to think like one of us.
Obama Sides with “Skip” Gates, Disses Cops
I expected better from the wise and beneficent Wizard of the White House. In his televised press conference yesterday, President Obama tried to navigate cleanly down the middle of the Gates controversy. He managed to remain reasonably neutral for nearly a full minute. He even cracked a funny and disarming joke about what might happen if he found himself locked out of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
But then his internal Racial Solidarity Meter must have started clicking wildly, because he came out and castigated those krazy Kambridge Kops for acting “stupidly.” That seemed like a needlessly harsh presidential rebuke to police officers who dutifully rushed to the scene of a break-in. Obama could have said they overreacted. He might have mentioned that Professor Gates overreacted, too. That would have been the fair and balanced approach, because both parties did overreact.
But no, Obama had to insist that “the Cambridge police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home.” Of course, it might have helped if Gates had furnished the cops with his ID when asked for it, instead of spouting bitter invective about the treatment of black men in America.
It might also have helped if the irate scholar had quit yelling for Sgt. James Crowley’s badge number, skipped the asinine references to Crowley’s “mama,” and stopped short of threatening him with repercussions. If I were a cop, I’d bristle if anyone told me, as Gates apparently told Sgt. Crowley, “You don’t know who you’re messing with!”
In the end, Obama simply closed ranks with an esteemed member of the tribe, carefully omitting any reference to the surly and uncooperative behavior of the venerable Harvard sage. In the Obama version of the story, Gates’s arrest was symptomatic of “a long history in this country of African Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately.” Cue the Minority Grievance music.
I should mention that Obama prefaced his remarks with a disclaimer: “Skip Gates is a friend, so I may be a little biased here.” (Note to the unwary: Whenever commentators refer to Henry Louis Gates, Jr., as “Skip,” you quickly know whose side of the story they’ll be favoring.)
At least Obama was honest about his bias. But his honesty managed to lose itself in the miasma of selective recall that followed.
I’ve seriously begun to wonder if left-leaning African Americans — even the most brilliant of them — are capable of opining objectively on any race-related issue. Justifiably or not, they appear to view everything through the dark lens of their people’s sad history. If I’ve learned anything from the Gates case, it’s that legitimate grievances from the past still have the power to distort perceptions in the present.
Professor Gates: Racial Profiling Victim?
Here we go again: just two weeks after the Great Philadelphia Swim Club Fiasco, another racially tinged incident pops up in the headlines. And once again we’re looking at a minor media riot, rife with accusations of white racism.
Here’s the story. Distinguished African American Harvard professor and alpha-intellectual Henry Louis Gates, Jr., was arrested by police in Cambridge, Mass., after breaking into his own home. Turns out the door was jammed, so Gates and his driver had to force it open. An eyewitness in the famously progressive college town promptly called the police and reported that “two black males with backpacks” were trying to “force entry” into the well-kept two-story house. Uh-oh.
By the time the police arrived, Gates was already inside. The investigating officer announced that he was responding to a report of a break-in and asked him for ID. Whereupon the irate scholar retorted: “Why, because I’m a black man in America?” and refused to step outside. Even when Gates flashed his driver’s license and Harvard ID, the policeman continued to question him. At this point Gates grew more irate.
“Gates continued to yell at me, accusing me of racial bias and continued to tell me that I had not heard the last of him,” the officer wrote. Gates repeatedly asked for the name and badge number of the cop, then followed him outside.
You probably know how it ended: Prof. Gates was arrested on a disorderly conduct charge, for what the police termed “loud and tumultuous behavior.” They dragged him down to the precinct, took the obligatory mug shots and ordered him to face arraignment on August 26. Cambridge police have subsequently dropped the charges, but the story continues to swirl and pick up debris like a mid-sized tornado.
Public opinion is split down the middle, of course, with the left crying racism and the right answering “no big deal.” Rev. Sharpton has already stepped into the fray, and we know that means trouble.
Was Prof. Gates a victim of racial profiling, or were the police simply doing their duty? Naturally, the answer lies somewhere in the lonely middle ground that most ideologues are too biased (or stubborn, or lazy) to explore. Let me explain.
If I see two men attempting to break into a house, it doesn’t matter whether they’re black, white, or Japanese sumo wrestlers: I might be inclined to tip off the police as a precaution. Unlike the Cambridge tipster (who I suspect is an otherwise enlightened, educated liberal, since Cambridge is populated almost entirely by enlightened, educated liberals), I probably wouldn’t have cited the race of the men breaking down the door unless the police asked me directly. The genetic background of the intruders should be a non-issue; the real issue is what’s happening to the door — and the intentions of the men forcing it open. Score one for the Gates team.
On the other hand, if police arrived at my broken-down door and simply stated that they were responding to reports of a forced entry, I probably wouldn’t have flipped them the race card as my first move. Granted, Gates might have been fatigued from his long journey home, and as an African American he was undoubtedly more sensitive than most to the racial nuances of the incident. But a brilliant man should be a little wiser. Score one for the police.
Once Gates flashed his ID, the police should have responded by saying, “All right, we were just making sure.” Then they should have excused themselves politely and left the premises. Instead, they kept questioning Prof. Gates. (All they had to do was compare the address on the ID with the address they were visiting; it doesn’t take a Harvard degree to figure that out.) In short, I would have been annoyed with the police, too. Score: Gates 2, Police 1.
Convinced that he was being singled out on the basis of race, Prof. Gates pressed the issue and proceeded to make an ass 0f himself. By asking for the officer’s ID, threatening repercussions, and storming outside the house in hot pursuit, Gates had to know that he was upping the ante. Sure, he was tired and ticked off, but so are a lot of folks who don’t mouth off to the cops. No excuse. Score: Gates 2, Police 2.
Did Gates deserve to be hauled down to the police station and put through the wringer like a common thug? Hard to say: we have no videotape of the final moments before his arrest. Did the arresting officer feel threatened by the slightly built 58-year-old scholar? Should the police have given him a free pass because he was a distinguished professor at Harvard? Would Gates have sassed a black cop who asked him to produce ID? Would a white Prof. Gates have been arrested? Or would police have been more likely to arrest a white Prof. Gates, given the hair-trigger racial sensitivities of our culture? Anything we add here would amount to sheer speculation… and so the score remains knotted at 2-2.
I can understand the resentment black Americans feel over racial profiling. I’m just not convinced the Gates case was a classic example. It’s not as if police stopped him simply for hanging out in a privileged, mostly white enclave like Cambridge. Even Gates’s sympathizers have to admit that breaking down a door looks faintly incriminating.
The eminent professor should have understood that much. He could have nipped the incident in the bud by promptly producing his ID; instead, his first response was to spout inflammatory racial invective. The police, for their part, could have calmed the agitated professor by walking away once they ascertained that their suspect was, indeed, the rightful occupant of the house. They didn’t, for reasons known only to them.
I’d hate to think that Gates — a reasonable liberal literary scholar with genuine respect for European as well as African cultural traditions — will be radicalized by his close encounter with the Cambridge police. I’d hate to think that other moderate-to-liberal blacks might become radicalized, too. But simple misunderstandings can lead to acrimony, especially given the history of race in America.
I think the wisest and most profound statement on race relations was uttered by a black man with no pretensions to scholarly distinction. His name was Rodney King, and his heartfelt plea still rings true, even in the Age of Obama: “Can’t we all just get along?”
Nearly everyone in the Western Hemisphere knows the story by now, but let me summarize it for those who might have been vacationing, comatose or preoccupied with the Great Recession for the past week.
In Huntingdon Valley, Pa., a middle-class suburb just beyond the Philadelphia city limits, 65 mostly black and Hispanic day-campers descended upon the Valley Swim Club and plunged into the welcoming turquoise waters of the club’s pool.
The club members, it turned out, weren’t quite as welcoming. Several concerned parents promptly yanked their offspring out of the water. Snide comments were overheard; a few club members wondered aloud what “all those black kids” were doing in their pool.
Club president John Duesler quickly canceled his organization’s contract with the day camp, citing safety issues: namely, overcrowding and an insufficient number of lifeguards. Fair enough. Then Mr. Duesler proceeded to utter the lamentable word-fart heard ’round the world: “There was concern that a lot of kids would change the complexion … and the atmosphere of the club…”
Poor Duesler. By all accounts a decent and unprejudiced man, he’s been inundated with thousands of hate messages since he opened his jaws and inserted his foot. (Joe Biden can probably feel his pain.) The director of the day camp, Alethea Wright, is threatening to sue, claiming that her campers were “permanently scarred” by the incident. The contrite club board offered to renew the contract, whereupon Ms. Wright essentially told them, “Thanks but no thanks.”
So are we looking at an ugly vestige of Jim Crow, alive and well in Obama’s “post-racial” America? Millions of inquiring minds seem to think so. I think the answer is a little more complicated.
First, let me confess that I belong to a swim club. A Philadelphia swim club. I go there to cool off on a sultry afternoon before dinner, unwind and swim half a dozen leisurely laps to placate my middle-aged circulatory system.
Let me also confess that if I were swimming my laps and suddenly saw 65 exuberant grade-school kids leap into the pool, I’d be alarmed. I’d be alarmed even if they were certifiably Nordic in appearance. No swimmer wants to deal with the prospect of colliding willy-nilly with young bodies thrashing about in the water. I’ve collided with kids when there were no more than a dozen of them in the pool. Swimming my laps in the presence of sixty-five kids, I’d have no choice but to collide with them.
I’m sure the members of the Valley Club experienced a similar wave of alarm when they saw the horde of day-campers engulf their pool. But here’s the million-dollar question: were they a little more alarmed because that horde happened to be mostly black? I’d be surprised if the answer was no.
Many of us middle-class burghers, having been conditioned to believe that black neighborhoods are sinkholes of squalor and violence, instinctively put up our guard when we encounter copious numbers of African Americans. It’s an unfortunate response, and a primitive one, but it’s an authentic human response just the same. For that matter, I suspect that a swarm of 65 white kids might touch off a racial spark in the unlikely event that they converged on a mostly black swimming pool. We’re still not totally at ease with race, even in the Age of Obama.
Did the Valley Swim Club — and the unfortunate Mr. Duesler — deserve all the acrimony, the torrent of nasty publicity, the threat of lawsuits? Probably not. Their biggest mistake was agreeing to host the day-campers in the first place. They simply didn’t think about the consequences of adding 65 vigorous young bodies to their pool. Their second biggest mistake was failing to inform their members about the arrangement. If I’m paying to belong to a pool, I want to be able to swim in it. Not just hop around in the water, dodging bodies.
But wasn’t the Valley Club engaging in blatant racism, you ask? How can a self-styled moderate defend a recreational facility that expelled black kids from its grounds? Here’s why: the Valley Club also canceled its contracts with two other day-camps. (We didn’t hear about this part of the story in the worldwide news coverage.) Those two day-camps happened to be overwhelmingly white.
So no, I don’t think the Valley Club and its board should be dragged through the legal system and subjected to a kind of institutional sensitivity training. But I’m still left feeling a little uneasy about the whole overblown incident. I’m uneasy about the way some of the club members reacted to the black kids in their midst. I’m uneasy about Ms. Wright’s eagerness to sue the club, and about her certainty that the kids were “permanently” scarred. (How does she know the scarring is permanent unless she can ask them fifty years from now?)
Still, I feel sorry for all those young day-campers who found themselves abruptly expelled from paradise. I hope they don’t think of their expulsion as a racial slight, but I’m afraid it’s already too late.
I guess it troubles me that race is still such a hot-button issue in America, all these many decades after the civil rights breakthroughs of the 1960s. Sometimes I wonder if the only permanent solution is to intermarry, generation after generation, until we’ve created a nation of Obamas. We could do worse.
Independents Day!
That’s right: Independents Day. Centrists and other unaligned, unaffiliated, undogmatic thinkers can now whoop it up and honk their noisemakers like certified extremists. Because today marks the official re-launch of The New Moderate in its new home.
Why the hoopla over a lateral move from Blogger to WordPress? Because now The New Moderate is a full-fledged, multi-page web site. Yes, you can still read our entertaining and provocative three-way debates on The Issues (“Righty,” “Lefty” and The New Moderate each have their say). But now you can stroll through our New Moderate Hall of Fame (yep, we enshrined Nixon) and chuckle at our Hit List (enemies to the right and left of us!). I’ll also be contributing regular blog posts that should stir the passions of every thinking moderate. (Be sure to look for my Extremist Outrage of the Week.)
Just as important, you can read about our vital mission as moderates, holding down the fort of reason while rabid extremists battle it out all around us. I’ve even supplied us with a seven-step action plan for taking over the world! (Well, more or less.)
Today marks the new beginning of our quiet moderate revolution — a long-needed movement that will forever erase the image of moderates as timid, noncommittal nonthinkers who shy away from controversy. Jump into the fray with your own comments… trade opinions with other independent thinkers… and help make the world safe for commonsense ideas that serve the common good.
Ideologies are for people who can’t think for themselves. We can do better.
Stay centered,
Rick Bayan, Founder & Editor
Under Construction
Greetings, all you embattled moderates! I’m creating a more elaborate site here to replace my current New Moderate blog (newmoderate.blogspot.com). Hope to be up and running by the beginning of August. Until then, keep the faith and stay centered!
Rick Bayan
THE NEW MODERATE 