The Fear That Dare Not Speak Its Name

I have been away from this keyboard for awhile because many things have been happening. I fell in love. I moved to North Carolina. I searched (and search) for work. I am settling into a new home. I am making new friends. And I am consuming voluminous amounts of political information as the election campaigns reach the final stretch run. I have decided it is time to put all those things on hold, because something terrifying is happening. And I have a specific audience in mind as I write.

This is for my aunt, a pro-choice Democrat who has unspecified fears about voting for a black man with a funny name. This is for my sister, a born-again Republican who seems to have forgotten everything my father worked for and everything she learned in her youth in a union household. This is for Will and for Scott, two men who I love like brothers, whose minds I don't expect to change, but who I desperately want to understand my fear. It's for my mother, who is out of excuses now that Hillary Clinton is out of the race. And it is for anyone else within earshot of my keyboard who still does not select health care, our troops, or the economy as the most important issue facing our country, and the things that should be most talked about in the next four weeks.

I have been paying attention to politics and government ever since I have had a memory. And I have seen a lot in three decades.

My bolonga has a first name,
It's J-I-M-M-Y.
My bologna has a second name,
It's C-A-R-T-E-R
I love to eat it every day,
and if you ask me, why, I'll say,
That Jimmy Carter has a way
of screwing up the U-S-A.

I hadn't quite figured out in first grade who Jimmy Carter was, or why I was supposed to dislike (or eat) him. But I was paying attention. I remember the Iran hostage crisis. I remember thinking then, as a kid of barely seven years, how curious it was that the hostages were released on the same day as we got a new president. I saw George Wallace speak from the back of a flatbed truck at Parkway City Mall as he campaigned for his last term as Alabama governor. I made the cover of my middle school yearbook, wearing a union t-shirt and borrowed glasses as I passionately debated in favor of the underdog Mondale-Ferraro ticket. I was in the Tuscaloosa County Democratic Party headquarters in 1992, deathly sick with the flu, to see Bill Clinton elected president.

I have also seen some things I never would have believed could happen. The Florida recount in 2000. The Sophie's choice election in Louisiana between David Duke and Edwin Edwards. Howell Heflin, Anita Hill, and Clarence Thomas. The first Alabama Republican governor since the Civil War. The impeachment of a president. The failure to impeach another. Terrorism in Oklahoma City, and Atlanta, and New York City. The destruction of two space shuttles. An African-American and a female presidential candidate, both with legitimate chances of victory.

In other words, I have been watching politics, eating and living politics, participating in politics all my life. Yet nothing - nothing - has filled me with dread any more than what I have witnessed in the last two weeks.

Barack Obama began receiving protection from the Secret Service in May 2007, the earliest that any presidential candidate had ever received protection since it was first offered after the assassination of Robert Kennedy in 1968. One year later, Hillary Clinton was chided by some for an oblique reference to Obama and Kennedy's assassination. And ever since Obama began his quest for the presidency, these fears have been referenced in hushed tones and muted colors (with an occasional right-wing outburst).

However, it has been considered poor form to talk about such things aloud, for multiple reasons: class; dignity; hoping that if we don't think about it, it won't happen; hoping that if we don't talk about it; others won't think of it. And all of those emotions and fears applied merely to the default state of America - how far we have come since the civil rights movement, and how far we have left to go. All of those thoughts about the future took into account the actual amount of racism and hatred left in our country on an average day. The last ten days have not been average.

• Before and after the second presidential debate, McCain attacked Obama over his association with William Ayers. Yet McCain did not have the courage to say anything about it directly to Obama in Nashville. (By the way, how many of you assumed Ayers was black? He's not.)
• Virtually all of McCain's television ads last week were attacks on Obama; Obama's attack ads were only one third of his total.
• In August, Sarah Palin sat in her church last month while a speaker said that terrorist attacks on Israel were "God's judgment of unbelief" on Jews who had not converted to Christianity. Palin apparently did not respond and did not walk out.
• Angry that his voter registration card was late, a Louisiana man threatened to bring his shotgun to the registrar's office to get it because he had to be sure to cast his ballot and "keep the nigger out of office."
• On Saturday, Sarah Palin accused Barack Obama of "palling around with terrorists" for having served on a non-profit board with William Ayers.
• On Monday, a supporter at a Palin rally shouted "Kill him!" at a reference to Obama. Palin did not respond.
• On Monday, a supporter at a McCain rally responded to McCain's rhetorical, "Who is Barack Obama?" by shouting "terrorist". McCain did not respond.
• On Tuesday, after Palin criticized Obama remarks on Afghanistan, a supporter shouted "treason!". Palin did not respond.
• On Wednesday at a rally in Allentown, Pennsylvania, a supporter shouted "off with his head!" McCain did not respond.
• At a rally today (video), McCain allows a voter to rant about Obama, calling him a "hooligan"; McCain concludes by agreeing with the man.

This week in Strongsville, Ohio, McCain and Palin supporters demonstrated the depth of their ignorance of the facts about Barack Obama. [Courtesy bloggerinterrupted]

At the same rally,

[A] family who believes Barack Obama is a terrorist. They brought an Obama doll, to show he’s a “puppet”, and when asked why, their small child says “you need gloves to touch him”.

Even Fox News is on the case.

On the contrary, watch this video of Barack Obama speaking about John McCain in Montana in August 2008(courtesy Associated Press):

The reason that I offer only one counter example is simple. This video is typical of Obama's approach to his opponent. He speaks of his opponent with dignity while he emphasizes the differences between the two of them. (It is often forgotten by most that criticizing an opponent's positions or highlighting differences is not attacking him.) And among the thousands of video clips floating in the intertubes, you will be hard pressed to find a clip of Obama allowing his supporters to boo, jeer, or make incendiary comments against John McCain. In many situations, he implores his supporters to show more respect. And it has become such a part of his stumping that audiences seldom jeer because they know it is inappropriate and not in keeping with the dignified campaign Obama is trying to run.

Countless supporters of Barack Obama fear for his safety because of extant racism and hatred in our society, because of Matthew Shepard, because of Timothy McVeigh, because it takes only one crazy person. Countless more supporters of Obama fear for his safety because they remember John Kennedy, and Robert Kennedy, and Harvey Milk, and Derwin Brown. And even more know the story of Henry II and Thomas Becket. It is a fear so great that we even fear the fear itself. But those fears exist in every day America.

In the environment that has enveloped the slash-and-burn tactics of John McCain and Sarah Palin just in the last two weeks, these fears are becoming too great to bear. I will grant that it is acceptable to have your own criteria for assessing a candidate, including who that candidate may associate with. And I would be remiss if I did not note that it seems ironic to trust the man intimately involved with the last great financial scandal, the Keating Five, with the current financial scandal.

However, inciting your supporters to hate speech and fighting words, or failing to call them on it, is a viciousness and a baseness that I have never seen in my lifetime, and it frightens me. These episodes above are not isolated; they are becoming typical of a McCain-Palin rally. Toss in the strained economic situation that many Americans find themselves in, and you have a fire that is ready to explode in violence.

It is irresponsible to rule through fear or to campaign through fear. If you still support McCain and Palin, I don't want you to ask them to stop attacking Obama. But I do expect you to speak out against hatred, violence, threats, and intemperance in their names. One of the worst tragedies our nation could face in these horribly turbulent times would be the assassination of a political leader.