- The past is never dead. It's not even past. - William
Faulkner
-
- I.
- Watertown, Tennessee - The 20th century was well into
its seventh decade, but he still came to the back door every time he needed
to see "Mister Edsel" about some business or other. No amount
of cajoling would induce him to knock on the front door. Finally one day,
in exasperation, my father told him: "Jim, if you don't come around
to the front next time, I'm not going to talk to you. This just won't do."
Jim shook his head, perplexed; it seemed a concept too radical to grasp
or accept: knocking on a white man's front door.
-
- The past lives longer in the South, as Faulkner,
that great bard of race and sex, knew well. Habits of subservience from
the days of slavery more than a century before were still lingering here
and there, as I could see on my own back porch that day, watching Jim and
my father. It was like a scene from To Kill a Mockingbird; and indeed,
"Mister Edsel" had come to play the role of Atticus Finch in
the town: an advocate and mediator for people like Jim - a black man from
the country, deprived of education, shunted into stoop labor, living in
the margins, forever under arbitrary threat from an uncaring officialdom
or from sudden outbursts of the deeply-ingrained racial enmity that lurked
beneath the placid surface of the white faces all around him.
-
- It was an unsought role that came to my father simply
because he was one of the few white men who treated black people like they
were ordinary, fully-fledged human beings, not lepers or clowns or dangerous
trash. It was a rare attribute in those days - and it is still much rarer
than most would care to admit, even in the "New South," where
Tennessee congressman Harold Ford Jr. stands within reach of becoming the
first African-American senator from the old Confederacy since Reconstruction
(or as some still like to call it, "the Yankee Occupation").
-
- Ford's surprisingly strong campaign has exposed fault
lines long buried beneath Tennessee's creeping - or rather, galloping -
suburbanization, where old ways, both good and bad, are rapidly being submerged
in the undifferentiated glop of modern American franchise culture. But
when money and power are on the line, atavism is the order of the day:
ancient fears and hatreds re-emerge - or are mightily encouraged to re-emerge,
with all the subtle and not-so-subtle arts of high-tech mass persuasion
stoking the flames.
-
- For the stakes in the battle for Tennessee's Senate
seat - once considered a lock for the Republicans - have suddenly grown
exceedingly high. A Ford win could wrest control of the chamber away from
the GOP, putting a serious crimp in the party's bacchanal of greed and
graft. What's more, it opens up the possibility of investigations, subpoenas,
and worse - for an administration that is not only suppurating with massive
corruption, incompetence, extremism and deceit, but has also openly acknowledged
several criminal actions, including torture and warrantless surveillance.
The Bush Faction simply cannot afford to face accountability for its monumental
failures and misdeeds.
-
- And so this month, with Ford rising rapidly in the
polls, even overtaking his opponent - Bob Corker, a typical tycoon-politician
with a bland manner masking sharp practice in his murky business dealings
- the Bush Party got serious and whipped out a barn-burning theme from
days of yore: the "hot black buck with nothing but white women on
his mind." This was the now-infamous advertisement that featured a
scantily-clad, bottle-blond young jezebel saying she'd met "Harold
at the Playboy party" and asking him to call her. (Ford, along with
3,000 other people, had attended a party thrown by the magazine at the
Super Bowl.) The ad, procured by the Republican National Committee, was
so ludicrously over the top that Corker was forced to denounce it, while
RNC Chairman Ken Mehlman washed his hands of it, saying it had been created
by an "independent organization" without the Party's input.
-
- It was, in fact, created by Scott Howell, an old
Karl Rove hand who had helped craft some of the biggest smear jobs in the
last two election cycles, including scaremongering attack ads for George
W. Bush in 2004, as the New York Times reports. Howell was hired for the
Ford hit by professional spinmeister Terry Nelson, who had been the political
director of the 2004 Bush-Cheney campaign, where he worked cheek-by-jowl
with a certain Ken Mehlman. Despite these intricate threads knitting the
race-baiters to the White House, Mehlman continued to maintain, with a
straight face, that he had no idea what kind of ad his two old friends
might concoct when he handed them a big wad of cash for the operation.
-
- The ad made the national news as a symbol of the
unprecedented use of gutterball in the 2006 campaign, was roundly condemned
by pundits and politicians everywhere, got Nelson fired from a plum job
as a "political adviser" to Wal-Mart, evoked outpourings of sympathy
for the victimized Ford, and was finally yanked after just a few days on
the air. It was an ignominious failure in every respect but one:
-
- It worked.
-
- Corker, who'd been reeling in the polls for weeks,
was suddenly back on top, surging ahead five points after being down by
that same margin at the first of the month, as The Tennessean reports.
Nor was he so wary of the ad now. "Ever since that attention came
on this race from the national media, our numbers have skyrocketed,"
he told reporters as he held affable court in the leather recliner on his
campaign bus. In fact, the "Playboy" piece was immediately followed
by another "independent" ad so scurrilous and inaccurate - falsely
accusing Ford of, among other things, pushing abortion pills on children
- that some stations refused to run it, while Corker himself then produced
a widely aired radio spot that featured brooding jungle drums every tim
Ford's name was mentioned.
-
- Corker had called to "the base" - the hard-core
conservatives who had abandoned him after he won a bruising nomination
fight against two of their favorites - and they had come home. The seemingly
irresistible momentum of Ford's rise, which had carried him from also-ran
status to the cover of Newsweek, was stalled. Going into the final days
of the campaign, his five-point deficit in the published polls was probably
much larger; every black candidate must deal with a "shadow quotient"
- a number of white voters, usually 10 to 15 percent, who tell pollsters
they are voting for the African-American, but once in the booth pull the
lever for the white opponent.
-
- It's old and tattered, and seems to come from another
age, a vanished world, but the race card can still win a hand. Especially
in the South, where the undead past exerts its ghostly pull on the tides
of modern life.
-
- II.
-
- Of course, seamy slurs about sexual transgressions
are being used by the GOP all over the country, as the Washington Post
reports. For example, New York Democrat Michael Arcuri is being lambasted
for "phone sex" because one of his aides once misdialed a number
for a government office and momentarily got a porn line instead. Ohio gubernatorial
candidate Ted Strickland has been accused of being secretly gay and supporting
sex with children: both charges completely spurious - and both prime examples
of Freudian projection coming from the party of Mark Foley and his protectors.
The list of leering, panting, hand-beneath-the-raincoat Republicans muttering
about sex in ads paid for by "secret" committees goes on and
on.
-
- In one sense, then, the attack on Ford could be seen
simply as part of a broader smear operation focused on sex, not race. But
this is sinister sophistry. You cannot introduce such an ad in a contest
between black and white candidates without knowing full well what ugly
spirits you are summoning from the deep. Especially in the state which
gave birth to the Ku Klux Klan, and where, as across the South, the lynching
of black men accused of dallying with white women is well within living
memory.
-
- Tennessee wasn't the worst state when it came to
that signature expression of white power, ranking only sixth in the nation
for total lynchings, behind such champions as Mississippi, Georgia and
Texas. Even so, hundreds died here by noose, knife, gun and flame. Nor
were these murders always furtive affairs, kept from the eyes of good Christian
society. Lynchings were often carried out in a carnival atmosphere, with
families bringing picnic baskets and all the young'uns to watch the fun.
Upcoming noose-fests and auto-da-fes were even advertised in the newspapers.
On one memorable occasion in Ford's hometown of Memphis, more than 15,000
people gathered to watch the burning of Ell Person, alleged killer of a
teenaged white girl, as the Tennessee Historical Society notes.
-
- Side by side with the lynching - indeed far surpassing
it in terms of depth and reach through the black community - was the money
angle. The end of slavery didn't mean the end of servitude by any means.
As each Southern state was returned to the control of its defeated white
elites after the Civil War, they quickly gamed the legal system to provide
them with a virtually unlimited supply of convict labor - without rights,
without protection, in chains, under the bullwhip, just like the good old
days. The smallest infractions of the law, petty fines, bad debts - or
often, nothing at all but the need of the local bossman - swept multitudes
of black men and women into minor jail terms that would be extended by
months, sometimes years, through draconian "fees" and "court
costs" they would have to "work off" - in the fields, in
the mines, laying rail, building roads, draining swamps. Savvy brokers
contracted with state and local governments to manage the trade in these
convicts, many of whom were simply worked to death or crippled for life.
There was no profit in looking after them anymore; they were no longer
someone's valuable "property" but just so much ever-replaceable
fodder churning endlessly through the legal machine.
-
- Freed but disenfranchised, emancipated but still
in chains, balked by law and brutal custom from full participation in society,
the Southern blacks also made handy targets to divert the anger and dissatisfaction
of the "poor white trash" from the elites that exploited them
as well, albeit less severely. If even the poorest white man could consider
himself superior to someone, if you could keep him tied up in psychological
and emotional knots about inferior darkies messing with his women, going
to his schools, sitting at his lunch counters, drinking from his water
fountains, swimming in his public pools, living in his neighborhoods, why
then he'd never make common cause with his black brothers and sisters in
poverty to fight for a better life. Canny patricians played whole decks
of such race cards to win the votes of the crackers and rednecks they privately
despised: "Don't vote for that commie over there talking about unions
and fair wages and equality; vote for me, vote for the man who'll keep
your women and children - and your drinking water - safe from the Negro!"
-
- This was the system that built the "New South,"
and was openly maintained and celebrated as late as the 1970s. And despite
many cosmetic and some substantive changes, you can still see it peering
out from behind the modern scenery at times, in incidents like Trent Lott's
hymn of praise in 2002 for Strom Thurmond's virulently race-baiting 1948
presidential campaign. For if the mental habits and unexamined emotional
states of subservience can last for more than a hundred years, as in Jim's
case that day on our back porch, then certainly ingrained attitudes of
racial superiority - and the seething racial hostility bred by guilt and
fear, by misdirected anger over economic injustice, by sexual anxieties
converted into powerful taboos - are still very much alive in swathes of
the white majority today, just a few decades after these traits were being
publicly exalted as lofty "traditional values."
-
- This history, this system, is the real context for
the RNC ad and Corker's jungle drums. These are the deadly ghosts that
the Republican Party has been dancing with for decades in its "Southern
Strategy" of fomenting white resentment and marginalizing black political
participation. Anyone who says that such tactics are not racist is either
a fool or a liar - or has no Southern blood, where these restless spirits
dwell.
-
- Chris Floyd is an American journalist. His weekly
political column, "Global Eye," ran in the Moscow Times from
1996 to 2006. His work has appeared in print and online in venues all over
the world, including The Nation, Counterpunch, Columbia Journalism Review,
the Christian Science Monitor, Il Manifesto, the Bergen Record and many
others. His story on Pentagon plans to foment terrorism won a Project Censored
award in 2003. He is the author of "Empire Burlesque: High Crimes
and Low Comedy in the Bush Imperium," and is co-founder and editor
of the "Empire Burlesque" political blog.
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