Impolite Topics

People today talk about how contentious our politics have become, but it is not just politics! Beliefs have always been challenged by our quest for knowledge, and the facts uncovered by that quest have always threatened orthodoxy. To a great extent the topics people deem to be the most impolite are the ones that challenge not just what they believe but what they want to believe. Over the last two centuries our knowledge has grown exponentially. To say that many people find this confusing and disconcerting would be an understatement. Thus we find more demagogues pandering to people who fear the threat knowledge poses to their beliefs. Ah, sweet validation!

If you listen, you can hear the braying of the wild dumb asses now: “Hey, I like the stuff that runs on fossil fuel. I don't care what the Pope says about global warming; if I do not consider that topic a matter of faith I can and will ignore his opinion. Furthermore, the fossil fuel industry and the Republican Party tell me global warming is not real. They ought to know, don't you think? Who are you going to believe? Are you going to believe the Koch brothers or Pope Francis? Are you going believe Senator snowball Inhofe or the Scientists?”

In the realm of history, which is a place very few Republicans have visited, there are not many events that involve more persistent myths than our Civil War. You have no idea how many Southerners have told me that the Civil War was not about Black people. The remarkable thing is that so many of them used a very impolite term for Afro-Americans while trying to convince me that their ancestors did not fight to keep those people enslaved. White Southerners have a real problem with that. They also have a problem with the fact that slavery, more than anything else, delegitimized their great rebellion. Admitting that so many of their ancestors gave their lives in an effort to preserve something so morally repugnant is more than most Southerners can bear. So here we have the white people of South Carolina denying historical facts while defending their display of a flag that symbolizes slavery, rebellion, and the racist groups that terrorized and suppressed the descendants of slaves freed by that war. Is this really the heritage they want to celebrate! White Southerners will say no. They will try to tell you that displaying that flag is merely their way of honoring the men who fought for state's rights. But “state's rights” was code for state laws permitting slavery, and after reconstruction it became code for permitting Jim crow laws, and now it has become code for the Republican Party's revival of voter suppression.

Now that the South is solidly Republican we also have prominent Republicans tying them selves into pretzels in an effort to avoid mentioning the racist motivations of the killer who slaughtered nine people as they worshiped at the Emanuel AME Church in South Carolina. People want to believe we have put racism behind us. And Republicans want us to believe we have put racism behind us. “It was the horrendous act of a lone lunatic,” they say, hoping that this will keep us from raising a fuss about the Confederate flag, voter suppression, the disparity in wealth and such. Those same Republicans also want us to ignore the fact that the killer was able to slay so many so quickly because guns are so readily available to criminals and lunatics. Them good ol' boys got to keep their guns to protect state's rights, don't you know?