It’s about time to acknowledge that ugly truth which has deformed us for going on four hundred years: we are a bunch of racists. Prejudices galore, in fact, but racism is the dominant — and most debilitating — one right now.
Quote Darrow: it is not so hard to show men that their opinions are wrong, but it is the next thing to impossible to take away their prejudices.
For the most obvious and most immediate (and, I think, most recent) example, here is Media Matters report on a recent commentary by Rush Limbaugh.
Rush aired a sound bite of Newsweek’s Evan Thomas contrasting Reagan’s and Obama’s visions of America in the world, describing Reagan as “parochial” while Obama is above it all, like a “god.” Rush said Reagan was not provincial; he understood America’s greatness and its role in the world for good. Obama, however, sees America’s role in the world as bad. Rush added: “It is offensive to the sensibilities of millions of people to hear a member of the state-run media refer to a half-black, half-white human being with no experience running anything of substance referred to as a god. He may be president of the United States, but he’s not a god.” [emphasis added]
MM notes that “Rush would later on endeavor to explain why Obama’s racial makeup has anything to do with this.” SOG notes that his having mentioned it in the first place in one of his (apparently) ad lib rants, then going back to try and explain it, is itself the explanation.
In an unguarded moment, he let slip what he genuinely meant.
Less blatant, but perhaps more dangerous and surely more devious, are attacks like the one spreading now across the Internet: Obama is an egomaniac. Just look at how often the first person singular shows up in his speeches.
It began, I think, with mid-list columnist Terrence Jeffrey’s piece called “I, Barack Obama.”
Then it was picked up by Stanley Fish in The New York Times.
There’s no mistaking what’s going on in the speech delivered last week. No preliminary niceties; just a rehearsal of Obama’s actions and expectations. Eight “I”’s right off the bat: “Just over two months ago I spoke with you… and I laid out what needed to be done.” “From the beginning I made it clear that I would not put any more tax dollars on the line.” “I refused to let those companies become permanent wards of the state.” “I refused to kick the can down the road. But I also recognized the importance of a viable auto industry.” “I decided then…” (He is really the decider.)
And of course, George Will had to get in his licks at the Washington Post.
“I,” said the president, who is inordinately fond of the first-person singular pronoun, “want to disabuse people of this notion that somehow we enjoy meddling in the private sector.
What might we infer about a man whose style is so instantly given away when we read “inordinately fond” in the lead sentence?
Well. Mark Liberman at Language Log has already done an excellent job of dismantling this libel. In brief, he does the research, counts the words, and find that Obama, in his speeches and in his press conferences, uses the first person singular (I, me, my, myself) less often than did Shrub or Slick Willy.
Read that again. Obama uses the first person singular less often than his predecessors. Yet the nattering and chattering clan finds his pronomination worrisome. I can hear you now, murmuring quietly, “What’s going on here, Old Guy?”
Glad you asked that question, because I have an answer for it, which I will include in the next post, due up later this afternoon.
