What is the opposite of a mensch?

Barack Obama had a perfect opportunity to show that he wants to take America “beyond race,” by saying that an Obama delegate’s having called two neighborhood boys who were climbing dangerously in a tree “monkeys” was not a big deal and that black people need to get over this kind of thing. He could have said that he doesn’t want America to be a society in which people must live in fear of having their careers and lives damaged over innocent and ordinary remarks. Instead he did this:

Moving to nip in the bud some potential bad press, White House hopeful Barack Obama’s campaign persuaded a delegate to step down after she was ticketed for calling her neighbor’s African-American children “monkeys.”…

On Saturday, two neighbor children were playing in the tree next-door to her house. Ramirez-Sliwinski “came outside and told the children to quit playing in the tree like monkeys….”

What a hollow phony this man is. A year after declaring that Don Imus should be fired for one insulting comment, he goes to great lengths to excuse the three decade-long vile hate career of Farrakhan pal Jeremiah Wright as mere “snippets” unfairly picked out by a hostile media. And now he fires one of his pledged delegates for something even less serious than Imus’s remark—something, indeed, that probably was not even intended as an insult.

Not only is Obama not a man. He is not even a shadow of a man. The size of his character is in inverse proportion to the degree of his eloquence, charisma, and other external qualities that have made people go crazy over him. The more he shines, the less is there.

Our picture of what makes Obama tick is getting clearer and clearer. His missing father, his amorphous marginal upbringing, his confusions over his racial identity, have left him a hollow shell who gets through life by putting on a series of acts, as he himself described in his autobiography. I think it’s possible that he if is elected, and has to do things instead of making vague uplifting speeches, the vacuity of his character will make it impossible for him to function effectively in the office. Within six months even the liberals will have snapped out of their Obamania and be wondering, What have we done? He could be a super Carter, paving the way to a conservative successor.

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LA writes:

Camille Paglia writes:

I was lucky enough to see [Obama] up close as he spoke at a recent rally in the Philadelphia suburbs, where he answered policy questions in great detail. I was very impressed by his easy, relaxed authority and quick humor as well as his classy elegance.

Yes, that’s the “shine” I’m talking about. But inside the suit, inside the exterior of “easy, relaxed authority and classy elegance” (which by the way sounds more like an ad for an expensive men’s suit than an endorsement of a presidential candidate) that so wows people, there is a vacuous, politically correct, black racist.

Adela Gereth writes:

I agree when you say England as we all once knew it is dead but news items like this certainly make America seem less and less viable . A woman was issued a $75 ticket in Illinois for calling young black boys “monkeys”—while they were climbing a tree.

A man can continue to run for POTUS even after his long-time pastor is seen on video damning the United States of “AmeriKKKica” from the pulpit. But a white woman can’t say black boys are climbing a tree like monkeys with being issued a ticket by the police.

The Brits may be ahead of us but there’s every indication we will catch up to them, probably sooner rather than later.

Adela continues:

Evidently, it is now racist to say that kids climb trees like monkeys when those kids are black. And now, as Zoe Williams writes at The Guardian Online, it’s racist to indicate that black guys are, in fact, black guys by referring to a garment which is not even exclusively worn by black guys.

Several people posted comments deriding her assertion but hers is the position of the governing elites in both Britain and the US—that even words not historically used or intended to demean people of color, “value-neutral” words, can now be construed as racist by elites and people of color. And this insanity can be backed by police action.

And then Obama comes along and tells us that it’s time we had a conversation about race. What’s left to say? I suppose he and Condi could get together for a little conversation and decide whether America was founded on an original sin or with a birth defect. Then Michelle could pipe up that that’s why she never felt pride in America till Obama ran for President.

I think the time for any constructive discussion has passed. And I don’t think I’m alone in thinking that.

LA replies:

People, like Obama, who say they want “conversation” in fact want the exact opposite.

A story I’ve told before: Once I was talking with a left-wing academic who stopped me when I used the terms “truth” and “Founding Fathers,” telling me these were “exclusivist,” “privileging” expressions that were out of bounds. When I asked him what he believed in, since he didn’t believe in truth, he replied with a straight face, “Conversation.” He prohibited me from using ordinary words, then he said he wanted conversation!

Such is the vile postmodern left, and such is Obama. He fires and disgraces a political supporter of his for describing as “monkeys” black boys engaged in the monkey-like activity of climbing in a tree, and then he says he wants America to have a conversation about race! I think he will not find many white people willing to take him up on the offer, since they know they will be punished if they say anything real

Perhaps after the country has had four years of Obama’s stimulating “conversation” regime, a right-wing version of Bob Dylan will come along and sing:

Barack Obama was president
Reverend Wright was king.
As long as you didn’t say anything
You could say anything.

Sebastian writes:

Is it too obvious to point out that refraining from calling two little black kids monkeys would be the real indication of racism? What would be the reasoning behind that? Either one refrains from calling them monkeys because one thinks they really are more simian than whites and thus looks for another word, which is racist, or one refrains from calling them monkeys because one fears they will think that one is implying they are more simian than whites, which is a condescending racialist view. If the content of one’s character were determinative, one would naturally refer to either black or white kids as monkeys if they were engaging in dangerously simian behavior. The fact that blacks take offense at the term monkey proves most blacks have no interest in transcending race. Monkey is not the n-word. I played on monkey-bars as a child. Are monkey-bars racist apparatuses whenever black kids play on them? If a little black kid is swinging from monkey-bars, how should we describe him? It seems to me to not use the term monkey would be a gross act of racism and/or condescension. If all words that have a historical connection to discrimination are still “loaded” terms, we will need a newspeak thesaurus to find different adjectives for the same behavior among the different races, and that really would define racism.

LA replies:

Ultimately we wouldn’t be able to use the word “America,” since America (or rather a large part of it) once practiced slavery.

What we should do is use the liberals’ liberalism against them. If talking to a liberal who says you must not say “monkey bars,” and if the liberal then refers to “America,” tell said liberal: “I think it’s very racist for you to use the word America, since America is a racist country that practiced slavery for hundreds of years.”

Reason won’t work with liberals. Only sticking their own ideas back in their faces, so they get to experience what it’s like, will get them to stop.

A few weeks ago I was riding on a New York City bus with a friend while a man sitting behind us was talking very loudly on his cell phone. We found it hard to hear each other speak. After he ignored obvious hints that he ought to lower his voice, we took a different tack. We raised our voices until it interfered in his conversation. We said things like, “Yeah, we sure are talking real loud, but it’s a free country, isn’t it, and people can talk as loud as they want.” I was half turned toward the cell phone user as I spoke, so he knew it was directed at him, and also I was making it impossible for him to keep talking on his phone. He ended his conversation quickly and didn’t say anything to us. At that point my friend and I returned to our previous conversation in normal voices.

What are the cell phone abusers and liberals going to do, if we simply reflect their own behavior and attitudes back at them? What we need to do is ruthlessly subject liberals to their own principles, not allowing them the exceptions that they adopt for their own convenience.

Mark Jaws writes:

Your response to the obnoxious cell phone caller was right out of the Mark Jaws Official Playbook.

Jim N. writes:

“Ramirez-Sliwinski ‘came outside and told the children to quit playing in the tree like monkeys….’”

This woman didn’t even call the kids monkeys, as the author of the article you linked claims in the first of the two paragraphs you quoted. In that paragraph she says that Ramirez-Sliwinski “called” the kids monkeys, but in the second paragraph, the author quotes the police commissioner saying that that Ramirez-Sliwinski said that the boys were playing in the tree “like” monkeys. Well, is it true or not that monkeys play in trees? So what did Ramirez-Sliwinski say that was false?

While Howard Cosell’s great sin was overblown and ridiculous (“Look at that little monkey go!”), at least he actually committed the “crime” he was accused of. This case, in contrast, is absolutely Orwellian in its disingenuousness. But, as Clyde Wilson says, “the purpose of Political Correctness is to prevent people from saying things that are true. Thought-controllers have little interest in suppressing falsehood.”

LA replies:

Or, as Michael Levin once said, a stereotype is something true that you’re not supposed to say.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at April 09, 2008 01:23 AM | Send