Pat’s Polemics

I was just glancing through an essay on White guilt. The words, White guilt, are inflammatory for a lot of people in this country despite the fact that Europeans at least at a certain level of society have been trying to come to grips for a long time with their own past in their relation to other peoples in the world. Now they are doubly troubled by massive immigration by those very peoples. Nevertheless, Americans, even Black Americans, are uncomfortable with guilt of this sort. Other guilt, personal guilt that religions talk about, are a major element in many Americans’ upbringing, but this sort of responsibility as a member of a privileged group is unacceptable.
In order to maintain our forward-looking, pragmatic, “see you at the top” mentality, what some view as a sort of hucksterism, we must put aside any thoughts about what we’ve done to people in order to get where we are. I once read a book on making money and the author said giving to charity helped make up for some of the things you might have had to do to make the money. How about not doing those things in the first place?
And in order to maintain our mentality in America, we practice denial. There’s a narrative told that many of us call the John Wayne narrative. It is comforting. We pushed West and fought off Indians and made this country great. As long as the aforesaid Indians stayed on their reservations and the Blacks in the fields or ghettos and the Mexicans in Mexico, something accomplished by restrictive immigration laws and housing discrimination [see the article by ], no one reminded us of our denial, of the distortions in our narrative. But now “those people” are among us and have access to the media.
Therefore, the Narrative has struck back. We now have a whole industry devoted to helping Americans (I include everyone here, not just Whites) forget and deny. Fox News is just the spear point; the Right has a bevy of writers who regularly tell us that the complaints on the Left are bogus and this country is the greatest country in the world with the greatest health care system, the most powerful military, and the best education…. oops, no, we must make room for the charters, so we USED to have the greatest education system in the world until “they” took prayer out of the classroom which happened to coincide with racial integration in the schools. Think tanks started up in response to the academic think tanks that were producing the studies on how White people managed to pile up so much wealth while the Indians remained on the reservations, the Blacks in the ghettos, the Mexicans in Mexico, and so on. That irritant was filtering into our White population, creating more Lefties, and it was coming along with a college education. Hence the rise of the Right wing publishing and media efforts.
But why so much effort? Who cares if a bunch of Lefties want to clarify for us just how we got to where we are? The tie-in is just this: once you begin to look at how our society manipulates people, it doesn’t stop with the Blacks and the Browns, they might begin looking at how the Whites are manipulated, and THAT becomes a problem because then the majority population, the Whites, might begin to kick back against the power brokers, the establishment, etc. Obviously, a major factor now is that Whites as a majority can no longer be a given. Also, the low-information, less educated White voter is becoming a thing of the past. This is why you see statistics on Republicans, Trump supporters, and the anti-Obama crowd showing an older and Whiter skew; those are the people who are able to buy into notions like we spend one third of our GNP on foreign aid or Russia could invade us and put troops in every little town in America or that Obama’s mother faked his birth in Hawaii from a Kenyan village, giving him a quintessential American name, just so he could slip into the country and take over as a Muslim dictator. These people really believe this. And the industry that spews out that crap and somewhat more sophisticated crap is what allows so many Americans to honestly believe that Mexicans are pouring over our borders just so they can fraudulently vote in our elections. To cap this off, I watched our former governor, Jan Brewer, tell an MSNBC host that illegals were pouring over our border here in Arizona no matter what the federal gummint statistics show. This is the same governor who told the world our desert here was filled with headless bodies. You think she’s crazy? Google Ev Mecham.