What is happening?
I’m at the Omni CNN Center, so it seemed appropriate to check in on that cable news network that nobody watches anymore. Big mistake. The guy who used to be on the morning show but is now on in nighttime when even fewer people care was running a special on the “Ground Zero Mosque.” There was a blogger by the name of Geller, crazy-looking woman with too much hair, spider-leg eyelashes and a thick Long Island accent who is credited with bringing the mosque furor into the mainstream. Building a mosque is a “slap in the face.” The location, formerly a Burlington Coat Factory, was “hallowed ground,” a “war memorial.” Never mind that actual office buildings with actual offices for actual private, commerce-oriented companies whose primary purpose is personal monetary gain will be taking residence not two blocks away with an obstructed view where there is any view at all but on the actual World Trade Center site with direct views of the memorial and all grounds. Never mind that.
She was pressed — not like a Tar Heel defense but more like a cup of French coffee — by the anchor whose name I don’t care enough about to Google it to explain how she wasn’t ignoring the First Amendment of the Constitution in her campaign against the mosque, which is really more of a community center than a mosque anyway. She said that she’d never said anything: she never said she was anti-Muslim, she never said she was against the Constitution, she never said that she had a problem with mosques in general. She never said anything. Yet she wouldn’t shut up.
Then they cut to their veritable clown car of political commentary to get their views, because god forbid we watch a news story and not follow it up with some stuffed shirts pontificating us into commercial break. The black guy spoke for the liberals. Natch. The really white guy with big ears spoke for the conservatives. The dude with the cheap suit and bad combover was the moderate. That moderate, David Gergen, whose increasingly even-keeled “reason” makes him seem like the most uncool anger management counselor ever, sided more with whitey in saying it was more than just a Constitutional issue, that it was a “sensitivity issue” and that Barack Obama had given everyday Americans (WHAT THE FUCK IS AN EVERYDAY AMERICAN?) another reason to believe that he was not like them, that he thought he was better than the average American.
Please believe my sincerity when I say that this shit is going to give me a heart attack. Through a political lens the mosque issue is a “sensitivity” issue. But the burden of sensitivity should be on the other side of the debate because the mosque issue is so clearly a Constitutional issue. Obama shouldn’t have to hold hands with the 70 percent of Americans who, going on a litany of blatantly fabricated “facts” about the controversy have decided that “sensitivity” to the victims trumps sensitivity to the single-most important freedom of the United States, the one that came over on the Mayflower (and then, naturally, was set ablaze with the Salem Witch Trials). The President of the United States isn’t our collective psychiatrist. He upholds the laws. He doesn’t have to hold our hand while doing it. This should not be, as Gergen agreed, a “turning point” in the Obama presidency. It should not, as the white guy with the big ears said, an issue come election day. But it will. Because we’re stupid. Because in the worst economy of the past half-century, we are arguing about a fucking mosque in fucking New York fucking City, the most diverse place on the fucking planet. But apparently a place that needs some lessons in sensitivity more than it needs some lessons in religious freedom.
What’s happening to Obama is not unlike what happened to Truman. Truman alienated the South by supporting racial equality, yet he alienated civil rights groups by being less than a picture of racial tolerance himself. He alienated labor groups and business leaders alike. After dropping the atomic bomb — twice — he pissed off General Douglas MacArthur and much of the military with his actions in Korea. In the lens of the day, he was considered out of touch with Americans of all kinds. Yet through the lens of history, he masterfully shepherded the United States through perhaps its greatest transition ever — from depression to prosperity, from world war to cold war, from isolationism to world cooperation. Obama is facing a similar transition, and he’s similarly getting hit from all sides.
But I digress. This isn’t about Obama — it’s about ignorance and prejudice at a time when the opposite should prevail.
I finally checked out the Dr. Laura rant. That’s one crazy bitch right there. The saddest part is that I have heard that argument so many times, from people I can’t stand as well as from people I love dearly. “The black comedians on HBO say it so why can’t I?” And then she gave her contrite apology. Now she’s not renewing her contract and instead focusing on “getting her First Amendment rights back.” Hey, Dr. Laura, I hope you come on over to the Internet where we’re free as can be to say things like “Fuck you, psycho.”
There was also a follow-up story about Shirley Sherrod making peace with the NAACP, the same organization that fell for the smear campaign from that fucker Breitbart and left Sherrod out to dry.
In Summerville, South Carolina, you have the city council voting in favor of a law banning “illegals” from all but crossing the city limits. In other parts of the South you have people talking about “illegals” in similarly racist terms, or you have elected officials referring to Islam as a cult not deserving of First-Amendment protections. And, naturally, you have Glen Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Andrew Breitbart, and others crying reverse-racism at everything. And Sarah Palin is invoking all sorts of nonsensical craziness about god and the bible and the Constitution.
And here we are having to take it seriously, having to spend an hour of TV primetime debating an issue that is amazingly unworthy of debate — something that should be as incontrovertible as a foul ball in baseball. We have to take all of these people seriously. We have to talk about them in mainstream media outlets. We have to consider their opinions. We have to live with the fallout that their opinions have on the gullible masses. We have to waste our time talking about a Muslim community center when we should be talking about healthcare, jobs, corporate corruption, political corruption — anything but talking about a Muslim community center and a black woman wrongfully accused of racism and a President wrongly accused of “insensitivity” and all of the other bullshit that leaves me wondering what the hell is going on and why we can’t just make it change.
