Mr. Nocera is off today. In ” ‘Duck Dynasty’ and Quackery” Mr. Blow says the “aw, shucks” version of intolerance is the worst kind. Ms. Collins, in “Civic Break for the Holidays,” says Congress gave all Americans a great Christmas gift: No government shutdowns for the next two years. Now we can rest easy until next year. Here’s Mr. Blow:
I must admit that I’m not a watcher of “Duck Dynasty,” but I’m very much aware of it. I, too, am from Louisiana, and the family on the show lives outside the town of Monroe, which is a little over 50 miles from my hometown. We’re all from the sticks.
So, when I became aware of the homophobic and racially insensitive comments that the patriarch on the show, Phil Robertson, made this week in an interview in GQ magazine, I thought: I know that mind-set.
Robertson’s interview reads as a commentary almost without malice, imbued with a matter-of-fact, this-is-just-the-way-I-see-it kind of Southern folksiness. To me, that is part of the problem. You don’t have to operate with a malicious spirit to do tremendous harm. Insensitivity and ignorance are sufficient. In fact, intolerance that is disarming is the most dangerous kind. It can masquerade as morality.
A&E, which airs “Duck Dynasty,” moved quickly to suspend Robertson, as his comments engaged the political culture wars, with liberals condemning him and conservatives — including Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, a possible presidential candidate — rushing to his defense.
Let me first say that Robertson has a constitutionally protected right to voice his opinion and A&E has a corporate right to decide if his views are consistent with its corporate ethos. No one has a constitutional right to a reality show. I have no opinion on the suspension. That’s A&E’s call.
In fact, I don’t want to focus on the employment repercussions of what Robertson said, but on the content of it. In particular, I want to focus on a passage on race from the interview, in which Robertson says:
“I never, with my eyes, saw the mistreatment of any black person. Not once. Where we lived was all farmers. The blacks worked for the farmers. I hoed cotton with them. I’m with the blacks, because we’re white trash. We’re going across the field. …They’re singing and happy. I never heard one of them, one black person, say, ‘I tell you what: These doggone white people’ — not a word! …Pre-entitlement, pre-welfare, you say: Were they happy? They were godly; they were happy; no one was singing the blues.”
While this is possible, it is highly improbable. Robertson is 67 years old, born into the Jim Crow South. Only a man blind and naïve to the suffering of others could have existed there and not recognized that there was a rampant culture of violence against blacks, with incidents and signs large and small, at every turn, on full display. Whether he personally saw interpersonal mistreatment of them is irrelevant.
Louisiana helped to establish the architecture for Jim Crow. First, there were the Black Codes that sought to control interactions between blacks and whites and constrain black freedom. The Jim Crow Encyclopedia even points out that in one Louisiana town, Opelousas, “freedmen needed the permission of their employers to enter town.”
Then, in 1890, the State Legislature passed the Separate Car Act, which stipulated that all railway companies in the state “shall provide equal but separate accommodations for the white, and colored races” in their coaches. The landmark Plessy v. Ferguson case was a Louisiana case challenging that law. The United States Supreme Court upheld the law, a ruling that provided the underpinning for state-sponsored racial segregation, and Jim Crow laws spread.
Robertson’s comments conjure the insidious mythology of historical Southern fiction, that of contented slave and benevolent master, of the oppressed and the oppressors gleefully abiding the oppression, happily accepting their wildly variant social stations. This mythology posits that there were two waves of ruination for Southern culture, the Civil War and the civil rights movement, that made blacks get upset and things go downhill.
Robertson’s comments also display a staggering ignorance about the place and meaning of song in African-American suffering. As for the singing of the blues in particular, the jazz musician Amina Claudine Myers points out in an essay that the blues was heard in the late 1800s and “came from the second generation of slaves, Black work songs, shouts and field hollers, which originated from African call-and-response singing.” Work songs, the blues and spirituals were not easily separated.
Furthermore, Robertson doesn’t seem to acknowledge the possibility that black workers he encountered possessed the most minimal social sophistication and survival skills necessary to not confess dissatisfaction to a white person on a cotton farm (no matter how “trashy” that white person might think himself).
It’s impossible to know if Robertson recognizes the historical resonance and logical improbability of his comments. But that’s not an excuse.
Now here’s Ms. Collins:
So, how do you like living in a country that has a budget?
This week, the Senate finished work on legislation that will forestall any government shutdowns for the next two years. Then our lawmakers packed up and went home for the holidays. They kept everything else open and closed down Congress! Finally, America’s getting what it really wants for Christmas.
It’s great, right? And people have noticed. Even as a new federal budget was wending its way from House to Senate last week, a Washington Post-ABC News poll showed that American approval of the job Congress was doing had rocketed from 12 percent to 16 percent.
“The budget agreement is not perfect,” said the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, before the bill finally passed. This was a major refrain during several days of long, meandering debates. Other favorite themes: bipartisanship, the evils of Obamacare, the goodness of Pope Francis and the Republicans’ strong feelings about unfairness of Senate rules.
“Like the frog in the warming water, we do not realize we are being cooked and that the freedoms of Americans are being cooked!” cried Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama. That was a reference to the rules, although honestly, it could have been about pretty much anything except the pope.
We are not going to discuss whether or not he had a point. I believe I speak for the entire nation when I say that there will be no thinking about the Senate rules during Christmas vacation.
The debate — perhaps you didn’t catch it — also included a passionate attack on one section of the budget that reduces automatic cost-of-living increases to pensions of military retirees who aren’t actually retired.
Let me run over that again. Suppose you joined the Army at 25. You can retire at 45 on a good pension, which is regularly increased through cost-of-living adjustments. Under the new budget law, those increases would be 1 percent lower until you hit 62.
“How far have we fallen? Do we have no shame?” cried Senator Lindsey Graham.
A number of observers noted that Graham is a huge fan of reducing cost-of-living adjustments for Social Security recipients. Also, of raising the retirement age for Social Security to 70. But remembering our holiday season, we will accept him at his word that he was simply offended by the sudden and arbitrary nature of the military cut and not posturing for the veteran-heavy Republican voter base in the state where he is facing a primary next year.
The change in benefits for the military unretired won’t kick in until 2015, and senators from both parties are already standing in line with proposals to eliminate it. Shouldn’t we focus instead on protecting Americans who are actually past working age? And what about the many, many enlisted men and women who serve in combat, then leave the service after 10 or 12 or even 19 years? You’d think they could at least qualify for a 401(k).
Mark this down as something to work on in the new year.
Right now, we can celebrate the fact that we do not have a single fiscal cliff to fall over until February at the earliest. That would be the debt-ceiling crisis, when we get to wait and see whether the House Republicans will refuse to pay the nation’s creditors until somebody repeals Obamacare. “We don’t want nothing out of this debt limit,” Paul Ryan said ominously.
Oh, Paul Ryan, we were just warming up to you and now this.
But that’s all next year. Everybody’s clearing out of Washington now. President Obama — who is looking really tired — left for Hawaii after a press conference in which he was asked if this was the worst year of his presidency.
Obama said he did not think about it that way. Personally, I kind of wished he’d said: “Yes, and I swear it will get better from here on out.”
Someone else asked about the woes of the Obamacare rollout. “Since I’m in charge, obviously we screwed it up,” said the president. Notice the shift in pronouns in this sentence.
Anyhow, let’s hope he has a restful couple of weeks. You, too. Feel free to forget about politics for a little bit. Hillary Clinton said recently that she’s going to decide about running for president in 2014. The takeaway is that if Hillary’s not thinking about this stuff right now, you have total leave to go off the grid. Visit your aunt. Go see a movie.
Maybe not the new “Hobbit” one — Thorin Oakenshield, the crown prince of the dwarves, looks a lot like Senator Ted Cruz.
Wherever you go and whatever you do, remember to stand tall knowing that you’re the citizen of a country that is capable of continuing to run for the next 24 months. Doesn’t get any better than that.
