Okay, lets take this to the largest picture. I see two things going on here. Let’s assume for a moment that the people who are promoting the Birther Movement, the ones who are out there aggressively sending the emails like the one I received, saying you know, sign our petition, we need to get a million names on this petition by August 4th, by President Obama’s birthday, so that we can force him into court, etc. etc. etc. Let’s assume for a moment that they’re actually not racists. That the members of Congress are actually not racist. Now, I realize that that’s a stretch because, you know, in the real sense, in the real world, we know that we’re all racist. There’s nobody who’s not. Or at least racially aware, well, we’re all racist. What the hell. Just say it as it is. It’s a matter of degrees.
But there are some people who are virulently racist. And I would submit to you that those people who are virulently racist are the ones who would give money to an effort to prove that the first black President of the United States isn’t actually President of the United States. And so somebody could be, not personally a racist, could personally deplore racism, but say, “Hey! I can make a million bucks off these people!” There’s a possible frame for you.
By the way, Shawn brought this in during the break, it would have been interesting to share with Mr. Kreep. It’s spelled KREEP by the way. "A law professor at the University of Arizona", this is Adam Liptak writing in the New York Times in July, July 11, 2008. "has concluded that" John McCain is not a natural born citizen. The reason why is that he was born in 1936 in the Panama Canal Zone. And people born in the Panama Canal Zone at that time were not natural born citizens. And so in 1937, a law was passed, retroactive to 1904 which I'm guessing is when we first got control of the Canal Zone, that said that anybody born in the Canal Zone was a citizen. So McCain was a citizen because of this retroactive law, but because he was born a year after the law, he was not a natural born citizen.
Now the professor, this is a law professor, Gabriel Chin, he says, "it’s preposterous that a technicality like this can make a difference in an advanced country. But this is the constitutional text that we have". How strange does it get? But I am not suggesting that John McCain, if John McCain was President, I would not be here saying, ‘He’s not a natural born citizen.’ Even though maybe he’s not, I don’t know. I mean, come on.
My take on this, fundamentally, is that we have in the United States, a small fringe that has historically been represented by people like George Wallace, and the right wing wackos, I mean the far right wing wackos not the, well, maybe some of the mainstream right wing wackos as well, but there’s been a long history of racism in this country, and of classism in this country. It continues to this day. It changes form with every generation, but it hasn’t gone away. It has lost some virulence over time, but it hasn’t gone away. It has diminished as a percentage of the population, although during hard economic times it will actually grow. And we’ve seen this in country after country, where when the economy goes in the tank, the nationalists and the racists and the crazies come out. Because people are afraid. And they want to blame somebody. And it’s a whole lot easier to blame ‘that black guy that got the job that I should have had.’ It’s a whole lot easier for that kind of blame to go on than to say, ‘Oh you know, maybe I should have studied harder.’ Or ‘You know maybe the politicians that I’ve been voting into office have not been acting in my best interests.’ Or ‘You know, maybe it’s really the fault of a handful or a hundred or two giant transnational corporations whose GDP is larger than most countries.’ I mean, it’s a concept that a lot of these guys can’t even wrap their brains around. But very easy for them to wrap their brain around the concept that ‘He’s different from me. It’s his fault.’
And then there are the folks who come along and say, and this, by the way, is the part that I think is not being covered at all in the corporate media coverage of the Birther Movement, is that then come along the people who say, ‘You know, there’s at least out of 300 some odd million people in America, there’s at least a couple of million, hard core racists. Let’s make some money off of them. Let’s do a mailing, let’s get some publicity and let’s make some money off of these guys so that, you know, everybody’s got to make a living.’ And maybe even justify it by saying, ‘You know, if we make a lot of money off of these guys then we can take that money and we can do better things with it, like defend the constitution. Well not just defend the natural born provision, in article 2 of the constitution, but we will also defend the first amendment right of free speech, and the 2nd amendment right to have arms. And the 4th amendment right to privacy.’ I haven’t heard anyone for a long time complain about the 3rd amendment right to keep troops from being quartered in your home, although there are times that I think we may be getting close to that too. The layers of rationalizations are so deep. Your thoughts, right after this.
Transcribed by Suzanne Roberts, Portland Psychology Clinic.
