I-YOUniverse

Some commentators on PBS were discussing the gloves-off approach taken by the McCain-Palin ticket and the Republican party in the last week. They pointed out how dangerous it is. It’s a very old strategy useful for killing off an undesirable while not becoming ritually unclean.

We might call it activating the fringe.

 First, you never get your own hands dirty. In fact, you may reject mud slinging and violence, sticking to the high road most of the time. Your lieutenants and gofers set the stage, creating a climate in which violence is tacitly approved of, and persons you may not know assume responsibility for execution.

White church folk have used this method effectively for years in the South. They are too nice to deal directly with the Negro problem. But they teach that the Bible says descendants of Canaan are cursed to perpetual servitude.

How did Canaan come to equal Negro? Doesn’t matter. You’re dealing with innuendo, mood.

They present miscegenation (a word that goes back only to 1864 America) as a threat to white Christians, especially white Womanhood. Centuries of sexual relations between white masters and black slaves cast shadows of fear and guilt over the former oppressors’ psyches. Ethnic jokes lighten things up, but like bees leave their stingers beneath the skin.

Nice people signal at a subconscious level that anyone who does something to deal with these trouble makers is serving God and race.

That’s all there is to it. It works with uppity Negroes. You know the other word. But I won’t use it here.

This atmosphere of racial threat triggers a response at the fringe of society from the likes of James Earl Ray.

The same approach works effectively with fearful Protestants, facing a Catholic President.

Or with real he men dealing with a young gay man Matthew Shepard, tortured and abandoned, one of countless gay and lesbian persons who met hate face to face.

Then, there’s little need to mention Jews, six million of them.

What’s all this got to do with McCain-Palin? While denouncing negative campaigning, the Republican ticket has begun a concerted effort to assassinate Barack Obama’s character.

• Sarah Palin describes him as a traitor and terrorist, friend of a Weatherman. The crowd boos and calls “Kill him!” Obama was eight years old when this individual protested the Vietnam War in unconscionable ways that have nothing to do with Obama.
• Then, surely not by accident, the man introducing Palin includes Obama’s middle name “Hussein” equivalent to Adolph or Judas.
• The RNC runs a political ad snipping two or three words from an Obama comment, reversing his actual meaning, claiming that he accused our service members of atrocities.

The nomination of a black man for President by a major party would have been unthinkable not many years ago. There are still individuals on the fringe who will justify violence against him by the irresponsible attitudes and actions of so called “nice” people.

This reckless strategy amounts to putting a loaded rifle in the hands of some Lee Harvey Oswald out there and training its sights on this extraordinary black man. We ought to let the RNC and John McCain know it is unacceptable.

Because we not only have to get Barack Obama elected President of the United States. We have to make sure he lives through his terms in office.