Imitating the Elite

I was exactly three months old when FDR gave a speech of which I reproduce a segment here. I found the speech easily when I searched Google with the key words “Roosevelt hatred.” Herewith that fragment:

For twelve years this Nation was afflicted with hear-nothing, see-nothing, do-nothing Government. The Nation looked to Government but the Government looked away. Nine mocking years with the golden calf and three long years of the scourge! Nine crazy years at the ticker and three long years in the breadlines! Nine mad years of mirage and three long years of despair! Powerful influences strive today to restore that kind of government with its doctrine that that Government is best which is most indifferent.

For nearly four years you have had an Administration which instead of twirling its thumbs has rolled up its sleeves. We will keep our sleeves rolled up.

We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace—business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering.

They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob.

Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred.

     [Franklin D. Roosevelt, October 31, 1936, at Madison Square Garden, link]

I made that search in the first place because, looking back, I was looking for another president of the United States who had been as genuinely hated by a subset of the U.S. public as President Obama. I knew that FDR had been so hated. Between 1936 and today, only a few things have changed. One is that we did not have any long breadlines during the recent Great Recession. Another is that FDR, no doubt because of those very real breadlines in his time, had full congressional support; hence “Government” was not split into warring sides; therefore he could right the wrongs that had caused the Great Depression. Finally, Obama is black; and in our time poverty affects ethnic minorities more than whites. To update the speech, we need only remove one word and add another. Remove breadlines and add, right after class antagonism, the word racism.

One cannot know anything with certainty where vast collectives are involved, but it seems clear enough to me that the recent upsurge of cases around aberrant cops killing blacks has its roots in examples being given at very high levels of government, namely barely disguised contempt for a black President by leaders in the U.S. Congress. I know, I know. It’s all about policy differences. But if the highest office is not visibly respected, the ordinary people, especially those who lack the necessary sensitivity—because they did not get it in their childhood—can certainly draw the wrong conclusions. And then the darkest angels of our nature will act in violent ways—when no one is watching.

A Note on Racism

As I’ve noted earlier, we saw The Jewel in the Crown again and I’ve read The Raj Quartet for the second time. Those experiences once more constellated a cluster of memories for me, dating back to my childhood and the days of World War II. In that time I was a child-member of an occupying force, a Hungarian army brat stationed in Serbia. It was a time when the little girl next door, a rather sweet child, suddenly appeared in the street to play with a huge yellow star sewn into her dress. A few weeks later she and her family vanished. I went to a Catholic school then; the teachers were all nuns; and for a while there, until they too disappeared, three member of my second-grade class appeared in school with the same sorts of stars, and our leading Sister lectured us about those stars trying to tell us that they meant nothing at all, just a little formality having to do with names. We’d had no idea at all that little Jewish children were our classmates. We’d never noticed. But we noticed that those children now had a strange shyness and sadness about them that they’d never had before. That was then.

Today’s context also included violent events in which Kyrgyz Turks killed Uzbeks in Kyrgyzstan and in which in Pakistan Muslims did violence to a Sufi community. In the background are continual (even if by now barely audible) reports of Sunni on Shia violence in Iraq, and vice versa. And never mind Jewish violence on Palestinians. Murderous clashes between Muslims and Hindus, a feature of The Raj Quartet, has not stayed in the 1940s. No. It still recurs quite regularly now. In most cases, then, as now the race of those who kill each other is the same. Let me keep that simple. They look exactly the same on either side—much as the little girl next door looked exactly like I did, and her mom like mine, and her dad like my father.

My thesis is that “racism” is a culturally juvenile, overly simplistic tag applied to a category not of human but of subhuman behavior. It isn’t precisely animal behavior but closely linked to it; animals living in packs and groups behave in violently territorial ways and sometimes cause the deaths of members of the opposing group. Animals are protected by the limits nature sets to this sort of thing. Human are more clever—but there is a kind of threshold. Intelligence, calculation, and free-will are already present, but the genuinely human is not yet awakened. It’s only there as a dim potential. It’s a very harsh way to put it. But is it true? I think it is. Race is just a very convenient way of tagging the “alien other”—the other that, in a dim, subhuman consciousness threatens, and may therefore be violently attacked to give vent to one’s dread and fear.

The paradox of this, of course, is that external conditioning, thus social pressure for tolerance of other races, is just that, conditioning. The underlying biological imperative is stronger and will surface under the right conditions anyway. The bio-social tribalism behind group-on-group hatred and violence literally permeates political speech today, even if carefully coded. It’s purpose is not to “educate” or to persuade but merely to signal: if you feel this, here’s where you belong. To raise humanity to a higher level—now there is a job that can’t be done by propaganda or by broadcasting nest odor.