Senaotr James Webb as Foghorn Leghorn

Every so often I open a paper or get on a website or turn on the TV and wonder what country I’m in. So with the recent extrapolations of Virginia Senator James Webb in the July 22 edition of the Wall Street Journal. In it, Webb decries the end of “white” (whatever that is) hegemony in the United States. The article is some of the saddest post-Civil Rights haranguing I’ve been entertained with in some time. The fact that Rupert Murdoch’s new Wall Street Journal would print something so dangerously outrageous and poorly thought out, however, does give one pause.

In Webb’s screed, he recounts White Anglo-Saxon Protestants as the former “whipping post” (?) of American debates regarding power and status in the 1960s. Post? Perhaps he though whipping “boy” to be too gratuitous or inflammatory, given his subject. He states that out of control government programs have “marginalized” “white” workers, although he offers no statistics for such a statement. He calls for fairness and a future in which “every American has the benefit of a fair chance at the future.”

Webb insists that his career has been devoted to fairness for all. As latest evidence of his honorable stand for human rights, he now claims that the present system discriminates against “white” people. Yet, he never defines what a “white” person is. According to him, new immigrants today are allowed to bypass “whites” “whose families have been in the country for generations”. Are we to assume that all new immigrants are not “white”? (whatever that may be). These “newbie’s” are not only making it hard for WASPS—they are jeopardizing the chances of African-Americans “the intended beneficiary of affirmative action” as it was originally conceived. Witness Webb’s old colonial switch and bait argument, pitting black Americans against new arrivals while “white” America in the form of Senator Webb clucks and shakes his head with disapproval over such un-American injustices.

Webb comes from the “whites suffered too” school of American thought. He also makes the incredible statement that recent immigrants from Asia, Latin America and Africa have not suffered any discrimination. Why does he think this? Or does Webb equate an absence of overt violence and lynching as evidence of tolerance and brotherhood?

Webb evidently equates “white” with a particular type of American whose ancestors have been here the longest—in some cases “for more than 200 years.” Guess we won’t worry about the Indians—after all, they’re not “white”—right?

In his article the term “white” becomes a label that refers to people from other cultures that successfully scrubbed and eliminated any individual cultural markings from their public daily lives and existences. Like the Irish, Germans and other northern European peoples, they changed their names, languages and customs and went underground to the point that third generations inheritors now spend a lot of time trying to figure out where their families were from originally. Italians and other southern Europeans often had a more difficult time—Asians had to navigate the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Acts and similar anti-immigration legislation. Emma Lazarus’s poem at the Statue of Liberty referring to “Huddle Masses yearning to breath free” makes good and sentimental propaganda but it didn’t reflect the actual horrors of Ellis Island.

Webb refers to America’s “white cultures in the plural, although he doesn’t tell us who these people are. He continues the long, sad paean of the abused white Southerner, citing illiteracy rates and poverty as if these and other attendant problems were thrust upon the South--this “truly American section’ as noted by President Franklin Roosevelt, a white American President for whose memory Webb supposedly has affection. He refers to “white ethnic groups”—the first time I’ve ever seen this term in print. He compares “white Baptists” and “Irish Protestants” leading one to believe that these are mutually exclusive groups—one evidently must be either white or Irish, Baptist or Protestant—but, according to Webb’s odd logic—not both. The usual suspect groups are infringing on the American dream—Chinese, Jews, Indians (I assume East Indians). Of course, Jews aren’t white, even if they’re Ashkenazi—they’re just too different.

Webb states that whites have been treated as a “fungible Monolith” which only leads me to believe that a Thesaurus fell off the shelf and onto his desk when he was composing this revelation. Or perhaps it evidences a law school education. It does show that in the south that thinking has come around to a “whitey is diverse too” kind of Byzantine logic. The US is diverse enough now—all the rest of you colored diverse guys need to stop whining and stay home.

Webb ends his amazing article with an accusation that “government” (another non-term) “picks winners.” Instead of assuring equality. The success of the post-Civil Rights political world is seen as proof that favoritism has replaced the former American system of discrimination. Webb ends his peculiar article with “Drop the Procrustean policies and allow harmony to invade (?) the public mindset. Fairness will happen and bitterness will fade away.” This only proves that southern hemp farming is evidently still alive and well and that Webb has been sparking up some of this crop that also appeared on the many of the founding fathers plantation manifests.

Webb’s article is sad evidence that xenophobia is alive and well in the United States and also that anyone can become a Senator, even the most misinformed and misguided. He does acknowledge that “whites” are also “diverse”—we just have to be careful that they’re just the right kind of white. Of a more sobering nature is the fact that the Wall Street Journal would print this piece in anything others than the comics—perhaps I missed the announcement of the beginning of a daily Wall Street humor section—but I doubt it. Informed Americans concerned about their country’s future should read such offerings as signs of a new and intolerant age in which fear and loathing are the order of the day and in which supposedly sequential logic follows the lines of a mobius strip.

Webb’s outrageou ending can be refuted by any freshman student of history who will tell you that fairness (justice) does not just happen—there are far too many dead from the Haymarket Riots to Selma that collectively cry out against such an obscenity. As for bitterness fading away, well, we can only hope—but Webb’s piece only shows that this possibility is far out of reach for many of today’s ”white” Americans.

I call for the establishment of an annual Foghorn Leghorn Award for the most bloficating and outrageous senatorial pronouncement of the year and I am happy to nominate Senator Webb for the first such recognition.

We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts, we make the world.
Buddha

The overreaching theme of human existence and thought is the attempt of humanity to place itself in time—to mark and control the perception of existence through attempts to fix an unchanging point in a dynamic and constantly changing universe—between absolute past and absolute future.

These attempts to control the material world of existence are all based in human imagination. Buildings, music, scholarship, art, food--all technology—attempt to fix and explain our existence at a specific point in time by personalizing the world through the application of imagination—to mark our being here through a creative and interpretive process—whether through graffiti or gnocchi, Egyptian pyramids or Mayan calendars—space travel or religious rites.

We arrive in this temporal plane amidst effluvia and confusion and we leave it pretty much the same way. We can’t say where we come from and we don’t where we’re going and all the time in between these two points we struggle with ourselves and each other over what we don’t know, exercising our human imaginations in the infinite void of time and space. We can only know for sure that we will one day die—that is, we will again change, in accordance with the dynamism of the universe.

We need to relax and truly smell the flowers and seek to understand rather than harbor a futile lust to know. Static knowledge is only imagined power—dynamic understanding that builds upon itself and continues to enlighten through constant change. It is communication—dialogue that makes this possible. St. John said “In the beginning was the word”, the Buddhists acknowledge the eternal OM-Jews embrace Hillel’s vision of the interpretation of God’s dream. The Greek Church incorporated Sophos or Wisdom into their understanding of the Christian godhead. Zen acknowledges the Tao without acknowledging the Tao. All point to a singular universal vibration of which we are all a part—an energy at once singular to each but shared by all.

Camus once observed that historians were the Sisyphus’ of humanity, constantly rolling the rock of history up the hill of human forgetfulness. I would disagree—historians are the moderators of a continuing human dialogue about where they have been, how they feel about it and what should be done in the future. The facts are important, accuracy is important but more important still is the constant re assessment and reinterpretation of those facts in light of our world at any given point in time with the understanding that nothing can be absolutely known any more that anything can be absolutely controlled. We must revel in the shared fact that we can truly know nothing--but we can attempt to understand. Such cosmic uncertainty should inspire only faith and evoke only mutual compassion rather than conflict in the rational animal.