Birthers of a Nation (We're all racists)

The New York Indypendent ^ | January 10, 2010 | Nicholas Powers

[2ndDivisionVet]

This past summer, On TV, I watched President Obama speak inside a New Hampshire high school. Outside angry protestors waved signs and one man, handgun strapped to his leg, made a veiled threat to kill him as he waved a sign, “It is time to water the tree of liberty.” I knew his type. He’s one of the millions of conservatives shouting that the president was born in foreign country and he’s building concentration camps, plans to kill the old and bankrupt the nation, brainwash our kids and open the borders.

This nightmare of being surrounded by enemies haunts the conservative mind. It is an old terror begun when European settlers slept on land stolen from natives, worked by Africans stolen from theirs. Each twig snap was a warning, each slave a shadow wanting revenge. To be a conservative in America is to inherit this nightmare that the wretched of the earth will take back their land and your life.

Rather than face our blood-stained history, conservatives transform it into what psychoanalysis calls a primal fantasy, a scene that re-imagines our origins. They use fantasy to re-enact the colonial violence that created our nation but instead of the perpetrator, we are now the victims using violence to defend ourselves. It’s why the Ur-text of the American nightmare is D. W. Griffith’s 1915 film Birth of a Nation. Even though few today know the movie, we inherited its hysteria because it was the first mass media experience of the conservative fantasy.

It contrasts two families, the Northern Stonemans and the Southern Camerons. Congressman Austin Stoneman wants to punish the South and Lincoln’s assassination gives him an excuse. He enlists mulatto protégé Silas Lynch, a hypnotic orator, to rally freed slaves to rule beaten whites. Enfranchised black militias terrorize whites and tax them to poverty.

Lynch becomes Lieutenant-Governor but Ben Cameron creates the Klu Klux Klan. They don sheets and wage guerrilla warfare against the federal government. In the climax Cameron rescues Stoneman’s daughter from forced marriage to Lynch, another white woman from rap and then his Klan routes black Union soldiers, revokes their right to vote and saves the white South. A blockbuster of its day, the film now serves as the unconscious frame of our origin for conservatives who see themselves nobly wage eternal war against savages.

The Right is re-enacting this plot. Once again it finds itself out of power, defeated by “liberal traitors” and a spellbinding Black orator. Their anxiety is translated through the Birth of a Nation fantasy into racist imagery surging from the fringe to the center but it can’t flow unfiltered. It must be transformed into serviceable slander. In psychoanalysis, one psychic strategy is called condensation, when one idea represents several overlapping associations. In terms of Obama, condensation allows conservatives to talk about race without openly discussing it.

From early in the presidential campaign, conservatives imagined Obama as a bearded terrorist, raised in a Muslim school and secretly foreign born. Right-wing pundits mispronounced his name as Osama and spat out his middle name, Hussein. They warned us he didn’t raise his hand at the Pledge of Allegiance or wear the flag pin.

These images condensed terrorism, Islamophobia and fear of immigration into one. All have the unifying element of race because all these threats come from non-whites. This fear expressed itself on election night. Obama was like Silas Lynch who “held the surging crowd in the palm of his hand.” The world danced in the street as conservatives armed themselves for an onslaught. I watched a story about white men crowding the Cheaper Than Dirt gun-store in Texas where one buyer said the election was, “The reason I’m here. I’m scared.”

Like Birth of a Nation, conservatives imagine liberals to be like fictional Congressman Stoneman, vindictive radicals who want to punish red-state America. Hence the rumors of FEMA camps set up by the Obama administration to imprison opponents. A rumor played with by Fox News bipolar celebrity Glen Beck. It is an example of another psychic strategy frequently used by conservatives, displacement. This is when an idea that is socially unacceptable can’t be expressed so its emotional energy is channeled through associative links to an acceptable one.

Racist images of Obama began early but the one that became popular on the Right was Obama as Joker, white-faced, red-lipped and smiling evil. Obama-Joker fuses the older and unacceptable red-lipped Sambo, a racist image of blacks as childlike mischief-makers with the anarchist Joker who cackles as “the world burns.” It’s an act of displacement with the linking feature being the red-lips and the twist, Obama-Joker is not a dumb Sambo but a demonic trickster who will destroy us.

Over the summer Beck said “The healthcare bill is the beginning of reparations. If you want to go medical school, they are going to get more federal dollars if they have proven that they are putting minorities ahead.” Again Beck is displacing the fear of black militias terrorizing whites onto a hospital scene where the linking image is incompetent angry blacks with sharp tools near a vulnerable white body.

At Tea Party protests some proudly flaunted signs reading “Obama’s Plan/White Slavery” or depicted Obama as an African witch doctor. Most didn’t, but under the Tea-Bagger rhetoric of tax burden was the displaced racism of Birth of a Nation where corrupt black politicians steal from the treasury and bankrupt the state.

In the film an ex-slave turned Union soldier named Gus lusts after a white woman. He chases her and seeing his hungry face and hot hands, she flings herself from a cliff. In conservatism a woman is often seen as a delicate vessel of a people’s dignity. The image of a defenseless woman fleeing from brutes unleashed by radicals originates in Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France where he rhetorically defends the Queen from revolutionary rabble. Since the Right cannot openly use the scalding imagery of a white woman hunted by a black man, the idea is displaced on to the helpless grandmother preyed upon by Obama’s death panels, another vulnerable woman whose aged body represents the dignity of the people.

In the conservative re-enactment of Birth of a Nation, ACORN fills the role of carpetbaggers and black Federal troops who organize former slaves to steal our money. Which is why videotapes of undercover conservatives, posing as a pimp and a prostitute getting tax advice from ACORN employees, works so well. It confirms the conservative belief that Blacks are a sexual threat and that wealth is wasted on trying to improve them.

The Right has now moved to the fantasy’s final scene of armed violence. Men with assault rifles regularly stand outside the president’s speeches. Unlike Ben Cameron they don’t wear white sheets but rather the ideological whiteness of patriotism and sovereign rights but they carry real weapons to terrorize us back in line. The line they imagine runs between patriot and foreigner, Christian and heathen, human and ape. As long as they can play the role of guardians of civilization they delude themselves into believing they are still a part of it. Any social change threatens them and they react with vicious cowardice. So the guns are aimed and focused. They want to kill Obama and through the assassination of the first black president, kill our hope.

[2ndDivisionVet]

I am speechless....

[buccaneer81]

Men with assault rifles regularly stand outside the president’s speeches.

No doubt. They work to protect him. Just like every other occupant of the White House.

[Talisker]

This is beyond insane - it’s literally using outright blood-slander for assassination-baiting.

The Left is the open, brazen, howling enemy of America.

[Cheap_Hessian]

This nightmare of being surrounded by enemies haunts the conservative mind.

Democrats only care about getting elected and gaining power. The truth is their enemy. This nightmare of being surrounded by crooks, evil, and lies haunts the liberal soul.

[freekitty]

These people call themselves “The New York Independent”.

Nothing could be further from the truth. They are as insane as the rest of the lefties.

[Mr. Blond]

A textbook case of schizophrenia.

[New Yawk Minute]

This guy watches too many movies. He should get off the couch and take a look at whats really going on.

[pacpam]

I’d call it hate speech. Projection at its best. And the premise of armed whites dissolves against the truth in that the gentleman referenced is actually black, not white. Will it never be understood that it’s the stated ideas and beliefs that President Obama holds that causes the problem.

[UCFRoadWarrior]

This dude will be disappointed to learn that Glenn Beck agrees with him on the Obama BC issue

[Balata]

This is an example of the left playing the race card.

They can’t compete with conservatives on the merits.

Liberalism truly is a disease.

[smokingfrog]

Brilliant! This guy should be a professor of Incoherent Paranoid Studies at Columbia, or something.

[AzaleaCity5691]

Of course this perpetuates the myth that Yankee Reconstruction was this humane institution.

But the truth is. Confederate vets were disenfranchised. Black militias did roam the South being very hostile to the white populations. The reason that there was a Jim Crow and that there was voter disenfranchisement is that the corruption of black backed Reconstruction governments was so bold that the whites, once conservatives had redeemed the states, blamed black voters for the evils that had happened and viewed disenfranchisement as a way to ensure it could never happen again.

[redpoll]

>>> The image of a defenseless woman fleeing from brutes unleashed by radicals originates in Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France where he rhetorically defends the Queen from revolutionary rabble.<<<

Sounds like the Committee for Public Safety needs another volunteer.

Normally, I’d say this writer is one of useful idiots who will be killed when the revolution is successful, but in this case, I think he’ll be one of the revolutionaries creating the lists of who will be shot.

[HiTech RedNeck]

So we’re just imagining it that black neighborhoods are more crime ridden than white ones?

[WilliamofCarmichael]

Racist?

Is it asking too much for the arrogant jerk to release a document that we little people are required to release many times throughout our life times?

All we are saying♩♪♫
is give release a chance♩♪♫

[HiTech RedNeck]

Independent of common sense, maybe.

[grey_whiskers]

Stand aside, I'll take it.

It contrasts two families, the Northern Stonemans and the Southern Camerons. Congressman Austin Stoneman wants to punish the South and Lincoln’s assassination gives him an excuse. He enlists mulatto protégé Silas Lynch, a hypnotic orator, to rally freed slaves to rule beaten whites. Enfranchised black militias terrorize whites and tax them to poverty.

Land of the Greed Home of the Slave

US of KKKA

Redistribution of Wealth

All accurate so far.

"In terms of Obama, condensation allows conservatives to talk about race without openly discussing it. "

As opposed to Harry Reid, right?

Right-wing pundits mispronounced his name as Osama

They're in good company.

They warned us he didn’t raise his hand at the Pledge of Allegiance or wear the flag pin.

What was your first clue, Einstein?

hese images condensed terrorism, Islamophobia and fear of immigration into one.

Actually, it was more these images:

Racist images of Obama began early but the one that became popular on the Right was Obama as Joker, white-faced, red-lipped and smiling evil.

You mean this?

Notice the caption?

It's not that he's black...nor that he's black and white.

It's that little "red all over" part.

And the guy that started it was from Chicago.

Over the summer Beck said “The healthcare bill is the beginning of reparations. If you want to go medical school, they are going to get more federal dollars if they have proven that they are putting minorities ahead.”

As compared to Robert Reich's statement that "if construction jobs go mainly to white males who already dominate the construction trades, many people who need jobs the most -- women, minorities, and the poor and long-term unemployed -- will be shut out."

So the guns are aimed and focused. They want to kill Obama and through the assassination of the first black president, kill our hope.

So whichever vast left-wing conspiracy pushed Obambi into the Oval Office has figured out he is a setback to their plans, and will throw him under the bus in an über-Krystalnacht moment to try to further solidify their power.

Good luck with that one, idiots.

Cheers!

[TigersEye]

I couldn’t read beyond the second paragraph but it sounded like he was well on his way to invoking every perceived victim of the last 300 years. A little Culture of Victimhood overload there.

[ebshumidors]

Assasinate ‘The One’? And make a martyr? Better to let them drown in their own lies. If he is assasinated, it will be from the leftists that find it useful.

[Between the Lines]

Director D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation glorified the original Klan. His film was based on the book and play The Clansman and the book The Leopard's Spots, both by Thomas Dixon, Jr.. Dixon said his purpose was "to revolutionize northern sentiment by a presentation of history that would transform every man in my audience into a good Democrat!"