My partner has worked for many years doing public relations for various singer/songwriters, both well-known and unknown. One of the fantastic talents she has become acquainted with over those years is the incomparable Janis Ian. This is a woman who was breaking barriers and making social waves before she was in high school. “Society’s Child”. “At 17″. Today she lives in the Nashville area with her wife, Patricia Snyder.
This afternoon we received an email from Janis regarding “Joe the Bigot.”
It was a nice, big sign.
When we got up this morning, it was gone. Worse yet, last night someone or someones had gone up and down the street next to ours, tearing down Obama signs and writing “nigger-lover” and other obscenities on people’s homes and cars. Admittedly, they defaced one McCain sign, but the rest were Obama. My assumption is that these hooligans are so stupid they actually thought “Hey let’s tear down a McCain sign - they’ll think it’s just vandalism then!”
Not surprising that it comes from the Bible Belt area. I was born to and raised by Eastern Kentuckians, and I lived for 20 years in South Central Kentucky, just a few hours from Nashville. The staggering beauty of the mountains and valleys would almost make one forget the dark underbelly of the past. Then you pick up the faint whiff of something old and moldy… the musty smell of something that’s been around too long without enough exposure to the sunlight. It sometimes makes it hard to breathe. This history making election year is exposing some of that mold and mildew to the daylight. And it isn’t a pretty thing. But it requires the dark. It can’t live long once it has been laid bare in the light.
In the Washington Post today is a chilling column by Dana Milbank. Although astute followers of this election season are already aware of the covert racism and hatred that is encoded in the speeches of John McCain and Sarah Palin, in Clearwater, I’m sorry to say, the true bigotry of the McCain/Palin campaign and its supporters reared its ugly head. From the Milbank column:
… Palin’s routine attacks on the media have begun to spill into ugliness. In Clearwater, arriving reporters were greeted with shouts and taunts by the crowd of about 3,000. Palin then went on to blame Katie Couric’s questions for her “less-than-successful interview with kinda mainstream media.” At that, Palin supporters turned on reporters in the press area, waving thunder sticks and shouting abuse. Others hurled obscenities at a camera crew. One Palin supporter shouted a racial epithet at an African American sound man for a network and told him, “Sit down, boy.”
and
The reception had been better in Clearwater, where Palin, speaking to a sea of “Palin Power” and “Sarahcuda” T-shirts, tried to link Obama to the 1960s Weather Underground. “One of his earliest supporters is a man named Bill Ayers,” she said. (”Boooo!” said the crowd.) “And, according to the New York Times, he was a domestic terrorist and part of a group that, quote, ‘launched a campaign of bombings that would target the Pentagon and our U.S. Capitol,’ ” she continued. (”Boooo!” the crowd repeated.)
“Kill him!” proposed one man in the audience.
Palin is no real hockey mom anymore. But she is a pit bull. One who was not raised well to work with others. The cocktail waitress winks and the coy, suggestive head tilting from someone who seeks the second highest office in our nation has been embarassing to me as a woman. But the cold, calculating attacks and innuendoed affirmation for bigotry and hatred that she is spilling forth is purely chilling.
…wake them puppies up!
We need to get the dogs barking on this campaign, and it looks like the Republicans are going to help us rouse ‘em up. The donations for Obama are up again, from regular people, in the wake of the Palin nomination. I sincerely believe the Obama/Biden ticket will prevail in November but there is always a slim chance that McCain will win. That thought terrifies me no end. I certainly don’t need a pitbull in lipstick telling me I have no privacy or choice over my own body or that this country is on a God ordained mission in Iraq. (Part 2 here.)
Fire up, Dems. Sic ‘em.
