The Voice of Treason

“Words matter. Words mean something.”

– Rush Limbaugh

“Actions speak louder than words.”

– Author disputed

“Little children, let us not love with word or with tongue, but in deed and truth.”

– John 3:17,18

“Action speaks louder than words but not nearly as often.”

– Mark Twain

Ah, all The Great Debates revisited. Church v. State. Words v. Actions. God v. Man. Old Testament v. New Testament. Right v. Left. The Big Question: Is God – if he exists – a political animal? I think many people believe, as I do, that God is just this seasoned, hardworking conservative guy who produced a good-natured, long-haired, sandal-wearing hippie son. They might not see eye-to-eye on everything, and certainly they employ different methods, but their relationship still works.

I’m reminded of growing up in Chicago in the 1960s with my lapsed Roman Catholic Italian-American mother and my sister, the Conflicted Conservative. A misanthrope, who often made Florence King look like Mother Teresa, she was also the most generous, kind-hearted, least racist person I’d known. But what she said sometimes didn’t always jive with what she did or how she conducted herself. Uh, perhaps she was nuanced.

A “for instance.” I’ve mentioned we lived in Rogers Park – a “safe” neighborhood. I imagine, looking back now, that this was code for a neighborhood that was white. In truth, it was mixed, diverse even by today’s standards, yet predominantly Jewish. Mixed, yes, but not mixed with blacks. This was Mayor Richard J. Daley’s Chicago, remember, where whites lived on the North Side and blacks lived on the South Side. An undisputed fact of life. That was Rogers Park in the mid-1960s. Times have changed and so has the neighborhood.

Shortly before we left Chicago for Prescott, Arizona, my mother flirted with the idea of moving us into one of those new apartment buildings the city was putting up for lower income families. Read: The Projects. I clearly remember her enthusiasm. My older sisters were married, my brother was off to an Air Force base in Texas, and it was just me, my sister, my mother, two cats and a raccoon. She had paperwork and glossy brochures.

“We could live on the 20th floor! Or the 22nd! Or the 24th! How exciting would that be?”

My sister, about fifteen at the time and always the voice of reason where my mother was concerned, looked at me – I was almost nine – then at my mother.

“You want her raped in the elevator?”

Again, the most generous, kind-hearted, least racist person I’d known until I met T. He was eighteen, wore heavy metal T-shirts and ringlets down to his waist, and he and his brother had been raised by their single mother on the Berkeley campus. Polar opposites? Not really. I observed him at work and thought to myself: This boy is conservative and doesn’t even know it. And the first person I’d known who truly evaluated each person he met on the content of his or her character and not skin color, economic status, or nationality. Eighteen years later, that hasn’t changed.

And so it was interesting to hear his assessment of Michelle Obama after a CNN profile that likened her to Jacqueline Lee Bouvier Kennedy Onassis: “She’s ghetto.”

This statement had little to do with the color of her skin. I’ve been watching Mrs. Obama for some time and every time I see or hear her I’m reminded of one of the more colorful expressions my mother learned from my father: “Her shit don’t stink, but her farts give her away.”

Michelle LaVaughn Robinson Obama was born in 1964 and raised on the South Side of Chicago. I was born a few years earlier and raised on the North Side. On the surface, one might think Michelle could have been envious of me. I was a white girl with straight honey-colored hair and (then) blue eyes and I lived in an apartment on a tree-lined block just steps from Lake Michigan. On the surface, however, I believe I probably would have been more envious of her. She had what I didn’t have: two parents with dual incomes, fewer siblings, and – frankly – probably less competition in school. At my school, I was up against some real super-geniuses – not only the Jewish kids, but also the Asian kids and a lot of the European immigrants. The most super of the super-geniuses, in fact, was a quirky, high-strung Scots-Irish girl named Karen. That kid was Bill Buckley in Mary Janes.

My parents had been separated as long as I’d known them. Michelle’s parents were not. My mother waited tables to support us. Michelle’s dad had a good job with the city and her mom worked for Spiegel. (I just loved the Spiegel catalog when I was a kid.) And Michelle only had to share her parents’ affection with one sibling – a brother who was very close to her age. Gosh, her life sounded so normal. So different from what I had and so close to what I’d always wished for.

Which brings us to the current issue of the Obamas and Trinity United Church of Christ.

“Racism is so deeply ingrained in this country that he (Barack Obama) could be flawless in terms of his policies. But he’s still a black man in this country which has a sorry history in terms of how it sees African-American males. That’s my 65-year-old, jaded perception of where this country is.”

– Reverend Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr., March 2007

Relatively tame stuff compared to the videos from the pulpit. My, the response to those sermons! Shocking? No, disheartening. Obviously the people who are so wide-eyed over this never listened to Ray Taliaferro during the Reagan-Bush years. This is old hat, folks. And disheartening because it’s a clear sign that a large segment of the black community has not progressed. Yes, there is racism. But racism is changing. The country has been changing. Hearts and minds have been changed. Well, some, anyway.

What caught my ear when listening to Reverend Wright was the part where he chastised blacks for killing other blacks. What should be asked is this: If blacks shouldn’t be killing blacks because blacks aren’t “the enemy,” then who exactly is “the enemy” and who should blacks be killing? The Obamas have been attending that church for twenty years; perhaps they have the answer.

This “controversy” reminds me of when I was in class with a middle-aged woman who suddenly snotted up in the middle of the session and confided that her life had been turned upside down because the pastor of her church where she’d been a member for most of her life said something about homosexuals that she just didn’t agree with. With tears in her eyes, she asked me what she should do. Torn to bits, she felt that the right thing was to leave her church, but she had a history there, had made dear friends, and loved and respected many of the parishioners. These people were family. But then this something was said, and it challenged her beliefs. Clearly a problem for this woman because it made her question her religion, herself, and everything she had believed about her world.

I never belonged to a church or a particular religion, I told her, so I probably wasn’t the person who should advise her. I belong to a political party and I don’t agree with everything every member of it says, but that’s politics and not religion. If what your pastor said is so offensive to you, perhaps you should find a pastor who believes what you believe. You chose your doctor, your dentist, your hairdresser, and your bank. You can choose another church and still maintain the relationships with those people you consider family. If they truly are your family, they’ll understand and accept your decision. And if they don’t, then maybe you’ll learn something. But what do I know? I subscribe to a political party and not a church. Politics isn’t religion, right?

One would think. As for Reverend Wright, the more I listen to him the less he sounds inspirational and the more he sounds like a run-of-the-mill politician. Coincidentally, the same can be said of his longtime parishioner, Senator Obama.

I found some great anecdotes online this week and I’ll share two of them here. The first:

“At a U2 concert in Ireland, the lead singer Bono asks the audience for some quiet. Then he starts to slowly clap his hands. Holding the audience in total silence, he says into the microphone, ‘I want you to think about something. Every time I clap my hands, a child in Africa dies.’

A voice from the audience yells out, ‘Then stop clapping, you asshole!’”

Jay Nordlinger says he saw it in the humor section of an Indian publication that he was reading in an Indian restaurant in Cleveland. “I can’t vouch for its veracity; but I can vouch for its funniness.” It is funny, and that’s probably why John Derbyshire, also on NRO, posted the same anecdote, this time as “a joke” sent to him by a reader, with a slightly different ending: “[Expletive] stop doing it then!”

It isn’t new — go online and you’ll find it everywhere, and variations on the same theme. Snopes says there’s no truth to it, but provides a great variation:

“At a recent rural elementary school meeting in north Florida (Hillary Clinton) asked the kids audience for total quiet. Then, in the silence, she slowly started to clap her hands, once every few seconds. Holding the audience in total silence, she said into the microphone, ‘Every time I clap my hands, a child in America dies from gun violence.’

A young voice with a proud Southern accent from the front of the crowd pierced the silence:

“Well, just stop clappin’, ya evil bitch!”

It’s the old saying: “It may not be true, but it sounds true.”

Another anecdote that sounds true appeared in Peggy Noonan’s column today:

“The story as I was told it is that in the early years of her prime ministership, Margaret Thatcher held a meeting with her aides and staff, all of whom were dominated by her, even awed. When it was over she invited her cabinet chiefs to join her at dinner in a nearby restaurant. They went, arrayed themselves around the table, jockeyed for her attention. A young waiter came and asked if they’d like to hear the specials. Mrs. Thatcher said, ‘I will have beef.’

Yes, said the waiter. ‘And the vegetables?’

‘They will have beef too.’

I’ve compared Hillary to Maggie Thatcher many times here, and have used numerous quotes to illustrate what it is that sets her apart. “Being powerful is like being a lady. If you have to tell people you are, you aren’t.” And another of my favorites: “This lady is not for turning.” Again, never wobbly.

Noonan, in today’s column, provides yet another example of what made Thatcher the true Iron Lady:

“In fact, she wasn’t so much a woman as a lady. I remember a gentleman who worked with her speaking of her allure, how she’d relax after a late-night meeting and you’d walk by and catch just the faintest whiff of perfume, smoke and scotch. She worked hard and was tough. One always imagined her lightly smacking some incompetent on the head with her purse, for she carried a purse, as a lady would. She is still tough. A Reagan aide told me that after she was incapacitated by a stroke she flew to Reagan’s funeral in Washington, went through the ceremony, flew with Mrs. Reagan to California for the burial, and never once on the plane removed her heels. That is tough.”

It was the purse thing that caught my attention. I remember criticizing the Clintons’ Sopranos parody video here on The V.O.T. because I found Hillary’s entrance – sans handbag – so distracting. I’ve always carried a purse and I don’t leave home without it unless I’m just going for a dogwalk. My mother was different; she only carried one when she was toting tips home from work. Otherwise, she always kept a leather wallet in her hand.

Because I’m convinced that nothing the Clintons do isn’t done for a specific reason, I got caught up in the significance of the absence of the purse. Did she not want to look girly? Is Bill picking up the tab? Did Hillary call the order in, along with her credit card number, in advance? Is she the type who just slips a debit card and a lip gloss in her pocket before she hits the road? Or maybe they stiffed the place, as one of many versions of this week’s waitress story suggests. Never mind… I tend to obsess.

But Noonan also mentions Obama in this article and I’m glad she did. He hasn’t been good at attacking Hillary on the campaign trail and it makes one think he’s afraid to. No one can blame him. Perhaps he should study Thatcher. But he’s put himself in an awkward position by saying he wants to change the tone of the race. He can’t very well say mean things, now can he? That’s why I was energized earlier this week when he resurrected his “generational” argument. He’d tried that one out early on and I think it fell flat because he tried to remove himself from the rest of the pack of Boomers and portray himself as a GenXer. I spent a good deal of time here analyzing that strategery and pointed out that Barack Obama is no GenXer. He, like me, is also a Baby Boomer. He’s a couple years younger, sure, born in the early Sixties, but he is correct in saying that he is different because of it. He is not of the Forties or Fifties and that does make a difference. I appeared in the final quarter of 1959, but all my siblings debuted between 1940 and 1953. Being a child of the Sixties – literally a child, a little kid – and coming of age in the Sixties are two very different things. Obama needs to stick with this theme and really work it.

There’s another reason. If 1992 was all about change, then a return to the Clintons in 2008 is a rejection of that. That ’92 campaign was rolled out as a break from something – a break from everything that other generation represented. The generation of Ronald Reagan, and George and Barbara Bush. At the time I interpreted it as a break from a generation of people who knew how to use their dinner utensils. It was a break from basic manners, decency, and, frankly, from class.

What I actually like about Barack Obama is that he exhibits a bit of that old-fashioned class that seems to be lacking in so many of his generation. I’ve noticed this in many of the younger Boomers – I think it’s as if they’re trying to apologize and make amends for the bad behavior of their older peers. I really think it’s because many of us were afterthoughts. Late additions. Some of our parents were relatively young when they had our siblings, then thought they were done with childrearing. But then, after the dust settled, they decided to have just one more. We were the ones who grew up with the older, perhaps wiser, version of our parents. Our siblings were gone, but we were still there, living with our parents. Perhaps we even developed an appreciation of the previous generation. Their films, their music, their sensibilities. But then… well, I could just be smokin’ crack.

Says Noonan:

“I am not sure of the salience of Mr. Obama’s new-generational approach. Mrs. Clinton’s generation, he suggests, is caught in the 1960s, fighting old battles, clinging to old divisions, frozen in time, and the way to get past it is to get past her. Maybe this will resonate. But I don’t think Mrs. Clinton is the exemplar of a generation, she is the exemplar of a quadrant within a generation, and it is the quadrant the rest of us of that generation do not like. They came from comfort and stability, visited poverty as part of a college program, fashionably disliked their country, and cultivated a bitterness that was wholly unearned. They went on to become investment bankers and politicians and enjoy wealth, power or both.

Mr. Obama should go after them, not a generation but a type, the smug and entitled. No one really likes them. They showed it this week.”

Not to smear Bono – he was born a few months after me and is part of a group that talks about making a difference and then actually does something. There are those, of course, who just talk and expect other people to do the heavy lifting. They’re the ones who tell you to clap, then inform you that you’ve, symbolically, just killed a child on the other side of the world, yet do nothing themselves to address the problem. They are the people who turn an entire TV network green and push it in your face – ad nauseum.

I live with a GenXer who’s convinced that the world will be a better place once the Boomers have all just gone away. Senator Obama and his staff should be aware that there are many voters out here who share that opinion.