If I was king for the day in the liberal world, one of my first commands would be that all liberals "count to ten" before getting "outraged" over the latest conservative political or cultural stunt.
People on the left tend to hit the moral outrage button first whether it's Ann Couter referring to Democratic leaders as "faggots," George Bush talking about Barack Obama in terms of appeasement, or John Hagee's anti-Catholic bigotry.
And that's a big mistake.
In fact, "outrage" is such an emotional reaction that liberals often fail to investigate why conservative polemicists make these kinds of provocative statements. Conservatives are trying to sell books, market radio shows, pump up conservative candidates, and support right-wing causes. How does racist, religiously bigoted, and homophobic statements fit into the marketplace and political strategies of people on the right? How do these kinds of statements actually fit in the American cultural landscape? Because liberals are so quickly outraged by right-wing defiance of political morality, we often miss much of what's going on in the world of conservative polemics.
Perhaps the most important dimension of conservative polemics that liberals fail to understand is the significance of liberal outrage for conservatives. Conservatives make bigoted statements specifically with outraging liberals in mind. From the conservative point of view, Rush Limbaugh looked extremely clever when his "Barack the Magic Negro" caused so much outrage while they thought of the outraged liberals as "emotional," "effeminate" because they were so emotional, and gullible for falling into the outrage trap. Conservatives always see themselves as winning these kinds of controversies unless someone like Don Imus goes too far.
In this way, a clever conservative columnist like Kathleen Parker is neither surprised nor unhappy that a liberal blogger like Glenn Greenwald describes her "
Getting Bubba" column with its testimony to the "blood equity" of rural whites as "one of the most repellant columns one would ever read" or a Chicago Tribune writer called it "shameful and insulting to Americans of every stripe in this country." Parker has written in defense of date rapists and mooned over George Bush's irresistible sexual attractiveness. So, she knows very well how to outrage liberals. She also knows that liberal outrage will increase her clout as a conservative and further her career as an op-ed columnist. For writers like Parker, there's career gold in outraging people on the left.
But Parker's "Getting Bubba" column is worth thinking and liberals would see the full depth of conservative cynicism if they looked closely.
Parker has two basic arguments. First, building on a remark by Josh Fry of West Virginia about wanting a "full-blooded American" as president, Parker argues that "white Americans primarily -- and Southerners, rural and small-town folks especially"-- should be seen as "full-blooded Americans" because they've built up a full "blood equity" in the United States through military service and agricultural labor. This is the point where liberals get outraged because Parker's rhetoric purposefully mirrors the "blood and soil" rhetoric that the Nazis used to promote the Third Reich.
But what was Parker trying to accomplish besides outraging liberals? By defining Southern, small-town, and rural whites as "full-blooded Americans," Parker is one of a long-line of polemicists who have been looking for a way to give white people a symbolic privilege as "real Americans" without using specifically racist language. Richard Nixon might have begun the trend when he used the term "silent majority" back in 1968. For the late Jerry Falwell, it was the "moral majority." "Mainstream," "normal," and "heartland," are among the many honorific terms have been used to characterize non-urban whites either.
None of the people who promote this kind of language will admite to being racist, but they all mean to convey that traditionalist rural whites are just more "special" than blacks, Hispanics, and Asian-Americans, and more "real" than urban whites or the white liberals in rural areas. According to Parker:
. . . so-called "ordinary Americans" aren't so easily manipulated and they don't need interpreters. They can spot a poser a mile off and they have a hound's nose for snootiness. They've got no truck with people who condescend nor tolerance for that down-the-nose glance from people who don't know the things they know.
Of course, this is all nonsense. People who live in small Southern towns like Morehead realize that an uncomfortable percentage of the "full-blooded Americans" in town are actually "full-blooded Confederates" who fly Confederate flags outside their homes, display Confederate flag bumper stickers, and refight the Civil War with any "Yankee" they see.
Those who live in small Southern towns also know that "heritage" often means isolation from the main paths of American progress. Whether it's isolation from transportation networks, isolation from large-scale industry and finance, or isolation from national trends, West Virginia, Eastern Kentucky and other rural areas in the South have often viewed themselves as separate from the rest of the United States. Kathleen Parker may represent whites in areas like Eastern Kentucky as "full-blooded Americans," but whites in this area are also painfully aware of the stereotypes of ignorant hillbillies, Elmer Gantry religious bigotry, and Deliverance-style deformity and violence that define rural Southerners as separate from the mainstream of American life.
Given the tenuous connections of this region to the rest of the country, the "American-ness" of Eastern Kentucky is always somewhat in doubt. In this context, Kathleen Parker's tribute to "full-blooded Americans" is not only a duplicitous play on racial bigotry, it's also a bitter irony to rural and Southern whites she's exploiting to make her point.
Parker's second argument is even more interesting. She claims that:
What they know is that their forefathers fought and died for an America that has worked pretty well for more than 200 years. What they sense is that their heritage is being swept under the carpet while multiculturalism becomes the new national narrative. And they fear what else might get lost in the remodeling of America.
Here, Parker gets at real dangers with multicultural narratives because contemporary multiculturalism excludes Southern and rural whites. In multicultural narratives, Barack Obama, Tiger Woods, the 180 languages in the Los Angeles School District, and global cities like Miami are the future while the traditions of Southern and rural whites are only seen as significant as sources of resistance to that future. Multi-cultural liberals have schooled themselves in recognizing the value of African-American, Islamic, and indigenous cultures while still engaging in condescension toward traditionalist white cultures in America.
Multi-cultural developments and the Obama candidacy in particular have the potential to create a much wider cultural mainstream in the United States. However, the fully potential of multi-cultural America will never be realized until the multi-culturalism and white rural America come to an accommodation.
through their hard work in clearing the forests, breaking the sod, tilling the soil, and growing the crops.
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