The Demise of "Niggardly"

According to Dictionary.com, the word "niggardly" is defined thusly:

niggardly
  Adjective:
  1. reluctant to give or spend; stingy; miserly.
  2. meanly or ungenerously small or scanty: -- "a niggardly tip to a waiter".
  Adverb:
  3. in the manner of a niggard.

According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, its etymology is thus:

niggard (n.) "mean person, miser," late 14c., nygart, of uncertain origin. The suffix suggests French origin (see -ard), but the root word is possibly from earlier nig "stingy" (c.1300), perhaps from a Scandinavian source related to Old Norse hnøggr "stingy," from Proto-Germanic *khnauwjaz (source of Swedish njugg "close, careful," German genau "precise, exact"), and to Old English hneaw "stingy, niggardly," which did not survive in Middle English.

Because it is so close in pronunciation -- or in hearing at least -- to the notorious "n-word", it has pretty much fallen out of polite conversation. I am language scholar enough to realize that words fall out of our vocabulary all the time. The "ruth" in "ruthless" for example, was in use just a hundred years ago or so. It's still a word that exists, but it might as well not since no one uses it except as the first part of its negative, ruthless. The "gruntled" in disgruntled is another that exists only in its negative. When was the last time you heard of anyone who was "gruntled" except in the form of some semi-clever wordplay?

All languages change and grow over time. New words are added, old words are cast aside and fall out. I really can't get exercised over the loss of "niggardly" -- if it is routinely heard by black people as a racist term, it ought to be retired.

Once I had a black woman on my staff come up to me completely pissed, livid, that our computer geek had used the word in her presence. I think I handled it pretty well, given the circumstances. I led her over to the office dictionary and together we looked it up, she found that there was nothing racist about it, neither in the word itself nor in its etymology. And that pretty much defused the situation, but it was a signal to me to watch my own language for these kinds of accidental racisms, words which are in context not racist at all but that sound racist to a hearer who was already attuned from birth to routinely hear the "N-word" coming out of a white person's mouth.

So it is good bye to "niggardly". It is, in fact, still a perfectly usable word, but it freights too much unintentional baggage to be used in a conversation. Probably not in written communications, either.

And it is of course even worse with the base of the word, "niggard", a noun for someone who is niggardly. That is even more likely to be misheard and misinterpreted.

Martin Luther King: It Was More Than a Dream

Today is Martin Luther King Day, and it has been 50 years since he gave the "I Have a Dream" speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. That speech and maybe a couple of marches are pretty much all he is remembered for any more by the majority of Americans, but that's not all that he did.

Over at The Daily Kos there's an excellent and thought-provoking piece called Most of You Have No Idea What Martin Luther King Actually Did that is well worth reading.

Excerpt:

...Because at this point in our amnesiac national existence, my question pretty much reflects the national civic religion view of what Dr. King accomplished. He gave this great speech. Or some people say, "he marched." I was so angry at Mrs. Clinton during the primaries when she said that Dr. King marched, but it was LBJ who delivered the Civil Rights Act.
At this point, I would like to remind everyone exactly what Martin Luther King did, and it wasn't that he "marched" or gave a great speech.
My father told me with a sort of cold fury, "Dr. King ended the terror of living in the south."

Go ahead and read it all. It will likely change the way you think about Martin Luther King.

My Review of The Turner Diaries

I finally took my own advice (I'm good at dishing it out, not so good at taking it myself) and read The Turner Diaries. I was fully prepared to hate it -- I was looking forward to talking about a constipated writing style, cardboard cutout characters, a stumbling plot and wooden prose descriptions. I was actually more than a little disappointed when I got none of that stuff. It is, very surprisingly and for the most part, well-written.

The very first chapter, in which the narrator describes four "Negroes" from the "political police" kicking down his door to search for guns (which are of course outlawed), is a Wayne LaPierre wet dream. Soon our "hero" and the members of his group, The Organization (as "the resistance" is called), organized like a series of communist-like "cells", blows up the FBI building with a truck bomb containing ... ammonium nitrate. It's not a coincidence that Timothy McVeigh had two pages from this book in his getaway car after the Oklahoma City bombing. They were the very two pages that describe the preparations for blowing up the FBI; I won't provide it here --it's a workable blueprint for bomb making.

Ultimately, I think that it's really an inversion of, and a through-the-looking-glass take, on the Weather Underground's journey in the early 70s. Take away all the White Supremacy stuff and you have a ripping good tale, a dystopian alternate history/sci-fi take on the future as imagined in 1978. All of the wackjob stuff you would expect is in here: Confiscation of guns, requirement to have an electronic ID to buy stuff, the need to go "underground" and fight against The System, the stockpiling of weapons and bomb-making materials.

I'm generally a big fan of the dystopian fiction genre (e.g. The Iron Heel by Jack London, 1984 by George Orwell, It Can't Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis). But this is really beyond the pale -- I've never read anything that is so matter-of-fact about the necessity to elevate the White Race by killing off all "subhuman mongrels", e.g. the blacks, the Jews, the Chicanos/Hispanics, the Asians, the mixed-race whites, etc. The list of intended victims runs into the billions.

While in the main the book is a gripping narrative of the actions of one Earl Turner, in the last quarter of the book or so it veers off into racist and anti-Semitic polemic that is hard to take. Besides (spoiler alert), all non-whites die in the end. And I do mean all. It's not a pretty prediction, but it's one that the Neo-Nazis and others of their ilk salivate over. This book really does enact the "Final Solution", on everyone that isn't white. Not surprising, since William Pierce, the author, was a Big Shot in the Neo-Nazi movement in this country and founded the National Alliance white-separatist, white nationalist, anti-Semitic organization. That fact was the only thing that kept me from believing that it was intended as a overblown, over-the-top satire on Nazis. You remember Poe's Law. The notorious fascist group, The Order, took its name and behavior directly from the book, which had an organization with the same name and the same designs.

This book is definitely worth reading. if only to get a chilling insight into the thinking of these people.

NOTE: As a sidebar, while I was reading it, I could not help but notice some eerie parallels between this book (1978) and The Talking Heads' song,  "Life During Wartime" (1979) -- was the song inspired by this book and not, despite what David Byrne claimed, the Weather Underground? I can see why he'd try to keep that part to himself.

It's an interesting question. The descriptions of life on the run in the song can be equally -- and is some cases, better --  applied to the events in this book.

Check out the lyrics, especially this line: "Heard about Houston? Heard about Detroit? Heard about Pittsburgh, PA?" That line has always been somewhat of a mystery to me. Until I read this book. The first bomb set off by The Organization (as "the resistance" is called) was set off in Houston. (On September 11, wrong year. Make of that what you will...) Later on, a bomb takes out Detroit, and there is also a surprise and deadly race riot in Pittsburgh by the non-whites who are not willing to kowtow to their new overlords.

It's in the book. I tried to find anything on the Internet that makes this correlation, and I couldn't find it. Maybe I am one of a very few people who have both heard the song enough to remember the lyrics and read this book. It doesn't seem to me that there would be a lot of crossover audience...

You can download The Turner Diaries free in a variety of formats, if you want to read it for yourself. I'm not recommending it as proper reading, but we must know our enemy!

The Invention of the Police

I discovered a new-to-me blog, Works in Theory, where I just read an interesting think-piece entitled Origins of the Police:

In England and the United States, the police were invented within the space of just a few decades—roughly from 1825 to 1855.
The new institution was not a response to an increase in crime, and it really didn’t lead to new methods for dealing with crime. The most common way for authorities to solve a crime, before and since the invention of police, has been for someone to tell them who did it.
Besides, crime has to do with the acts of individuals, and the ruling elites who invented the police were responding to challenges posed by collective action. To put it in a nutshell: The authorities created the police in response to large, defiant crowds. That’s
— strikes in England,
— riots in the Northern US,
— and the threat of slave insurrections in the South.
So the police are a response to crowds, not to crime.

The author, David Whitehouse, takes the long view from a Socialist perspective of the rise of capitalism and the corollary invention and evolution of the police, especially in three US cities, New York, Charleston SC and Philadelphia. He comes to the inescapable conclusion that the police are doing today what they have always done, what they were set up to do: Control by intimidation certain large segments of the population to force them into "obeying the law".

It's a long article but it is well worth the time it will take to read it.

Idris Elba a Black James Bond? Great! -- Not So Fast, Says Rushbo

A little background: Idris Elba is one of my all-time favorite actors. Who can forget him as Russell "Stringer" Bell, the crimelord/aspiring businessman in that great HBO series, The Wire? Or as the angst-ridden police Detective John Luther in the terrific BBC series, Luther? He's been suggested as a possible future movie version of James Bond

With his versatility and range, along with being able to project a sense of smoldering danger, he would be great at playing that role. James Bond may have been originally conceived as a blue-eyed half-Scots half-Swiss white guy by his "daddy" Ian Fleming back in 1953 (over 60 years ago!), but there is nothing in his character or behavior or job description that would preclude the role being taken by a black man. I'm not aware of anyone having a fit over Bond's CIA pal, Felix Leiter, turning black in 2006 for Casino Royale.

But wait! I forgot to include the wheezy rants of America's foremost neo-19th-Century wingnut, that drug-addled ass-pimpled flailing gas-bag draft dodger, Rush Limbaugh:

"James Bond is a total concept put together by Ian Fleming. He was white and Scottish. Period. That is who James Bond is," Limbaugh said.
"But now [they are] suggesting that the next James Bond should be Idris Elba, a black Briton, rather than a white from Scotland. But that's not who James Bond is."
And as if that wasn't bad enough…Limbaugh finished up his rant with an alarmingly self-aware thought.
"I know it's racist to probably point this out."

Gee, ya think?

As the E! Online story pointed out, that statement is, in fact, "alarmingly self-aware" of him. Could Rush Limbaugh finally get so self-aware that he sees that he's become totally irrelevant?

No, I'm not counting on it either.

"A White and Delightsome People"

It used to be that the Mormons believed and taught that all Native Americans were descended from a group of emigrants from the Middle East to the West Coast of the Americas about 600 BCE(!) who were eventually called "Lamanites", followers of a guy named Laman in the big civil war that happened circa 400 AD, wherein all of the Lamanites slaughtered to the last man their rival tribe, the Nephites. This was a Very Big Deal, with mounted cavalry, chariots pulled by horses, steel swords, the whole works. Never mind the total absence of historical/sociological/biological/archeological evidence of all this, seeing as how, for example, the remains of horses, chariots, steel swords, etc., have not been found anywhere in the Pre-Columbian Western Hemisphere and there is absolutely zero Middle Eastern DNA in the genetics of the "Indians".

However, long before this big battle, as punishment for their apparently innate rebelliousness, God cursed those Lamanites with a "skin of blackness" so that they would "not be enticing" to the Nephites. Who remained "white", of course.

Despite that curse, the Lamanites embarked on some serious ass-kicking, stomped the Nephites literally out of existence, and wasted no time in populating the North and South American continents with up to 50 million people or more by the time Columbus showed up late to the party. And that population explosion all happened in just a little over 1000 years. I'll leave it to you to do the math on that, but me, I don't think it really adds up.

The Mormon Church had for years an "Indian Placement Program", wherein it identified the best and the brightest among the children of the various tribes that inhabited Mormon Country and yanked them off the rez to be raised the homes of middle-class white Mormon foster parents, all in the interest of the betterment of the race by erasing their Native culture and grinding "civilization" into them. Not to mention the salvation of their very souls by infecting them at an early age with the basic tenets of Mormonism.

This all started in 1947, and, coincidentally I'm sure, the Navajo Nation, primary recipient of this cultural hijacking and ideological brainwashing, had become suddenly wealthy in strategic minerals, specifically uranium, which was needed to fuel the nuclear armaments industry. Many of the Indian Placement Program alumni went on to positions of power and authority in theor tribes and have become individually quite successful economically. It was initially limited just to the Navajo Nation but later it expanded out to include the Hopi and other "strategically-important" tribes. Hardscrabble poverty-ridden tribes like the Paiute had to "suck hind tit" -- they apparently had no place in "God's Plan" for the betterment of the Savages.

Sadly, I have to report that none of these "Lamanite Brethren" have turned into a "white and delightsome people" yet, despite the promise of God that if they kept the commandments, served the faith, exalted Joseph Smith, stayed away from the booze, etc., then He would lift that horrible curse and turn them into that white and delightsome people. Now of course, the newer versions of the Book of Mormon (the so-called-by-Mormons "the world's most perfect book" -- which has undergone several thousand editorial revisions over the 170+ years it's been in print...) calls it a "pure and delightsome people".

Jeez, though. It's not like the Mormons didn't try really really hard, and wish-oh-wish with all their might.

Here's no less an authority than Mormon "Apostle" and later Prophet, Seer and Revelator of the Church, (aka the "head honcho") Spencer W. Kimball, speaking at a Mormon General Conference in 1960:

I saw a striking contrast in the progress of the Indian people today... The day of the Lamanites is nigh. For years they have been growing delightsome, and they are now becoming white and delightsome, as they were promised. In this picture of the twenty Lamanite missionaries, fifteen of the twenty were as light as Anglos, five were darker but equally delightsome. The children in the home placement program in Utah are often lighter than their brothers and sisters in the hogans on the reservation. At one meeting a father and mother and their sixteen-year-old daughter we represent, the little member girl—sixteen—sitting between the dark father and mother, and it was evident she was several shades lighter than her parents—on the same reservation, in the same hogan, subject to the same sun and wind and weather... These young members of the Church are changing to whiteness and to delightsomeness. One white elder jokingly said that he and his companion were donating blood regularly to the hospital in the hope that the process might be accelerated.

This was just 13 years after the program had started. Jeez, you'd think that the whole Navajo Nation would have achieved that elusive "white and delightsome" status by now.

But now that I think of it, isn't one of the symptoms of radiation poisoning through lengthy exposure to uranium a bleaching out of the skin to a deathly pallor?

Or maybe that's just death itself. It's called a "deathly pallor" for a reason, I guess...

We've Had Quite Enough of Kim Kardashian

Jeez, let's just stop with all this Kim Kardashian crap. She has eaten up enough bandwidth already. (For those of you who have been living in a cave in Tora Bora, she is of course the poster girl for being Famous for Being Famous and nothing else.) Now apparently she has felt her fame slipping a bit, so she's come up with a new hook. Nakedity. Nudeness. Full frontal and full backal nudity. Showing off her butt and boobs with the hope of "breaking the Internet".  

"Breaking the Internet"? Really?

But I guess if it's all you've got going for her,  you go with what you've got.

Over at theGrio there's an interesting story about this cheeky display, called Kim Kardashian doesn’t realize she’s the butt of an old racial joke (ha-ha) that puts that famous-for-being-famous ass of hers in a little historical perspective.

Consider this: Black women with extremely large derrieres were quite the vogue in sideshows and freak exhibits (yes) in the 19th century, and Kim has -- wittingly or unwittingly -- brought that racist concept back into focus.

Read the whole story for a round and firm and fully packed insight into this. It's even got pictures (nudge-nudge, wink-wink)...

BTW, the Urban Dictionary has an apt (if marginally offensive, but hey, it's the Urban Dictionary...) appellation for Kim Kardashian and her ilk: Celebutard.

Religion, Race and the Old Double Standard

Andrew Sullivan, although I think he can be a bit of a dick at times, usually has some interesting stuff to say about politics. And this week at The Daily Beast, he's hit one out of the park:

Imagine for a moment that Barack Obama had never attended Jeremiah Wright's church in Chicago and had decided to attend services, and proselytize for, a black separatist, nationalist church that refused to allow whites to participate in crucial religious services because white people had been condemned by God for their iniquity in the ancient past and had been for ever marked white so black Americans would know instantly to keep their distance. In fact, the definition of white in this black supremacist church was just one drop of white blood in a black person. It was Nazi-like in its racist precision and exclusion. Whites were denied the rites that made a person a full member of the church. Even blacks with a tiny strain of white DNA were kept from full participation.
Imagine further that backing this racist church was not a youthful folly on Obama's part, but a profound commitment - that he went on a mission abroad to convert Christians to a new religion based on black racial supremacy, and has often said that the most important thing in his entire life to this day is a church whose sacred scripture declares white people to be cursed by God for their past sins - and the sign of this curse is their white skin.
A simple question: Do you think this issue would not come up in a general election or a primary? If Obama was subjected to news cycle after news cycle of clips of Obama's actual former pastor, Jeremiah Wright, can you imagine the outrage if Obama had actually been a part of a black supremacist church - that denied whites equal access to the sacraments - for over a decade in his adult life?

Well, a little role reversal, a little whitewashing of images, and voilá, may I present Mitt Romney, lifetime member of the long-time white-supremacist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints -- Mormon, for short.

Go ahead and finish the whole story for a complete look at Bishop Romney and his church. We can't afford to have this guy as president.

Traveling Atheist Billboard Attacks Mormons

Over at CNN there's a story entitled Atheist billboard attacks Romney's faith, but Mormons say it's misleading.

The billboard says, simply, "No blacks allowed (until 1978); No gays allowed (current); Shame on Mormonism".

Naturally The One True Church is all in a lather about it:

"People are surely free to disagree with us on the facts," Dale Jones, a church spokesman, wrote in an e-mail to CNN. "This group seems not to know that there have been black members of the Church since our earliest history, and there are many faithful gay members of the Church today."

But that really doesn't tell the whole story, either. Black people were certainly not denied membership in the church. They were "only" denied the priesthood. Doesn't sound like it's such a big deal, except for the fact that the entire church is built on the patriarchal structure of the priesthood. Without having it conferred on you -- which is standard for every male member of the church -- you can't hold a church office, you can't be become a scout leader (and the Mormons are into scouting big time), you can't officiate at any church-related function, you can't bless the sacrament, you can't even bless your own children. All of these things are extremely important to the Mormons, and withholding the priesthood from the "unworthy" is, in fact, a Very Big Deal in the church.

And you have to wonder about the self-hating African-Americans who were willing to put up with this nonsense prior to 1978. Yeah, there may have been black Mormons prior to that time, but I'll bet they were few and far between.

I saw a group of black Mormons on The Daily Show last week, and one of them said, in defense of the church, that many churches exhibited overt racism in their history. Yeah, true enough, but does that really excuse the racism in the Mormon church that existed officially up until 1978?

1978. Think about it. That's so recent that it's barely history.

Meanwhile, Back on the Boston Plantation...

How fucked up is this? The Massachusetts Rethugs are paying unemployed black people to campaign for Scott Brown.

They are getting a "per diem" payment of about 8 bucks an hour to walk around in predominately black neighborhoods wearing t-shirts that say "Obama Supporters for Brown". While I guess that it is technically legal, it is fucked up in so many ways that I can't think about it without my head wanting to explode.

Exploitation? Hell, yes. Who wouldn't take that eight bucks if they were homeless and unemployed?

And maybe when the election is over, Scott Brown, if he manages to win, can find a job for all those lazy shiftless newly-unemployed "Negroes" on one of the plantations down south. I hear that Alabama, since they made being a Mexican illegal, can't find enough people to harvest the crops...

Old Time Radio Shows and "Colorblindness"

Since I was old enough to remember it (about 1949), Old Time Radio -- that is the programs that filled up the nation's airways starting in the 1920s and running through a good part of the fifties when they were eclipsed by television on the one hand and music radio on the other -- have been an especially fun hobby of mine.

At one point in my work career I was locked in the basement of the building with no outside windows and an exit reached by a long walk down a hallway, where I "guarded" a server room. My sole job was to be there in case anything went wrong with any of the servers. It never did, so I found myself needing to fill up eight hours of work each day for five days a week. It was in a basement so I couldn't get a radio signal, and they wouldn't give me a television, so one of the only forms of entertainment available to me was Old Time Radio. I made a bunch of CDs of such shows as The Life of Riley, Gangbusters, Red Ryder, Mister District Attorney, Boston Blackie, Lum & Abner, The Great Gildersleeve, Terry and the Pirates, Lights Out, The Inner Sanctum, The Whistler... Well, the list goes on and on, and listening to those old shows, many of which I remembered listening to as a child, like Baby Snooks (I was in the radio audience the night Fanny Brice died--May 29, 1951), not only served as a rollercoaster down memory lane, but actually kept me relatively sane during that period of time.

So stories about the days of the Theatre of the Mind tend to grab my attention, as did this one. It's about the great radio pioneer Norman Corwin striving to have "colorblind" radio -- blacks were as systematically excluded from radio as they were from other forms of entertainment.

The apex of Corwin’s radio career coincided with a profound shift in America’s dominant racial formation, the beginnings of “colorblindness.” By colorblindness, I mean the belief that if individuals and institutions ignored skin color as a signifier and eliminating race as an official category of identity—particularly within governmental institutions—it would cease to matter in American life and all groups would have equitable access to the privileges, opportunities, and freedoms afforded by citizenship.  

Corwin's push to have black persons trained to talk on the radio backfired in some ways led to the opposite result, as this article explains.

The article is On the Lower Frequencies: Norman Corwin, Colorblindness, and the “Golden Age” of U.S. Radio and it makes for an interesting read and presents a real and unique window into what was going on behind the scenes in radio.

The more things change, the more they stay the same, I guess.

What do the Birthers Really Want? To Deport Obama

What is it with the Birthers? They just won't give up, not even in the face of overwhelming evidence that Barack Obama was actually, physically, really and truly born in the then-Territory of Hawaii in 1961. World Net Daily has pretty much given over its entire editorial sections to shrill screeds on the topic from Orly Taintz and her flying-monkey minions.

Like many of us over here in the Reality Based Community, I've been vacillating between being just bemused and totally nonplussed by their neurotic OCD obsession with the whole thing. I've been at my wits end for going on four years now, trying to figure out what the fuck the "Birthers" really want? I've tried asking them, and even the few who will still talk to me (i.e., my wackjob cousin) can't -- or won't -- answer my question.

And to me the question is a pretty simple one: If Obama's mother was a US citizen -- which no one is disputing -- then isn't her son automatically a US citizen, regardless of where he was born? Hasn't that been the law since like, forever?

Well, that's what I thought, anyway, but when I did my own research, it turns out that this isn't such a straightforward question with a straightforward answer. It all depends on WHEN he was born. Over at VisaLaw Immigration Information, I found this:

What are the rules for people born between December 23, 1952 and November 13, 1986?
Again, children born abroad to two US citizen parents were US citizens at birth, as long as one of the parents resided in the US at some point before the birth of the child.
When one parent was a US citizen and the other a foreign national, the US citizen parent must have resided in the US for a total of 10 years prior to the birth of the child, with five of the years after the age of 14.  An exception for people serving in the military was created by considering time spent outside the US on military duty as time spent in the US. [Emphasis added]

Yes, now it all makes sense to me. Obama was born in 1961, and his mother was just 18 at the time of his birth, and so it is temporally impossible for her to meet the "five of the years after the age of 14" stipulation.

That's why it's so fucking important to the Birthers to establish that Obama was born in Kenya. Or Indonesia. Or where the fuck ever Orly Taintz wants us to believe this week, just as long as it was outside the borders of the United States. By the simple fact that if he was not born in the United States, he is, ipso facto and QED, not a United States citizen.

Jeez. I wasn't expecting that... But okay. what then? Well, I'm more than 100% certain that, not satisfied to strip him of the presidential mantle that he paraded around in so arrogantly, so illegally, so blackly, for the last four years, they will also insist on deporting him as an illegal alien. You know how the whole right wing feels about so-called illegal aliens, and here would be the biggest illegal alien of all, right in their sweaty grasp. He is so outta here!

But wait. First I want to relate a story from my own family. My cousin Jimmy* was born in occupied Berlin, in a German hospital, in 1948 to my uncle, an American soldier who was just nineteen and had been shipped there after advanced individual training, and a young German mother (they were married at the time, but just barely, having just achieved that status before Jimmy was born, in a traditional German Zwangsheirat). He eventually grew up in my home state after his father was discharged and moved his family back to the US. Jimmy graduated from high school in 1965 and enlisted in the Army, following in his father's footsteps.

Unfortunately he had the bad luck to be assigned to the25th Infantry Division near Cu Chi, and after less than three months in country he was shot up severely, ambushed while he was on patrol, injured to the extent that he has to spend a substantial amount of his remaining time in a wheelchair, to the extent that he was awarded a VA disability pension of 100%.

He eventually got married, had two children (that part still worked!), and went on to college (GI Bill, naturally); afterwards he got a job, from which he is now retired and drawing Social Security. He just finished paying off his house and putting his youngest child, a girl, through college. He has two grandchildren by way of his oldest daughter.

Got the picture? Now let's go back at take another look at that immigration law, cited on the VisaLaw page, this time another section:

What are the rules for people born between January 14, 1941 and December 23, 1952?
As before, children born abroad to two US citizens, with one parent having resided in the US, the child was a US citizen at birth.  No further action was required to maintain citizenship.
When one parent was a citizen and the other a foreign national, however, the rules changed substantially.  To pass citizenship, the citizen parent must have resided in the US for at least 10 years before the birth of the child, and at least five of those years had to be after the parent turned 16.  Because this rule made it impossible for parents under 21 to pass citizenship, in 1946 the requirement was amended to create an exception for parents who had served in World War Two. [Emphasis added]

Oh, okay. Whew. That WWII exemption ought to take care of it. But wait a minute, no it doesn't! Uncle Bud was born in 1929 and didn't join the Army until after WWII. He was barely 19 when Jimmy was born. So he didn't meet the residency requirement, either.

Wow. Based on the law in effect at the time, it turns out that Jimmy is not really a citizen of the US after all. So it would seem that he will have be deported as an illegal alien along with Barack Obama, and probably lose both his VA disability and his Social Security. This deportation will, of course, come as a wrenching shock and appalling surprise to him and his family, especially his grandchildren. Everyone except for his ex-wife, who will no doubt be glad to see him go...

The only fortunate thing is that he will get to be repatriated to Germany, which has a solid social safety net and which will take care of him. He also still has some cousins there on his mother's side who know him and like him, and who already call him "Jakob"; they will be glad to help him out.

Unlike my old Army buddy Eladio, who served with me in Vietnam and if the same rule applies to him (my memory of his situation is a little hazy after all these years, but I think it is in large measure basically the same as Jimmy's), he will have to return to El Salvador, where things are short in social safety nets but long in military junta dictatorships who work with United Fruit (a partially-owned subsidiary of the CIA) using their US-made military weapons to torture and repress the common people, especially Johnny-come-lately types who have been expelled from the great El Norte.

It will also come as a surprise, I would imagine, to the officials in the Reagan State Department who first issued Jimmy a US passport, apparently assuming he was the citizen that he claimed to be, and that common sense dictated that he was. Too bad for them as well -- I'm sure heads, if there are any still around 30 years later, will roll over that decision.

Now you have it. It's not all so cut and dried after all, is it? You goddam Birthers, you really want to strip my disabled Vietnam veteran cousin Jimmy of his citizenship -- which he apparently never really had -- and deport him? Strip away his Social Security and his VA disability pension? And Eladio's too, as long as you're at it, even though he's been a productive member of society and has run a successful small business in Texas for the last forty years, employing nearly 20 (legal, he assures me) workers?

Never mind, I already know the answer to that. I heard it during the Rethug presidential debate when the audience screamed, "Let him die!"

Even Baby Doc Bush claimed to be a "compassionate conservative". I don't even hear that weak pabulum puking out of the craven vulture craws of any of the new "leaders" on the right.

One final note: Fuck you, Birthers! You are an embarrassment to political discourse and to rational thinking. And to the whole Human Race as well.

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[Footnote: Please respect the man's privacy. No, Jimmy is not his real name, he has a different last name from me, and he is not even on the same side of the family as my infamous "wackjob cousin" --she doesn't even know him.]

Republican Racism: The New Ten Top Hits

It used to be that the Rethugs used "dog whistle" politics to display their just-under-the-surface racism. They could talk about the infamous Chicago "welfare queen", for example, without actually coming out and saying she was Black, but everyone knew who she was.

Ronald Reagan was a master of this, but even he kept it more or less symbolic. That's why he could, without even a blip on the media radar, go to Philadelphia, Mississippi, in 1980 to announce his candidacy for the presidency, standing on hallowed ground watered by the blood of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, the three civil rights workers who had been murdered there in June 1964.

But in the ensuing 31 years, the party's racism has become more visible, more blatant, and more of a siren call than a dog whistle.

Over at Alternet, African-American commentator Chauncy De Vega has an insightful (and inciteful) piece entitled The 10 Most Racist Moments of the GOP Primary (So Far) that is well worth the read.

In it are the usual suspects: Newt Gingrich wanting to make "poor inner-city children" (code for "Black") work as janitors and bitch-slapping that uppity Juan Williams on Dr. Martin Luther King's birthday while standing under a huge Confederate flag and Rick Santorum calling, in essence, Black people "parasites" who are lazy and want to live off the hardwork earnings of White people, but there's also our old buddy, Herman Cain, calling Black Americans out for living under the generous hand of the Democratic Party "plantation" system, and equating conservative Blacks as runaway slaves. And let's not forget Michelle ("Our Negroes are better than their Negroes") Bachmann claiming that slavery was actual good for Black people.

It's appalling that the Rethugs don't even think they have to try to appear not to be racists any more.

"Forgotten Men" of Black History 2: Henry Ossian Flipper

Today's Forgotten Man is Henry Ossian Flipper, the first African American to graduate from the US Military Academy at West Point.

Flipper was born into slavery in Thomasville, Georgia, in 1856. He attended Atlanta University (under the protection of the presence of the United States Army during the Reconstruction period) and while he was still a freshman he was appointed to West Point by Representative James Crawford Freeman (who, despite his last name, was not of African-American descent...).

Flipper, a member of the Class of 1877, joined four other
African-Americans at West Point. They were harassed and ostracized by the white cadets, to the point that the other four eventually dropped out. Flipper was left to eat his meals alone, study alone, and attend class with cadets who refused to speak to him.

Regardless of the hardhips he was forced to endure (Jackie Robinson's seem to pale by comparison), Flipper graduated West Point in 1877 and was commissioned a lieutenant in the US Army. He was assigned to the 10th Cavalry Regiment and was the first African-American to command a troop of Buffalo Soldiers.

Read the entire history of Flipper, and especially the part that the appropriately-named William Rufus Shafter (aka "Pecos Bill") played in kicking Flipper out of the Army with the officer-equivalent of a dishonorable discharge, which happened apparently only because Shafter hated seeing black officers. BTW, Fort Shafter in Hawaii is named for this racist pig of a general, as is the town of Shafter, California.

Anyway, Flipper spent the rest of his life trying to contest the charges brought against him on Shafter's behalf, and trying to overturn his discharge. Flipper died in 1940, but the battle was fought on by his descendants and others, who finally were successful only in 1999 when Bill Clinton finally pardoned Henry Flipper.

This pardon resulted in a bust of Flipper being on display at West Point, along with an annual award to the cadet who exhibits "leadership, self-discipline, and perseverance in the face of unusual difficulties." Indeed...

Fortunately for history, Henry Ossian Flipper was also an accomplished writer, and his autobiography, The Colored Cadet at West Point, is available for download in a variety of formats from Project Gutenberg.

Racist Homophobe Author: Here's a Book NOT to Buy

For obvious reasons, I'm usually a big fan of Vietnam War fiction. I belong to an email group of other Vietnam War authors, and normally the group is entertaining and informative.

But the other day I got an email that went to the group praising a new book of Vietnam War fiction: Land of Childhood's Fears - Faith, Friendship, and The Vietnam War by David Todeschini. For reasons which will become obvious, I refuse to give the guy's website or anything else about the book. Google him if you like.

This email itself was from a member of the group, and was not from this Todeschini guy, but attached to it was an email from The Toad, which said "Play the attached MP3 file; my sentiments exactly" with an .mp3 sound file of a song entitled "Sand Niggers". As you would expect, it was an inflammatory, violent and racist diatribe against Arabs -- but it also included gays and "communists" who "took god out of the schools". It also contained some wishful thinking that these "problems" could best be taken care of right here in the good ole USA by a shotgun and an M-16, accompanied by the sounds of shotgun blasts and fully-automatic rifle fire.

It is beyond me how someone who, presumably, is trying to sell as many books as possible would do something so incredibly stupid as to alienate a large portion of the book-buying public.

So, since silence is assent, I fired back my own diatribe to the group:

This is disgustingly racist and disturbingly violent and to make matters worse, it's not even funny. And, given the recent events in Tucson, it's also in incredibly poor taste. I'm sure that the parents of little Christina Taylor Green would just be tickled pink to hear this crap.
I am surprised that you would forward this, especially embedded in an otherwise striking review of this book.
But listening to this shit, I can swear that I will NEVER buy this book, I don't give a goddam how fucking good it is, if the author comes off as such an intolerant racist homophobe that this is what he thinks passes for political discourse. Especially since he has "faith" in the title -- it kind of begs the question, who would Jesus blow away with a shotgun and an M16?
I am appalled that in the second decade of the 21st Century people still think this way. This is not the America that we're supposed to have.
Please take me off this list if you ever plan on sending out anything like this again.
Life is too short for this kind of shit.

To be fair, the person who sent it to the group was not the author of the book, and he realized immediately that he had made a mistake and issued a profound apology. Which I accepted, along with, I assume, most other members of the group.

Except for this one. He (who shall not be named here unless he wants a public fight in which he will be the pathetic loser) sent me a personal email, not to the group, calling me out:

For the love of God, I do not know why some folks want to paint them selves [sic] as lilly [sic] white and pure in actions and deeds.

The word nigger was coined by the English, it means a dirty trashy person. It was their way of refering [sic] to the Irish, not anyone of color. Through hard work and intergity [sic] the Irish out grew [sic] the name. Then the blacks picked it up and now it is taking a violation of our right to free speach [sic], and laws passed by half assed politicians trying to buy votes at the cost of our free speach rights to make it a raciest [sic] term.

What is the NAACP? What is LULAC, La Raza, Brown Berets, and the Latino Congresional [sic] caucus? All raciest [sic] organizations.

If you are sincer [sic] point these organizations out as raciests [sic]. Other wise shur [sic] up.

A side note: Why is it that these people are all so spelling-challenged and thinking-impaired that they don't even know how to turn on the spell check in their word processors?

Also note that he claims that the Irish, through their "intergity" and hard work, outgrew the term, which of course blatantly implies that the "others" (i.e., black people) do not work hard and have no integrity...

Here's my email response to this jackass, to which as of this posting I have not received a reply:

Thank you for that reasoned and rational response. Ignoring the fact that your response was neither "reasoned" nor "rational", nor was it even correct.
From Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigger):
"Nigger is a noun in the English language, most notable for its usage in a pejorative context to refer to black people (generally people of Sub-Saharan African descent), and also as an informal slang term, among other contexts. It is a common ethnic slur. The word originated as a term used in a neutral context to refer to black people, as a variation of the Spanish/Portuguese noun negro, a descendant of the Latin adjective niger, meaning the color 'black' ... In the Colonial America of 1619, John Rolfe used negars in describing the African slaves shipped to the Virginia colony ... In the United Kingdom and the Anglophone world, nigger denoted the dark-skinned (non-white) African and Asian (i.e., from India or nearby) peoples colonized into the British Empire, and "dark-skinned foreigners" — in general."
I can find no reference that backs up your claim that it was first used by the British to describe the Irish, and I challenge you to prove your claim. It's obvious from its etymology that it was first used to describe dark-skinned peoples, and ascribing any other origin to the term is nothing more than wishful thinking.
It is a horribly offensive -- and yes, racist -- term for black people, and those other organizations that you throw in willy-nilly are not "racist" in any normal usage of the term. However, to be fair you didn't actually call them "racist"; you called them "raciest"...
You have some ... issues ... with race, obviously, most likely taking the form of Denial. Go ask your friends who are black what they think about your statements.
Oh, wait. My guess is that you don't actually HAVE any friends who are black, do you.
So maybe you should do a little thinking for yourself before you tell anyone else to "shur up" (whatever that means).
"Violation of our free speech"? Really, that's the best you can do? You want to be able to call a black person a "nigger" without any responsibility for what that speech can mean? As Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. stated in Schenk v US, free speech does not include things similar to yelling "fire" in a crowded theater. In other words, freedom is not license; freedom comes with responsibilities.

I think that the reason he hasn't responded is that he's having too much trouble with words like "etymology" and "pejorative". Plus he's probably scouring desperately the Rush Limbaugh and Michelle Malkin and Clusterfuck "News" websites to find that fake origin that he cites. I know that his enfeebled mind didn't come up with that on his own. He's just parroting something he's heard, and my best guess is that he heard it coming out of the spewing maw of that nitrogenous-waste semi-human pimple-assed draft-dodging slimebag, Rush Limbaugh. I can just hear him saying it...