Just like the movie's fictional Western town of Rock Ridge, the country is beset by a beastly gang of misfortunes--soaring gas prices, stumbling economy, resurgent inflation, global warming, and two or three unendable wars.
Just as in the movie, a dashing, eloquent, smart, handsome, decent, and charming hero has appeared on the horizon to save the day.
And just as in the movie, the hero is black. The extended joke, in the movie and in this year's election, is in watching the white people of Rock Ridge and the country try to come to terms with this strange turn of events.
As funny as anything is seeing how few people can even bring themselves to acknowledge what might be happening. There are any number of articles about the puzzling fact that while the Republicans are almost universally blamed for the fix the country's in, and while the Republican candidate is an overaged, underinformed, flip-flopper with a wooden speaking style and a platform that promises to stick doggedly to the policies that got us in this fix, the election remains tantalizingly close.
Pundits scratch their heads over Barack Obama, the Democratic nominee, wondering whether it's his "newness," his "inexperience," his "strangeness," or his "inaccessibility" that is holding him back.
Just as people tip-toe gingerly around the N-word, so they avoid considering the most likely explanation for what's happening, that Obama's background, the story he proudly tells us "could only happen in America," is itself generating the old All-American racist reaction that we have seen in action repeatedly over the years.
It's like we've got the inarticulate Gabby Hayes-figure from the movie perched on the tower with the spyglass on the new sheriff coming over the horizon, repeatedly trying to yell down the news that "the sheriff is a ni—" but repeatedly having the end of the word garbled by the noise of the crowd. It's as if the word of the new sheriff's identity hasn't gotten through to us.
In Rock Ridge, the word eventually does get through and the townspeople's negative reaction is immediate, overt, and unambiguous. In America today, there's no way to tell for sure what's going on.
The infamous older, rural, white males might still be ready to acknowledge their racial hostility. But even among old white men "he's not one of us" is about as clear as anyone feels they can get without being called a racist. Any reporter looking for people honest enough to acknowledge that they don't like Obama's skin color is going to come up with slim pickings.
We've got plausible deniability on this issue. There are plenty of other reasons people can give for opposing this candidate. Obama is new. He is inexperienced. He is, for all his eloquence, somewhat inaccessible. But he's also black. And that's what makes his success to date the miracle that it is.
No comments:
Post a Comment