I have just finished reading two op ed pieces that connect in my mind. The first was by Frank Rich in the NY Times, for which he steals a title from Barbara Tuchman's famous book about the build-up to The Great War. In The Guns of August he explores the increasing rhetoric of violence by some on the right against Obama and his administration and not only the unwillingness of political leaders to condemn such rhetoric, but even to support it. The other was in The Washington Post, by Jerry Mitchell, a reporter for the Clarion-Ledger of Jackson MS. A Cold Case, Still Burning reexamines the lynching 45 years ago of Goodman, Cheney and Schwerner in Philadelphia, MS, where they were buried in an earthen dam. Mitchell has covered the case since the premier of the movie about it, "Mississippi Burning." He points out that there are still 4 known participants in the murders who have not died nor been prosecuted.
You should read both. Then what I write might be unnecessary, but if read might make some sense.
Rich's column rambles more than a bit. There are several key points worth noting. He refers to a relatively new book by Ronald Kessler on the Secret Service (on which there is a separate critical column in today's Times) in which Kessler reports that the threats against Obama
are up 400 percent from those against his White House predecessor.
For all the rhetoric those of us on the left offered against the Bush administration, threats against his life were 1/5 those against Obama. We argued for impeachment, for legal action, for the Congress to stand up to him.
Rich rightly notes that the rhetoric of violence predates the current debate over health care, and that perhaps some on both the right and the left have been disappointed that Obama has not moved forcefully on issues of gun control. I note that such fears helped fuel massive purchasing of ammunition after the election by some on the right, and the lack of action has fed into the rhetoric of those on the left who feel Obama has not lived up to his campaign commitments.
Much of Rich's piece focuses on Sen. Coburn, who seems to validate the move towards violence, despite the fact that Obama has reached out to him on more than one occasion. Rich reminds us of the rise of groups advocating violence as was noted in a report by DHS first drafted during the Bush adminsitration. He tells of us a federal agent in a new report by the Southern Poverty Law Center that
he hadn’t seen growth this steep among such groups in 10 to 12 years. "All it’s lacking is a spark," he said.
And Rich points us back at an essay written by sociologist Daniel Bell in 1962, "The Dispossessed," to help frame the current situation:
No, the biggest contributor to this resurgence of radicalism remains panic in some precincts about a new era of cultural and demographic change. As the sociologist Daniel Bell put it, "What the right as a whole fears is the erosion of its own social position, the collapse of its power, the increasing incomprehensibility of a world — now overwhelmingly technical and complex — that has changed so drastically within a lifetime."
Let me temporarily leave Rich and turn to Mitchell. His essay is perhaps not quite so dark as that of Rich. He rightly notes the changes in Philadelphia MS in recent years. After reminding us of the words of M L King, Jr., when he visited the city in 1966, 2 years after the murders:
"There is a complete reign of terror here."
Mitchell tells us
Over the past decade, though, the town has begun to more fully face its history. It printed brochures that honestly describe the past, and citizens formed a multiracial group called the Philadelphia Coalition that successfully pushed for prosecution of the case.
Later in the piece we learn
Six months after the nation elected Barack Obama its first black president, this majority-white town of nearly 8,000 elected James Young its first black mayor.
Progress is possible, and in this case Mitchell believes that the conviction in 2005 of Edgar Ray Killen as the primary organizer of the murders of the three civil rights workers helped move the town forward.
The number of participants in the murders of the three young men dwarfs the level of those held accountable. The occasion of Mitchell's writing is the death on August 13 of one of them, Billy Wayne Posey, who ten years ago assured Mitchell he had nothing to do with the case. But Mitchell has covered the case for 20 years, since the premiere of the movie with Gene Hackman. Mitchell learned differently:
Seven years later -- long after he had quit talking to me -- I read what he had told Mississippi authorities in 2000. How he had been among the Klansmen chasing down the men that night. How he had been a member of the killing party. How he talked of "a lot of persons involved in the murders that did not go to jail."
Mitchell tells us how close Posey came to prosecution:
He came within one vote of being charged with murder in 2005. A relative of his on the grand jury cast a deciding vote against indictment.
Ponder that - a relative on the grand jury deciding the possibility of your being held accountable.
Mitchell tells us of continued threats against him and his paper for his continued pursuit of justice. Yet justice has moved forward: since 1989, the date the film premiered, 23 have been convicted of killings from the civil rights era, and the Congress authorized creation of a cold case unit at Justice to determine if further prosecutions are still possible.
Posey died. But consider this:
Four suspects in the trio's killings are alive and could still be prosecuted if enough evidence can be found. One of those suspects is Olen Burrage, the owner of the property where the bodies were buried. He has insisted on his innocence.
But an FBI informant said Burrage had talked with Klansmen in advance of civil rights workers arriving in Mississippi, boasting that he had a dam that would "hold a hundred of them."
Perhaps you did not read the entire Mitchell piece. Let me offer three paragraphs that provide some context for what I am about to offer of my own:
At the time of the 1989 premiere, I was covering courts for the newspaper in Jackson, Miss. -- a place I had never intended to live. After the movie, I wrote story after story on the cases and found myself drawn into the dark world of white supremacists, who welcomed me, perhaps because of my alabaster skin, my Southern accent and my conservative Christian upbringing.
Over plates of barbecue and catfish, they warned me of communists and told me that the stories I had heard in Sunday school about God loving all races were lies. They paid their light bills, fed their dogs, kept clean houses and moved through their communities with the respect their age required. People called them "sir."
But sitting there, I just knew. I could feel the evil in them the same way you feel an old piece of glass that got stuck in your foot on some forgotten creek bank, slowly working its way out.
Mitchell writes about a time beginning two decades ago. The words he relates about the people with whom he talked should sound familiar today - we have heard them during the campaign and since the election - among tea-baggers, on talk radio, from those disrupting town hall meetings on health care, in emails passed around to gin up opposition to the administration and to roil up people against the president.
What we are not hearing is the voices of politicians on the right condemning such words and the actions that have begun to flow from them. Instead we see some on the right encouraging such actions, amplifying such rhetoric, using such rhetoric themselves. It may be a Roy Blunt giving support to the cracked ideas of the birthers, it could be Chuck Grassley stupidly seeming to affirm the notion of "death panels." Or, as Rich notes pointedly, it can be the work of a Tom Coburn who opposed legislation on terrorism even after Timothy McVeigh blew up the federal office building in the largest city in the state he represents. As he notes of Coburn:
Yet last Sunday, when asked by David Gregory on "Meet the Press" if he was troubled by current threats of "violence against the government," Coburn blamed not the nuts but the government.
"Well, I’m troubled any time when we stop having confidence in our government," the senator said, "but we’ve earned it."
Southern politicians opposed to Civil Rights did not criticize the violent rhetoric of their own day. Some inflamed it. And people died as a result.
People are already dying as a result of the violent rhetoric of today. Many of us have just returned from a city where three policeman responding to a domestic incident report were gunned down by a man who had become convinced the government was going to take away his guns. The increasing incidence of people visibly carrying firearms outside events at which the President is to appear cannot be interpreted as other than an attempt to intimidate, to oppose those advocating for a change in society they are unwilling to consider. In my lifetime, in the 1950s and 1960s, the KKK and affiliated organizations similarly used intimidation and violence to attempt to prevent change they rejected. People died, but they did not stop the change.
Some were prosecuted. But those who perhaps bore the greatest responsibility, the politicians who either ramped up the rhetoric or who looked the other way to gain personal and political advantage, were for the most part not held accountable, at least not within the legal system.
And as a result this kind of hatred has continued to fester, often out of the view of many, in part because the traditional media has not considered it important enough to devote air time or column inches, to inform the American people of this metastasizing cancer in our midst.
For whatever reason, some are unwilling to confront this now open hatred with its calls to violence. Some even help stir it up for political advantage. Perhaps they - and we- have not learned two lessons. First, that over the long term it will not succeed - in many ways despite the continued hatred among some the South has made greater progress on racial issues than many places in the supposedly more liberal North. Second, that the price we pay for not confronting such intransigence is death and destruction, which only allows further hatred to flourish.
There is now no equivalence between what those on the extreme right do and those on the extreme left. Code Pink did not, as Rich points out, use violence against the atrocities (I use the word deliberately) of the Bush administration. Rich also points to the words of Rick Perlstein, who reminded us that not a single Democratic Congressman ever endorsed the work and violence of the Weatherman (so we can drop any reference to Bill Ayers right now).
Jefferson's words were about tyrants. Obama was elected by a clear majority of the American people, and he deals openly with an elected Congress, which while he controls it, he has made every attempt to work with the opposition party. That party apparently is unwilling to accept the results not only of the Presidential election, but of several successive Congressional elections that have seen their numbers decrease. Like the politicians of the South during the Civil Rights era who sought to oppose the will of the nation, they are not only tolerating violence, in some cases they are actively encouraging it.
It did not work then, and if the American people hold fast it will not work now. But in the interim it will cause this nation and its people great damage.
Then the politicians were Democrats. Now they are Republicans. It is not the party label that matters, because in some cases they are the same people, or at least cut from the same cloth, descended from the same "philosophical" orientation, one that justifies hatred and violence to gain advantage.
Perhaps they see themselves as the blinded Sampson at Gaza, and are prepared to pull the edifice down upon themselves in order to destroy those they view as the enemy. Perhaps they are merely cynical and self-serving.
Frankly, I do not care about such distinctions.
They do a disservice to the nation. In my opinion they are in violation of their oaths of office.
I began with a question, have some still not learned?
Unfortunately, the answer seems clear that for many, for the Tom Coburns and others of his ilk, for their partners in what is becoming crime among the Glen Becks, Rush Limbaughs, Michael Savages, and Sean Hannitys, the answer is that they have not.
Unfortunately, we will all pay a price for their ignorance, their willful blindness. And some will die.
How sad.
And yet I still insist on ending as I usually do, this time as my demand:
Peace!