Unfortunately for Trooper O’Donnell, Senator McCain wasn’t on the bus he stopped, and no real harm was done. However, the incident typifies the thinking that overtakes some members of law enforcement. It simply never occurs to them that there might be something they can do that they shouldn’t. There’s no inward analysis or questioning of the legitimacy or reasoning behind their actions, just that attitude that “if the good Lord didn’t want me stopping you, he wouldn’t have given me lights and a siren.”
An even more egregious incident happened a few days later in Louisiana. A family rushing a heart attack victim to the hospital was stopped by a deputy who made them wait while he wrote a ticket.
“Y’all go ahead and have your heart attack or stroke now. Have a good day,” the officer allegedly told the driver.
The victim, Benjamin Basile, whose arrival at the hospital was delayed by half an hour, spent a week in intensive care. Not surprisingly, he was hopping mad . . . but not nearly as mad as he became when he heard that the local sheriff’s office “has yet to determine if the officer actually did anything wrong.”
Okay, so what would it take for these badge-toting buffoons to figure out that having a heart-attack victim scrounging around for his license and registration is bad public policy? Would it take a death? Basile feverishly sucking oxygen from the officer’s Breathalyzer in a desperate bid to stay alive?
My concern is not that police officers, like talk show hosts and writers, occasionally make mistakes. I’m worried about their unwillingness to acknowledge their mistakes and, worse, the attitude of the general public that the police are always right.
Quite frankly, this confidence in our law enforcement professionals has not been earned. We have more than enough reasons to view them not with the benefit of the doubt, but with a dubious glance over our collective shoulders.
Right now in Los Angeles, thirty-two convictions have been overturned and many more cases are being reviewed because power-hungry officers planted evidence and framed people.
In Illinois, state executions have been postponed in the wake of the discovery that there were at least twelve men on death row who had not committed the crimes that sent them there.
And in Charleston, South Carolina, the North Charleston police recently unleashed more than thirty bullets at an unarmed man sitting in his car, surrounded by police.
But there is no outcry. None of the officers involved in the outrageous shooting in Charleston, for example, have so much as been reprimanded, not even the officer who falsely accused the driver of having a gun. The police chief feels no need to dump a clearly dangerous officer because the community is thus far rallying to the department’s defense. As long as citizens say, “They were shooting at a crook. He gets what he deserves,” the cops will keep firing away.
Police work is a tough, grueling and often lonely job. I respect those officers who work hard to do it right. But I have nothing but fear and loathing for the authoritarian anal retentives who abuse their power.
And fear is the right word. After all, who polices the police? Out in L.A., it looks like the same officers who couldn’t get the goods to convict O.J. are now planting enough evidence to convict everyone else. It seems that getting a special autograph or making their speeding-ticket quota is more important than protecting and serving the public.
The word I wish we could instill in these Barney Fife wanna-bes is serve. There is no service in jerking around single girls going five miles over, or shaking down tourists who miss the 35 mph sign. Helping people get where they’re going, treating them fairly and exercising some modicum of common sense—these are the most valuable assets our patrolmen have.
Or at least, I wish they had.
What About Bob?
* * *
March 2000
We love the practicing Catholic and earnestly desire to see him accept the Christ of the Cross, [and] leave the false system that has enslaved his soul.
—From the new, less anti-Catholic Bob Jones University Web site
Let me start with an easy question about the South Carolina intellectual internment camp known as Bob Jones University: Yes, it is racist.
That this is even in question here in South Carolina shows how far adrift our state is from the continental United States, where BJU is viewed as a cross between Hee Haw and a bad episode of In the Heat of the Night. Indeed, since the Bob Jones brouhaha erupted into the presidential primaries, I have repeatedly been told by my fellow South Carolinians that Bob Jones’ ban on interracial dating is not racist.
I’ve heard the argument put many ways, but it is neatly summarized in FAQ format at www.bju.edu this way:
Q: Is Bob Jones University guilty of racism because it has a rule restricting interracial dating?
A: Students of all races attend here and live in racial harmony and respect for one another as Christians. Each person dates within his own race. For there to be discrimination, one race would have to be treated differently than the other.
This argument is, of course, a crock, the kind of poor pseudo-rationalization that passes for logic among the typical enrollee in a southern Bible college or school of straight chiropractic.
Bob Jones’ ban on interracial dating is racist because it is a control of behavior based on race. The argument that no race is favored at BJU, or that black people don’t want to date white people either—these do not make the policy any less race-based and, therefore, racist. What other word would you use to describe the segregation of people based on their skin color? Sexist? Ageist?
The premise of the interracial ban is that race matters, that race is somehow determinant, that people should be treated differently because of their skin color. This is racism, and the policies resulting from this worldview are racist.
Now, you can argue that, using my definition of racism, affirmative action, hiring quotas and the like are racist. And you would be right. And yes, it is true that many of the politicos currently attacking Bob Jones are die-hard supporters of race-based government policies that deny people jobs, quality education and even the right to vote based on their race. A few examples:
In Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, last year, there were one thousand empty desks in magnet schools and several thousand parents seeking admission to those same schools for their children. However, these children—white and black—were denied the education they sought because they were the wrong color. Their admission would have made the schools too white or too black for school-administered racial quotas. A law removing similar restrictions from South Carolina charter schools has been opposed by some of BJU’s most outspoken critics.
In Florida, Governor Jeb Bush has passed the “One Florida” measure, under which the state will stop taking into consideration race or sex when administering programs or accepting bids for state projects. One black legislator, who seized control of a state office in protest, insisted that ending racial quotas and treating all citizens the same would “divide the people of Florida based on race.”
The state of Hawaii turned Jim Crow on its head by denying white citizens the right to vote on certain offices dealing with programs for indigenous Hawaiians. The U.S. Supreme Court overturned the law last week, but the two judges voting to maintain racial voting restrictions were both liberals who support denying Bob Jones its tax-exempt status because of its treatment of people based on their ethnicity.
It’s easy to see why George W. got confused about going to Bob Jones. When America views one form of racism as good and another as bad, it can be hard to keep score. Which is why those of us who want to get rid of the scorecards are so frustrated with Governor Bush right now.
The fight by inner-city black parents for school vouchers, the success of Ward Connerly’s assault on racial quotas in California and Florida, the collapse of support for race-based government favoritism in the polls—all these things were shaping up to help turn the 2000 election into a body blow to the Al “Sharpton” Gore view of America. There was an opport
unity to use the upcoming election to fundamentally change America from a nation seeking to balance unfair treatment between groups to a nation where group membership simply does not matter. And it appeared that George W. Bush, with his “compassionate conservatism” and relative popularity in the Hispanic and black communities of Texas, might be ideally suited to deliver the knockout punch against state-sponsored racism.
Then he got to South Carolina and succumbed to a seizure of redneck politics. It wasn’t just kicking off his South Carolina campaign at Bob Jones, or engineering the mailing of 250,000 pieces of pro-Confederate-flag mail, or the attack phone calls from Pat Robertson, or the whispering campaign in upstate churches about Warren RUDE-man (sic) and the Jews in Columbia working with the liberal Jewish media to elect John McCain, or the “John McCain: The Fag Candidate” fliers handed out by over-the-top evangelicals in support of Bush.
No, it was the Bush campaign in toto that shaped the perception that George W. is willing to play ball with the worst elements in American politics if that’s what it takes to get elected.
After two weeks of brutal press, George W. reversed himself and apologized to Cardinal O’Connor for going to BJU, calling it a “missed opportunity.” Forget that. The real missed opportunity for the Republican nominee for president—and George W. Bush will be the nominee—is the opportunity to overcome Al Gore and the politics of racial resentment with the principle of equal treatment under the law.
So much opportunity lost, just to win a primary in a rinky-dink state such as South Carolina.
Who’s Sorry Now?
* * *
March 2000
At Sunday’s special mass, the pope asked God’s forgiveness for the sins of Catholics through the ages, including wrongs inflicted on Jews, women, and minorities.
—Associated Press
He may not be the most popular guy at Bob Jones University, but Pope John Paul II has a lesson to teach South Carolina: You can’t have the heritage without the hate.
That, in brief, is why the pontiff celebrated a special mass repenting for sins committed by people long dead and asking forgiveness from victims long forgotten.
It is particularly ironic that we southerners would receive this message from the Catholic Church, aka the Whore of Babylon. As a young evangelical growing up in a rural South Carolina church, I was taught that not only were Catholics lost souls, but that they were mostly Yankees, which meant that they were condemned to spend their afterlife in New York.
Talk about eternal damnation.
Anyway, it’s a good thing the Pope isn’t southern. If he were, say, a member of the South Carolina General Assembly who supports flying the Confederate battle flag atop the state house, His Holiness would never have made such an apology. He would instead insist that he is the victim of rabid Protestant bias in the news media, that the Inquisition wasn’t about torture but about Church rights, that the Muslims who “converted” during the Crusades liked choosing between the cross and the blade.
And as a member of the one true and perfect Church of the Confederacy, the Pope would have avoided at all costs anything resembling remorse or responsibility for the lynchings, murders, assaults and riots that took place beneath—and in defense of—the Confederate flag.
Now, to be fair, for years the Roman Catholic Church did cling desperately to the altar of denial. Jesuit scholars printed millions of words in defense of anti-Semitism, the Inquisition and other historic misdeeds. And until recently, Catholic leaders would acknowledge no wrongdoing during the Holocaust, when the Church said little, and did even less, to prevent the horrors of Nazi Germany.
But apparently someone finally figured out, perhaps with divine intervention, that defending bad behavior was a poor use of time. Every scholarly dodge deflecting the Church’s errors was a missed opportunity to celebrate its achievements.
And, compared to the Confederacy, the Roman Catholic Church has quite a record to celebrate: preserving all of Western civilization during the Dark Ages, inventing the university system, feeding the poor, caring for the sick, inventing bingo—there’s a lot to brag about!
And, rightly so, modern Catholics celebrate their heritage of Michelangelo and Bach’s Mass in B Minor as representative of their culture and a point of communal pride. But the Pope has made the Church’s legacy even greater by acknowledging what seems self-evident to people beyond the Mason-Dixon line, namely, that with the history of previous accomplishment comes the heritage of past shame.
Instead of picking and choosing their way through history, Catholic leaders are embracing something close to the truth. Detractors will always find one more sin to be acknowledged, one more wrong to be addressed, but the Church has achieved something great: It has strengthened its legacy of pride by acknowledging and embracing its failures.
Instead of the self-deluding circular arguments from flag-waving rednecks that keep history spinning into the present, the Catholic Church will, over time, put its failings behind it without losing its great history.
So why can’t the cult of the Confederistas follow this path? I talked to one die-hard Dixonian who said, “We can’t have an institutional apology like the one the Catholic Church made because the Confederate States aren’t around. The Church has a leader and an organization. We don’t. Who would apologize?”
That’s a good point. But I have a suggestion for where to start. How about if every adult white southerner over the age of fifty who wants to glory in the memory of the Lost Cause stood up today and apologized for Jim Crow?
How about if every person who says the Confederate flag is only a symbol of heritage but who waved it in hate outside segregated schools and lunch counters in the 1960s and ’70s issued his or her regrets? How about if every dewy-eyed defender of Dixie fighting to stop Martin Luther King Jr. from having a state holiday declared a holiday on vindictive personal attacks against their side’s political opponents?
I believe there is an opportunity here, a path toward a positive resolution that could reclaim the legacy of courage and sacrifice of the Confederacy through accepting and acknowledging its sins. Unfortunately, that lesson we southerners need so desperately to learn is being taught by the Pope in Rome, and I can already hear my fellow South Carolinians’ response:
“We don’t care how y’all do it up North.”
Stop Making Census
* * *
April 2000
To all households:
This is your official form for the United States Census 2000. It is used to count every person living in this house or apartment. Title 13 of the U.S. Code requires that you answer these questions. Please be as accurate and complete as you can in filling out your census form, and return it in the enclosed postage-paid envelope. Thank you.
Kenneth Prewitt
Director, Bureau of the Census
START HERE:
1. How many people were living or staying in this house, apartment or mobile home on April 1, 2000? Please print their names.
Person 1, Question 1: What is this person’s name? ___
2. What is this person’s sex?
Male ___ Female ___
3. What is this person’s age? ___
4. What is this person’s date of birth? (NOTE: If the answers to questions 3 and 4 don’t match, please request special simplified census form for residents of Alabama.) ___
5. Is this person Spanish/Hispanic/Latino?
Yes, Mexican/Chicano ___
Yes, Puerto Rican ___
Yes, Cuban ____
No, just a plain old white person ____
6. What is this person’s race?
White ___
Black, African American, or Negro ___
American Indian or Alaskan native ___ (What tribe?) ___
Asian Indian ___
Chinese ___
Korean ___
Guamanian or Chammoro ____
Some other race ____ (Please list)
7. What is this person’s ancestry or eth
nic origin? ___
8. Is this person really sure he/she doesn’t want to answer these questions? It is the law, you know. ___
9. Look, you can refuse to answer these questions if you want, but we know that you’re an angry white guy who hates the government and has a stockpile of canned meat in your basement, so why not just go ahead and admit it? ___
10. Okay, if that’s the way you want it, fine, but just so you know, we’re going to put you down as an African American lesbian—and a single mom, too. Happy now? ___
11. That’s better. Thank you for answering this important question, one that is vital to the efficient operation of your federal government. Now that we know you’re a white male, just a few more nonintrusive questions: How many guns do you have, and where are they? ___
12. All right, pal. Let’s include the ones under the bed this time, shall we? ___
13. Is this person a veteran of the military? ___
14. If so, how many times did you use the word homo while on active duty? ___
15. None? Yeah, right. ___
16. How much money did this person make last year from wages, salary, commissions and tips? ___
17. Sure, we already know. But the IRS asked us to double-check. ___
18. For whom did this person work? ___
19. Yes, we know that, too. Now we’re checking on your boss. Hey, he’s giving you the shaft, too, right? So feel free to jot down any incriminating information you’ve got on him while you’re at it. ___
Clinton & Me Page 17