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The Fulford File | Regular Americans' Opinions On Deportation, In One WONDERFULLY "Xenophobic" Chart
Over on TechCrunch, a tech industry site, reporter Gregory Ferenstein is shocked to find that Americans don't like illegal immigration, and think illegals should be deported--which is, after all, the law. The article is called: Why We Can’t Trust Polls On Immigration, In One Horribly Xenophobic Chart, and my question is "Why 'Horribly'?"
Ferenstein writes
While polls consistently show that Americans overwhelmingly favor the tech industry’s #1 legislative goal, comprehensive immigration reform, I wondered if I could also get them to agree to a horribly xenophobic plan that was the opposite of the proposed bill: deporting all 11 million undocumented immigrants. We conducted a CrunchGov poll with Google Surveys to find out and the results, you’ll find, are surprising.
First, remember that Americans like to agree to things: they say yes to bigger cars, more debt, and, of course, more croutons on their all-you-can-eat Olive Garden salad. So, when pollsters ask Americans if they “support” an idea, the answer is, on average, yes.
In our poll, a majority of all Americans (53%) and a whopping 74% of Republicans want to kick out every undocumented immigrant (details here*). Bear in mind, no one, not even the most anti-immigrant members of Congress, are proposing any remotely close to this idea. At most, Congressmen disagree over whether current undocumented immigrants should be permitted to become citizens, not whether they can stay in the country.
More importantly, the results from our on-going CrunchGov Poll find that roughly the same percentage (64%) want to grant a pathway to citizenship as kick them all out. Confused? You should be, because both of those views are diametrically opposed.[More]
I think Ferenstein thinks that polls that agree with him are the authentic voice of the people, and polls that disagree are either what we at VDARE.com call pollaganda, or people just saying whatever comes into their heads. This is wrong: polls that agree with me are the authentic voice of the people...
Seriously, even the "good" poll
John Derbyshire On Making Ourselves Heard During The Congressional Recess. Silence = Amnesty!
[JD Note: In what follows, any mention of a congresscritter is followed, in brackets, by his/her/ its NumbersUSA rating on immigration issues, from immigration patriots rated “A” to Treason Lobby participants at “F.” My own representative, for example, is Steve Israel (F). Grrrr.]
This year’s Congressional recess runs from August 3rd to September 8th. That’s 37 days; at the time of posting this, we are a third of the way into it.
The House of Representatives then meets for eight days in the middle of September, mainly to wrap up fiscal business for the federal government’s 2013 Fiscal Year, which ends September 30th.
It is of course the House of Representatives in which the next congressional action, or inaction, on new immigration laws will take place.
On this schedule, nothing at all will happen, or significantly fail to happen, until early October, seven or eight weeks from now.
In the meantime, some of us will have the chance to put our concerns directly to those who represent us. A much-advertised feature of the summer recess is the Town Hall meetings that representatives hold in their home districts, to hear the opinions of their constituents. Artist Norman Rockwell idealized the traditional Town Hall meeting in one of his 1943 “Four Freedoms” paintings for the Saturday Evening Post.
To judge from the handful of such meetings I have attended since my first, back in 1969, the reality sometimes falls short of the ideal. Grass-roots politics, if not firmly managed, can be a playground for lunatics and monomaniacs.
There was a fuss in Britain earlier this year when a senior person in the co-ruling Conservative Party was overheard describing party activists as “swivel-eyed loons.” ['Swivel-gate': David Cameron goes to war with the press over 'swivel-eyed loons' slur . by Brian Brady and Jane Merrick, The Independent , May 19, 2013 ]
Disgracefully elitist, of course (I am not being sarcastic). Most party activists are public-spirited citizens with earnest concerns about national policy.
Still, I doubt many politicians look forward with keen anticipation to their next Town Hall meeting.
And technology has come to their rescue. Back in June, the Associated Press reported a falling-off in the frequency of traditional Town Hall meetings, with “virtual” events taking up the slack, or some of it.
These days, lawmakers generally are holding fewer in-person public gatherings with constituents than they have in past years...Instead, members of Congress are relying far more on telephone and online forums. [Congressional Town Halls Held Less Frequently, Despite Hot Issues, By Thomas Beaumont And Charles Babington, AP, June 2, 2013]
Easy enough to understand, given the difficulties of managing a Town Hall meeting in the old, open style; yet still regrettable. E-meetings, phone-ins and webinars certainly have their place in the democratic process, but they are “colder” than the face-to-face format.
The AP report posits some further factors in the recent falling-off: the raucous opposition to Obamacare in 2009, and “security concerns” following the 2011 shooting of Arizona Rep. Gabby Giffords.
It is hard to see why “security” is any more of a concern now than it has been in the past. But on opposition to Obamacare, the New York Times, at least agrees. In a story this Monday, the Times specifically blamed the Tea Party for spooking congressfolk away from public meetings:
“The reason 2009 was so successful for the grass roots was because the politicians never saw it coming,” said Jennifer Stefano, the state director for the Pennsylvania chapter of Americans for Prosperity, a Tea Party group. “Now they know. And they are terrified.”
[A Former Engine of the G.O.P., the Town Hall Meeting, Cools Down, New York Times, By Jeremy W. Peters, August 12, 2013.]
Neither AP nor the Times provided overall statistics to support
"Stop-And-Frisk" And Voter ID: Racism Card Looking A Little Dog-Eared
Do liberals have any arguments for their idiotic ideas besides calling their opponents "racist"?
The two big public policies under attack by the left this week are "stop-and-frisk" policing and voter ID laws. Democrats denounce both policies as racist. I'm beginning to suspect they're getting lazy in their arguments.
Stop-and-frisk was a crucial part of the package of law enforcement measures implemented by New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani that saved the city. Under David Dinkins, who preceded Giuliani, murders averaged about 2,000 a year. There were 714 murders in New York the year Giuliani left office. Continuing Giuliani's policing techniques, Mayor Michael Bloomberg's New York had only 419 murders last year.
Just during his first year in office, Giuliani's policies cut the murder rate an astonishing 20 percent. Thirty-five percent of the crime drop nationwide from 1993 to 1995 was attributable solely to the reduction of crime in New York City during Giuliani's first year in office. (The New York Times hailed this remarkable achievement with an article headlined, "New York City Crime Falls but Just Why Is a Mystery." [By Clifford Krauss, January 01, 1995]
It was mostly black lives that were saved by Giuliani's crime policies. By the end of his administration, the Rev. Calvin Butts, liberal pastor of Harlem's Abyssinian Baptist Church, was describing Giuliani as King Josiah of the Bible, who "brought order, peace, the law back to the land." The black minister told The New York Times, "I really think that without Giuliani, we would have been overrun." [Giuliani Internalized, By James Traub, February 11, 2001]
About the same time as the Rev. Butts was comparing Giuliani to King Josiah, Richard Goldstein of The Village Voice claimed he felt less safe in New York under Giuliani. It was the ravings of a madman, like saying winter is warmer than summer. But now, Goldstein's ideas are being delivered from the federal bench by Judge Shira Scheindlin, [VDARE.com note: appointed by Bill Clinton] who recently held New York City's stop-and-frisk policies unconstitutional.
Yes, Democrat Bob Filner can pat down his female employees, but cops can't pat down suspected criminals.
Liberals wail about guns, but how do they imagine police get guns off the street without going to high-crime neighborhoods and stopping young men acting suspiciously? Giuliani's policing policies, including stop-and-frisk, reduced gun homicides in New York by 75 percent within five years.
It is precisely the fear of being caught with a gun that induces young hoodlums not to carry them. The word gets out: Don't carry a gun! It's not worth the risk.
Of course cops don't find many guns anymore! That's because they're doing stop-and-frisk.
By liberals' logic, the government should stop doing meat inspections because it turns up so few cases of contamination these days, anyway. We can also drop the metal detectors at airports. How many people does the TSA actually catch trying to sneak guns onto airplanes?
Have liberals polled the elderly black residents of high-crime neighborhoods on stop-and-frisk? As soon as the word gets out that it's now safe to carry weapons, spray paint, drugs and stolen goods again, hoodlums will rule the streets and the elderly will, once more, be confined to their homes. As Martin Luther King said, crime is "the nightmare of the slum family."
But liberals don't care about the innocent black victims of crime. They don't care about citizens being prisoners in their own homes—as long as it's not in their neighborhoods. The important thing is, liberals get to self-righteously preen about racism.
When a policy that has saved thousands of black lives is attacked as "racist," the word has no meaning. At this rate, liberals will be claiming that peanut butter sandwiches are racist—except that wouldn't be as crazy.
Voter ID laws don't actually save black lives the
Remember Maine! The Whitest State, Where Americans Are Still Doing Jobs That “Americans Won’t Do”
[See also Jobs Americans Won't Do? Not Where I Live, By Linda Thom ]
Everyone has heard the saying that immigrants—legal and otherwise—are simply “doing jobs Americans won’t do.” Jobs such as farm workers, janitors, landscaping, and housekeeping are labeled as “undesirable” work for Americans, and therefore, amnesty/increased immigration is needed in order to harvest crops, clean houses, and maintain lawn integrity. Yet one blue state seems to be doing just fine—trimmed lawns and all—with Americans doing jobs that “Americans won’t do.” That state is Maine—the whitest state in the Union.
In Maine, about four percent of farm laborers are non-citizens. In California, approximately 73% of farm laborers are non-citizens. California has approximately 2.2 million illegal immigrants residing within her borders. The number in Maine is so small it was not quantifiable in the 2000 Census.
Somehow, even without massive amounts of immigrant labor, Maine produces 25% of all of the lowbrush blueberries in North America in addition to one of the largest potato crops in the nation.
So while the Soviet-style agitprop line is that immigrants are “doing the jobs Americans won’t do,” this does not seem to be the case in the Pine Tree State. Maine’s population is around 1.4 million people, and of those, only a paltry 43,000 are foreign-born—a number which is likely inflated by the number of births across the Canadian border simply because the hospital there was closer.
Maine has experienced a 350% increase in the number of African immigrants since 2000. However, even with this invasion, the state is still 94.9% white, the whitest in the nation. A majority of its immigrant population comes from Canada and Europe—not exactly the stereotypical Hispanic housekeeper or farm laborer. Over half of Maine’s foreign-born residents are now U.S citizens.
Unlike in California, native-born Mainers have somehow retained the ability to pick crops and clean houses. In Aroostook County, the largest county east of the Mississippi and home to the majority of the potato production in the state, potatoes are picked not by immigrants—be they “guest workers” or the illegal variety—but by armies of high school aged children.
Most high schools in Aroostook County start two weeks earlier than elementary and middle schools, to account for a three-week long “harvest break” in late September to pick potatoes. The availability of the (nearly entirely white and native Mainer) schoolchildren is so crucial for the success
The Illegal Alien Murderer of Vanessa Pham
Why is gun control the only policy we're allowed to discuss when horrific murders occur? In the liberal mindset, "root causes" of crime begin and end with the Second Amendment. But who pays the price when our public guardians fail to secure our borders, refuse to deport serial criminal offenders, and enable drug-crazed menaces to prey upon innocent citizens?
Meet 27-year-old Julio Miguel Blanco-Garcia. An illegal alien from Guatemala, he has lived and worked in Fairfax County, Va., for at least 11 years. The region is a notorious "sanctuary" for immigration law-breakers where elected officials and big business look the other way for cheap labor and cheap votes.
When he wasn't working illegally as a construction worker in the government-fueled Boomtown 'burb or getting himself high on drugs, Blanco-Garcia was building up a lengthy rap sheet. According to Fairfax County court records cited by the Fairfax City Patch.com, Blanco-Garcia has been arrested for:
- Public swearing/intoxication in March 2010.
- Petit larceny in September 2011.
- Concealment/Price alteration of merchandise in April 2012.
With the feds granting blanket amnesty waivers by administrative fiat and refusing to fix the deportation abyss, coupled with brazen "don't ask, don't tell" sanctuary policies by local officials, Blanco-Garcia managed to escape detention and deportation for more than a decade. In December 2012, the Capital Area Regional Fugitive Task Force (which includes U.S. Marshals staff, Fairfax County police, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and D.C. fugitive operations officers) finally caught up with Blanco-Garcia. They detained him after determining "that he was in violation of U.S. immigration law."
But it was too late for 19-year-old college freshman Vanessa Pham. In July 2010, the bubbly art student's decision to be a Good Samaritan to open-borders beneficiary Blanco-Garcia cost her life. After getting her nails done at a Fairfax Plaza salon, she encountered the illegal alien and his infant daughter in the parking lot. Blanco-Garcia was strung out on $400 worth of PCP.
According to prosecutors, he asked Pham to take him to the hospital. She let the man and his baby into her car. When Pham took a wrong turn, Blanco-Garcia turned on her—stabbing
Memo From Middle America | Pedro Vargas, Hialeah Shooter, WAS Another Case Of Immigrant Mass Murder Syndrome. Why Won’t The MSM Tell Us?
Another mass shooting has taken place, this time in Hialeah Florida, Miami-Dade County, July 26 and 27th, 2013.
The perpetrator: 42-year old Hialeah resident Pedro Vargas (not to be confused with the late Mexican singer-actor Pedro Vargas). After setting a stack of cash on fire, Vargas shot and killed six people, held two hostages and was eventually shot by police.
All such shootings are tragic. But the Main Stream Media is very selective as to which shootings are publicized, what causes they are used to support, what facts are emphasized, and what patterns are allowed to be noticed.
And, as we know from bitter experience, the MSM can rapidly disseminate wild speculations without evidence if it supports the Agenda.
Recall the 2011 shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and others by Jared Loughner. He was linked by the MSM with no evidence at all to the Tea Party, talk radio, Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, and American Renaissance’s Jared Taylor—in the last case apparently just because of having the same first name.
Recall the 2012 Aurora cinema shooting by James Holmes. In the aftermath of that shooting, ABC "Chief Investigative Correspondent" Brian Ross simply Googled a Jim Holmes who was a Tea party member—but a completely different person—and blurted out his name on the air. Needless to say, this caused problems for Mr. Holmes and could well have put his life in danger.
So now it’s 2013, with yet another shooting by another troubled man, Pedro Vargas. Like Jared Loughner and James Holmes, Vargas appears to have had serious psychological problems.
The MSM loves to psychoanalyze mass murderers, but there are certain avenues they’d rather not explore.
Pedro Vargas has a Spanish name and surname, lives in a majority Cuban/Cuban-American city, and was speaking Spanglish, a mixture of Spanish and English
Martin, Zimmerman, “Immigration Reform,” And The Two Rich Lowrys
National Review has just triangulated against Rep. Steve King, who is emerging as the hero of patriotic resistance to the Amnesty/ Immigration Surge a.k.a. “Immigration Reform” bill in the House in parallel to Senator Jeff Sessions in the Senate—unquestionably because holy dread about King’s (indisputable) point, that illegal alien valedictorians are far exceeded by illegal alien drug mules, is the current price of Main Stream Media respectability. The editorial was unsigned, but VDARE.com’s James Fulford, a renowned textual critic, says: “I'll take a guess based on style—imitation WFB—that it was actually written by Rich Lowry, who in any case is responsible for it as NR Editor.”
Which is interesting to me, as a student of fashionable Manhattan journalism from my vantage point in Far Rockaway. I’ve decided there are two political writers named Rich Lowry, whose views on matters such as Trayvon Martin and the Amnesty/Immigration Surge Bill are significantly opposed. For simplicity’s sake, I’ll call them “PC Lowry” and “Conservative Lowry.”
{Some readers don’t like us criticizing Conservatism Inc. pundits, saying that they are on our side. But they are not. Of course, Rich Lowry in particular, and the neoconservatives of whom he is an ally, systematically seek to destroy the lives of immigration reform patriots, paleoconservatives, race realists and anyone more brilliant than themselves , while sucking up to the Cultural Marxist Left. But, more significantly, their careerism causes them to be flat out wrong at key junctures. It is forgivable to change one’s mind, but one must own up to it, and explain why one did. Otherwise, one is no better than the scurviest politician.)
On March 24, 2012, 29 days after “white-Hispanic” George Zimmerman killed aspiring murderer Trayvon Martin in self-defense, PC Lowry jumped on the bandwagon against Zimmerman. Although there had been more than enough time to get the story straight—I had already published nine items at my personal blog exposing the hoax—PC Lowry followed the MSM script with its many falsehoods, under the particularly outrageous headline Al Sharpton is right
What is true of the stopped clock is also true of the perpetually aggrieved, shamelessly exploitative publicity hound: Through sheer chance, he occasionally will be right.
The Trayvon Martin case appears to be one of those instances for Al Sharpton. The longtime provocateur and MSNBC host has a leading role in the protests over the lethal shooting of the 17-year-old Martin at the hands of a zealous neighborhood-watch volunteer in the Florida community of Sanford.
During halftime of the NBA All-Star Game, Martin left the home of his father's girlfriend to walk to the local 7-Eleven for Skittles and iced tea. It was about 7 p.m., and he caught the attention of 28-year-old George Zimmerman, who had taken it upon himself to patrol the neighborhood armed with a gun. He considered Martin suspicious and called 9-1-1, which dispatched police. Ignoring the 9-1-1 operator's urging not to pursue Martin, Zimmerman followed the young man, got into an altercation with him, and shot him dead.
Zimmerman claims Martin attacked him from behind and he fired in self-defense. But while he was on the line with 9-1-1, Zimmerman was the one chasing Martin….
We may never know what exactly happened in the altercation.
“ELYSIUM”—Hollywood Open Borders Propaganda Concedes "Nativists" Are Right
Los Angeles is an overpopulated Third World wasteland, where swelling masses of non-whites scramble through the ruins of a once-great city. The rich and powerful live figuratively and literally above the ruins, experiencing luxuries and pleasures that most Angelenos can only dream of.
Also Matt Damon stars in a new movie set there. The only difference is that, in his futuristic version, the rich live in space.
Elysium is in its own way a masterpiece. It’s a dystopian morality play oblivious to its own absurdity, earnest to the point of kitsch, equally self-righteous and sentimental. In the world of the future, the middle class is a thing of the past, and so, apparently, is irony.
Yet despite it all, Damon and writer-director Neill Blomkamp give us something timeless. They have achieved artistic immortality in capturing the premises, the delusions, and the peculiarly poisonous moral idealism behind the ideology we call “Open Borders.” Elysium succeeds because it shows us what it is to believe that “citizenship” itself is the root cause of oppression.
Ironically, Elysium inadvertently concedes that today's “nativists” are right. The futuristic Los Angeles is a decrepit, overcrowded ruin. The English conversations of the main characters are simply for the American audience—all the casual encounters in the film are in Spanish. Matt Damon's character, “Max,” is the fulfillment of VDARE.com Editor Peter Brimelow's projected but unwritten concluding Alien Nation chapter about the last white family in Los Angeles, except that “Max” was raised by (Spanish-speaking) nuns.
At no point throughout the course of the film do we see an American flag. While there is the occasional vague reference to “the government,” there is no sense of American national identity, culture, or civic unity. There are simply the exploitative rich (who have literally abandoned the planet for the eponymous space-based refuge) and the resentful Third World masses.
In contrast, “Elysium” itself seems to have a semblance of identity and culture. This orbital refuge for the rich is almost entirely white, except for a few token Asians and a weak and cowardly Indian “President Patel” (Farhan Tahir). The real power in Elysium: Defense Secretary “Jessica Delacourt” (Jodie Foster in a comically bad performance). Foster gleefully veers into outright camp, affecting what can only be called a “supervillain” accent. We see her speaking French with the attractive “citizens”
Thinking About The King Kerfuffle: The Answer To False Charges Of "Racism" Is The (Truthful) Charge Of Treason
Of course Rep. Steve King was accused of “racism” when he noted recently that the much-mythologized young illegal aliens who become high school valedictorians are far outnumbered by those who enter as drug mules—for example, by professional token Hispanic columnist Ruben Navarrette here. The charge, needless to say, caused Establishment Republicans to flee in panic.
Why “of course”? Because the modern definition of “racism” is “someone who is winning an argument with a liberal”—or, too often nowadays, with a libertarian or with a cheap-labor Republican.
(And King did indeed win the argument. The simple fact is that drug mules among young illegal aliens do indeed outnumber valedictorians by a factor of quite possibly a hundred or more—especially because most of the “valedictorians” recently touted in the Main Stream Media turn out to be frauds).
But the King kerfuffle raises a more general point. Not even the accusation of witchcraft in Colonial Salem had the same irrational power as the accusation of “racism” in American politics today.
Thus currently fear of being accused of “racism” is a huge problem for opponents of the S.744, the 2013 Rubio-Schumer Amnesty/ Immigration Surge act, which has been steamrollered through the Senate and which the House is now being pressured to pass. (This is what provoked King’s comment). Many live in terror that someone in their coalition of supporters might be revealed to be “racist.” (Or accused of it by the MSM, which amounts to the same thing).
At the same time, they utterly lack the language to point out the pro- Amnesty/ Immigration Surge coalition includes Communists, Socialists, Cultural Marxists, sexual perverts, predatory plutocrats and crony capitalists, Reconquistas and other ethnic agenda mongers, to say nothing of Democratic political hacks flagrantly plotting to elect a new people so as to keep their own snouts sunk in the trough.
But there is, in fact, language to counter to the charge of “racism.” There is a word that has the same incantatory power—and, unlike the charge of “racism,” it happens to be accurate.
That word is “Treason.”
What the Left, the Democrats, and the immigration enthusiasts are doing to America is treason.
Treason, of course, is defined quite specifically in the U.S. Constitution (Article III, Section 3): “Treason against the United States shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort.” The Founders were specific because they were aware of the danger of what Colonel Oliver North was later memorably to describe, during the Iran Contra hearings, as "criminalizing policy differences."
But the Founders did not mean that only armed attack constituted treason. The Supreme Court, in Cramer (1945), quoted a definition of treason as "an act which weakens or tends to weaken the power of the [United States] . . ." Treason required an act and conscious intent; but not necessarily war.
And this definition of treason must be read in the context of what the Founders believed they were doing. The preamble to the Constitution begins: "We, the People of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity . . ." [Italics mine.]
Not posterity in general, note—but the specific posterity of
The Asylum Amnesty—The Treason Lobby’s New Plot To Dispossess America
America’s asylum system has transformed from a way to help refugees into an entire alternative immigration system. Even America’s de facto Open Borders policy is not good enough for those who want to dispossess the American people. Instead, Congress has now created the “right” to asylum for any victim of a crime anywhere in the world.
Three recent Main Stream Media stories highlight the “asylum” farce.
Until recently, crime victims who were in this country illegally could only stay until they were no longer needed to give testimony in court. However, our rulers are now using the mere existence of crime—any crime—to keep migrants in the country permanently, as this first story illustrates:
Dyah Widyati is a rape victim. As a result, she also has become the victim of an overloaded and backlogged visa system created to help immigrants who are victims of crimes.
Immigrants such as Widyati who are applying for the humanitarian U visas created by the 2000 Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act have to wait a year or more for their visas to be approved. During that time, they are in a no-status limbo.
They are without authorization to work or attend college. They can't leave the country without jeopardizing their right to return. They don't qualify for any benefits to help them get through a lengthy waiting time without paychecks.
Immigrants Face Long Delays For Visas Designed To Help Crime Victims, by Nancy Lofholm, Denver Post July 15, 2013
Rape, of course, is a horrible crime. But Widyati’s immigration status—she has overstayed her visa—had nothing to do with her rape. Her illegal status neither endangered pending testimony nor enabled threats against her from the perpetrator. In fact, her rapist is unlikely to ever be caught, much less prosecuted.
...Widyati, who came to the United States from Southeast Asia legally in 2009 on a student visa and currently lives in Denver.
Widyati, 32, was living near Baltimore and working on her master's degree in women's studies when a stranger entered her apartment and raped her.
The victims' program Widyati went to for counseling persuaded her to apply for the U visa. It would keep her in the country to help with prosecution if the perpetrator were caught. Widyati's attacker has not been found.
Before the creation of what the Denver Post calls the "humanitarian U Visa", crime victims and witnesses who were not lawful residents were either issued a visitor's visa or paroled into the United States temporarily for the period necessary to testify. Once the testimony was completed, there was no need for the victim or witness, and they could return home. There was, in fact, no problem to solve.
But Congress and the radical Leftist and ethnic lobbies created one. They wanted to bring more immigrants to the United States by any means necessary. Giving green cards to aliens, especially
John Derbyshire On The Voter Demographic That Dare Not Speak Its Name
I can’t say I’m a very keen fan of the Parade mini-magazine that comes with my Sunday New York Post. My wife pulls it out to read over her breakfast while I go directly to op-ed articles in the main newspaper—thumb-sucking pieces about the collapse of Detroit or the prospects for Syria.
Not that I mind Parade at all. On balance I’ll allow it’s a Good Thing. For those like Mrs. Derbyshire who take it at face value, it offers generally sound advice on matters like health, parenting, and household finances, in among harmless celebrity gossip, nostalgia pieces for the older readers, and uplifting stories about citizens who have triumphed over adversity.
For those of us with a more coldly sociological eye, Parade is a window into the interests and concerns of those sensible tens of millions of Americans who, like the great Warren G. Harding (according to historian Paul Johnson), do not believe that politics are “very important or that people should get excited about them or allow them to penetrate too far into their everyday lives.”
So no, I don’t mind Parade; it’s just that its content doesn’t usually interest me much.
But last week’s issue was an exception. The cover showed super-celebrity Oprah Winfrey and movie actor Forest Whitaker, with a short caption telling me that these two are starring in a film about a White House butler during the Civil Rights era.
This was interesting to me because, during my 1980s campaign to Americanize myself, one of the books I read and enjoyed was Forty-Two Years in the White House, the 1934 memoir by White House usher Ike Hoover.
Hoover had served under all the Presidents from Benjamin Harrison (“Very seldom did he work after lunch”) to FDR, about whom Hoover was diplomatically silent. He is an invaluable source on such things as the smoking habits of the Presidents and First Ladies: McKinley the most intense smoker (cigars only), Mrs. Coolidge the only First Lady who smoked (“and she never did so in public”).
Thus primed, I was mildly curious about the Winfrey-Whitaker movie, which is scheduled for release August 16th. So I read the Parade piece, in which the magazine interviews Winfrey, Whitaker, and director Lee Daniels. [Oprah Winfrey, Forest Whitaker Talk Lee Daniels' The Butler, Racism, and the N-word, By Katherine Heintzelman, July 31, 2013]
Titled The Butler, the movie is a fictionalized account of the career of another White House servant, Eugene Allen, who served in the White House from 1952 to 1986.
Whitaker is the Allen character (under a different name). Winfrey plays his wife, Gloria. “We took a lot of liberties with Gloria,” Winfrey tells Parade. Uh-oh. Robin Williams plays Eisenhower; Jane Fonda is Nancy Reagan. Uh-oh.
To judge from the Parade interview, The Butler is not an assemblage of amusing or instructive anecdotes about The Presidents in Ike Hoover style. Instead, it is black grievance porn.
So is the Parade interview itself.
Parade: Do you think that young people today know enough about the civil rights movement?
Winfrey: They don’t know diddly-squat. Diddly-squat!
Later:
Whitaker: The movie deals with the valuation of life, too. Like, whose life is valuable?...In terms of today, Fruitvale Station is playing, about the shooting of Oscar Grant in the Oakland BART station . . .
Winfrey: And the shooting of Trayvon Martin.
Soon no doubt to be a major motion picture,
Bill O'Reilly Is Smarter Than Lawrence O'Donnell: Illegitimacy IS Driving The High Black Crime Rate
After attacking Bill O'Reilly's history last week, I'll defend his sociology this week. On Monday, MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell ridiculed Fox News' O'Reilly for saying that single motherhood is responsible for the the high black crime rate.
Curtain of Lies: How the Treason Lobby Seeks to Lie the American People into Oblivion
Why has the Main Stream Media suddenly been reporting that Americans favor Amnesty?
Three Forgotten Facts About the Fort Hood Massacre
Finally. Four years after Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan walked into the Soldier Readiness Processing Center at Fort Hood, Texas, and perpetrated the bloodiest massacre ever on an American military base, the self-confessed jihadist's court martial proceedings began this week. Have you forgotten?
