Playing the Race Card in Maryland: Round 2; or, a Short Dissertation on the Language Police of the Left

Last year, Wonker cited the blatantly racist attitudes of Democrats toward black Republican Senatorial candidate Michael Steele, an attitude that still persists, although it's usually buried by the press which favors his Democratic opponent, Ben Cardin. The incident I cited in this earlier post was one of many common variations on a theme that more or less goes as follows: if a black man or woman is identified as a Republican, that man or woman is therefore not black. Further, it's fine to make racist attacks on them because they are Republicans and thus not worthy of racial respect. (If you think I'm kidding, ask Justice Thomas.)

The racially-tinged atmosphere in "liberal" and "tolerant" Maryland has continued off and on during Steele's difficult campaign, where he has closed the gap but is not favored to win. But this latest flap is a little unusual. It puts the shoe on the other foot as it were. The kerfuffle is synopsized on Powerline under the header "Please":

Michael Steele's campaign wants to make something of a comment by Rep. Steny Hoyer, who during a campaign speech on behalf of Steele's opponent said that Steele has "a career of slavishly supporting the Republican Party." Come on. This word is used all the time in politics to attack those who support a particular line. Let's not draw any inferences from ordinary usage of the English language.

PowerLine is offended by Steele's tactic, and there was a day when I would have been irritated as well. But over the past year or so, my gloves have come off forever and I've put on brass knucks instead when dealing with the congenital liars on the left. In my view, they've gotten away with their own language and meaning distortion tactics for so long that it's time to hit back.

Steele knows just what he's doing, and it's lovely, frankly, to see the race card being cynically played back in the other direction. Paybacks are rough. Steele is an intelligent fellow and was no doubt delighted that no less than the House Minority Whip was caught in a remark that gave a Republican a chance to play the race card back against a 'Rat—this in a state where that tactic may have some resonance going down the stretch.

I recall several years ago when a white official appointed by DC Mayor Tony Williams used the word "niggardly" to describe how he'd have to manage an upcoming budget. The resulting uproar from lower-level employees caused Williams to terminate the poor dude who, as a liberal Democrat, had more than paid his dues. Too bad. His opponents took "offense" to the "racist" remark, and didn't back off when informed that this old-fashioned but perfectly useful English word has absolutely nothing to do with race, which it does not. The retort (and I quote indirectly as I can't find the source readily on the web) was something like, "Well, it sounds racist, so I'm offended anyway." The result: another perfectly good word lifted out of the English language and discarded because some ignoramus didn't know what it meant and was more than happy to take offense to shore up his victim-status.

More recently, Masachusetts' Republican Governor Mitt Romney had to bob and weave when a similar ignoramus—on the Republican side, no less—objected Romney's use of the term "tar baby" when discussing Boston's current Big Dig mess:

"The best thing politically would be to stay as far away from that tar baby as I can," he told a crowd of about 100 supporters in Ames, Iowa.

The source of Boomer Governor Romney's reference? Maybe not what you might think.

I remember years ago enjoying the Uncle Remus stories I read in a "Little Golden Book" which was inspired by the Walt Disney film "Song of the South" —a film which introduced the popular, catchy tune "Zippedy Doo-Dah!" in the late 1940s. So did many other Boomers, as the Romney citation (and Tony Snow's reference below) make clear.

While the 1940s were not exactly a progressive time in race relations, the Disney film was an inspired, innofensive, and light-hearted watering down of some of Joel Chandler Harris' Uncle Remus stories that dated from the mid-19th century. (Although the Disney "inoffensiveness" was later pilloried by those who imagined more sinister motives, as described here.) Harris' original stories, I later learned when I perused some originals in graduate school, were written in a thick Southern/black dialect that was virtually impossible to parse. Disney's writers and animators cleaned this stuff up, along with anything that might seem offensive to moviegoers, resulting in a delightful family movie and childrens' book spinoffs that are now hard to get hold of due to today's ideological hypersensitivities. (Interestingly, both the stories and the film were set AFTER the Civil War.)

Uncle Remus was a genial, grandfatherly black guy who always had a good story to tell, many of them about the wily Bre'er Rabbit who fearlessly took on the much bigger and meaner Bre'er Bear and Bre'er Fox and generally got the best of them—something gleefully highlighted in the Disney film which was primarily animated but occasionally featured live actors. Some of these stories were later extracted and put in the Golden Book that I read as a child, delighted to see the oppressed little rabbit elude his enemies via wit and trickery. This actually places him in the mythical tradition of Loki and other legendary trickster figures in world folklore.

The sneaky Bre'er Rabbit didn't always win, however. Sensing his cockiness and overweening pride in his own cleverness, Bre'er Bear and Bre'er Fox (at least in the Disney verson) decided to play a fine trick on the rabbit, fashioning a little human-like figure out of a chunk of thick tar, clothing it, and sitting it on a log where their diminutive antagonist was sure to pass. Indeed, Bre'er Rabbit walked by the log and repeatedly tried to engage the "Tar Baby" in a discussion.

"But de Tar Baby, he say nothin'." After a few more attempts at conversation, Bre'er Rabbit became enraged at the Tar Baby's affront to his dignity and started swinging away. But with each blow he landed, the rabbit got more and more hopelessly trapped in the thick tar, at which point the villains just happened to walk by, laughing their heads off, to make fun of the rabbit's utter helplessness. Since I've never been able to penetrate the original, I can only imagine that the fox and the bear took their revenge. But the Disney folks wisely bowed out of the story at that point, figuring that the moral lesson about pride leading to a fall had been sufficiently imparted to the young audience. (Walt Disney was nothing if not an early conservative.)

Why this long aside? Very simple. The "tar baby," as a result of Chandler's story and Disney's update, became a lively metaphor to most Baby Boomers for a mess you shouldn't have gotten yourself into and now can't get yourself out of. I know of almost no one who hasn't used the term in this context at some point, since it's a perfectly apt short description of a potentially tricky situation if you know the story behind it.

Apparently, "tar baby" has also been used in an offensive context against blacks, if you buy the following observation. That was sure news to me. But this was offered up as a response to now-Presidential Press Secretary Tony Snow's use of the same term, which he probably acquired the same way Romney and Wonker did. Snow defended its use as a vivid descriptor that had nothing to do with race. But:

In response to a similar point raised by Tony Snow in his own defense, one African American commentator, Margaret Kimberly, says that we miss an important point. She writes, “The words tar baby are a slur, period. They are used to hurt, to anger, and to offend. The fact that they first appeared in the Uncle Remus stories doesn’t let Snow off the hook. The Uncle Remus stories were part of a carefully orchestrated effort to make plantation life appear benevolent instead of horrific.”

Sorry, Ms. Kimberly, I beg to differ. The overconfident moral absolutism of the left's moral relativists is always rather startling. But it is the stock in trade of Democrats regardless of race. Now hear this: "Tar baby" is not a slur, period, Ms. Kimberly. Caught up in typical lefty righteousness, she herself misses an important point, as she lectures us—no, hectors us—in a way that she would never allow herself to be harangued. She is either unaware of or doesn't care that most white Boomers learned about the tar baby via the Disney version of the Harris story. They never had a clue that the term might possess any other meaning beyond that expressed in the Harris/Disney story they so enjoyed.

But no matter. Since someone has now decided to become "offended" there's some possibility that this wonderful metaphor may go the way of "niggardly."

In this way, slowly and incrementally, nuance and meaning in language have been gradually lost to us due to the triumphalism of leftist dogma and purposeful aggressive ignorance on the part of individuals who don't understand that certain terms may have multiple entymologies. (BTW, the article that contains the quote above has as lovely a background and defense of the innocent use of "tar baby" as you're likely to see. Link to it here.)

But back to our original point: Unlike PowerLine, I find it delightful that Mike Steele has turned the table on the phony Idiotarians who are tolerant of everyone except those who have the audacity to ignore the party line when it comes to langauge, culture, and politics. But in a larger context, whether we're dealing with "niggardly," the "tar baby," or something else, I am increasingly disgusted by the relentless of the Gramsci-inspired left to re-mold our language and culture in a way that robs us of context, history, and meaning, while making us fearful of employing innocent but richly descriptive words and phrases. This is called "coercion" and its aim is to censor the same freedom of speech the doctrinaire left hypocritically claims to uphold.

As for moi? I'll continue to use both terms whenever I choose to. If you don't like it, I'll see you in court.

(Note: The word "comment" in the initial quotation above contained a link to an MSNBC report on the Steele campaign. But examining the link I found no sign of Hoyer's remark, meaning that it was edited out after MSNBC discovered the link to PowerLine. Sometimes you can find an earlier version of a PC-vacuumed release via Google News, but sometimes not. Post-story editing on the web is a trick that's commonly used by journos and PC police on the left, a Moscow-inspired alteration of history meant to cover the tracks of their lefty heroes in the Democratic Party. It's rarely used to correct mistakes, which are generally allowed to remain only if they damage Republicans.

Phony journalistic "Photoshopping" of war photographs to favor the terrorists is another history-altering tactic of the left, particularly with the news service that Little Green Footballs aptly calls "Al Reuters." Check the lgf archives for egregious examples that occurred during the most recent conflict between Israel and Hezbollah.)