After America

arguments. All those tea parties and town halls with ordinary citizens protesting governmentalized health care?

Oh, don’t be so naive. As the New York Times assured its readers, “The Rage Is Not About Health Care.”⁴⁵ “It’s merely a handy excuse,” Frank Rich explained. “The real source of the over-the-top rage of 2010 is the same kind of national existential reordering that roiled America in 1964….”

Ah, in the Democratic Party it’s always 1964 and Selma, Alabama.

Except that now it’s not the Democrats who are the redneck racists, it’s you—yes, you. As Frank Rich explains:

If Obama’s first legislative priority had been immigration or financial reform or climate change, we would have seen the same trajectory. The conjunction of a black president and a female speaker of the House—topped off by a wise Latina on the Supreme Court and a powerful gay Congressional committee chairman—would sow fears of disenfranchisement among a dwindling and threatened minority in the country no matter what policies were in play…. When you hear demonstrators chant the slogan “Take our country back!,” these are the people they want to take the country back from.

So you may think you object to ObamaCare because you’re very concerned about what you’ve heard about two-year wait times for MRIs in Canada, but it’s really because you’re itchin’ to get your sheet on and string up that uppity Negro.

You may think you object to ObamaCare because it will lead to a massive shortage of primary care physicians as has already happened in Massachusetts,⁴⁶ but it’s really because you’d like to slap around that Nancy Pelosi the way Bogey does Mary Astor in The Maltese Falcon ’cause that’s the only language these lippy broads understand.

You may think you object to ObamaCare because the Federal Government forcing you to make health-care arrangements that meet the approval of the state commissars is unconstitutional, but it’s really because you think that that wise Latina on the Supreme Court should be turning down your hotel bed and leaving a complimentary hazelnut truffle on your pillow.⁴⁷

You may think you object to ObamaCare because its absurd bureaucratic insistence that you need a doctor’s prescription in order to pay for your Tylenol from a health savings account will waste untold hours of doctors’, patients’, and pharmacists’ time, but it’s really because Barney Frank reminds you that you’ve always been slightly confused about your own sexuality and at the back of the desk drawer you’ve still got the phone number of that guy who wrote back when you put the “Bi-Curious Male Seeks Similar” ad in the classifieds, and to be honest when Congressman Frank gets butch and beats up on those bank executives it kinda turns you on.

I can’t speak for the rest of you racists, sexists, and homophobes, but I’ve opposed government health care in Canada, the United Kingdom, Bulgaria, and anywhere else I’ve been on the receiving end of it. And in Britain no blacks, women, or gays were involved in its introduction, just pasty-faced white blokes. In Canada, it was just pasty-faced white blokes with a pronounced hint of maple. In Bulgaria, it was swarthy Slavic blokes with impressively hirsute monobrows. Okay, that is racist, but only mildly so. And in any case when it comes to Slavic monobrows I prefer the women.

Okay, that’s racist and sexist, so I’ll quit while I’m behind. But the point is, throughout most of the western world, government health care has been the creation of white males of drearily conventional orientation.

Yet, if you write for the New York Times or teach race and gender studies at American colleges for long enough, it seems entirely reasonable to conclude that a difference of opinion over health-care policy is being driven by nostalgia for segregated lunch counters. Invited by National Public Radio to expound on the use of “racial code words” in “the current opposition to health care reform,” Melissa Harris- Lacewell, Professor of African-American Studies at Princeton, informed her listeners that “language of personal responsibility is often a code language used against poor and minority communities.”⁴⁸

“Personal responsibility” is racial code language? Phew, thank goodness America is belatedly joining Europe in all but abolishing the concept.

“Code language” is code language for “total bollocks.” “Code word” is a code word for “I’m inventing what you really meant to say because the actual quote doesn’t quite do the job for me.” “Small government”? Racist code words! “Non-confiscatory taxes”? Likewise. “Individual liberty”? Don’t even go there! With interpreters like Professor Harris-Lacewell on the prowl, I’m confident 95 percent of Webster’s will eventually be ruled “code language.”

Faced with public discontent about the statist agenda, the Condescendi look out the window at the unlovely mob in their “Don’t tread on me” T-shirts and sneer, “The peasants are revolting.” You oppose illegal immigration? You’re a xenophobe. Gay marriage? Homophobe. The Ground Zero mosque? Islamophobe. If that’s the choice, I’d rather be damned as racist and sexist. The evolution from -isms to phobias is part of the medicalization of dissent: the Conformicrats simply declare your position a form of mental illness. After firing commentator Juan Williams for some insufficiently politically correct observations about Muslims, NPR exec Vivian Schiller suggested her longtime colleague needed to see a psychiatrist.⁴⁹ That’s the polite version of dismissing him as just another one of those “fucking Nascar retards,” the elegant formulation Eric Alterman (Distinguished Professor of English and Journalism at Brooklyn College, and Professor of Journalism at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism) used on the in-house “JournoList” to describe those Americans who disagree with him and his fellow media professionals.⁵⁰ Juan Williams seems an unlikely Nascar retard. He is not only liberal but black. Had a conservative hinted that an eminent African-American Democrat had mental health issues, he’d be the one headed for the funny farm. But, of course, in briefly wandering off liberalism’s ideological plantation, Mr. Williams had behaved so irrationally that, as in the Soviet Union, only a medical condition could explain it. Don’t worry about it, Juan. Just let the men in white coats get the straps around you, and shoot the needle into your arm, and you’ll soon be feeling much better, and thinking just the same as everybody else.

On most of these issues, from illegal immigration to the Ground Zero mosque, the Conformicrats are losing the battle for public opinion by as much as 70/30. Yet even that isn’t enough to persuade them to mount an argument. So much liberal debate boils down to Ring Lardner’s great line:

“‘Shut up,’ he explained.”

Fewer people know the line that precedes it (in Lardner’s story, The Young Immigrunts): a kid asking, “Are you lost, daddy?” The rulers think we’re kids, they’re the daddy, and it takes a village to raise a fuckin’ Nascar retard child. The ruled think we’re lost, and being driven farther and farther off the map.

But the disparagement of dissenters as racists, sexists, homophobes, and retards is not entirely an act of misdirection. It reflects the so-called technocracy’s priorities: for Big Government bent on social micro- management, ideological enforcement takes priority over any other activity. When Hurricane Katrina swept in and devastated Louisiana and Mississippi, volunteer firemen—whoops, “firefighters”—from across the map headed south to help with disaster relief. FEMA dispatched them to… New Orleans? Gulfport?

No, to Atlanta—for diversity and sexual-harassment training.⁵¹

Which most of them had already undergone back home. But you can’t be too careful: Heaven forbid that a waterlogged granny should be rescued by an insufficiently non-homophobic fireman.

FEMA is supposed to be the Federal Emergency Management Agency, not the Fairyland Equality Makework Agency. But so it goes. Government agencies created to demonstrate the laser-sharp problem-solving skills of the elite technocracy in the end mostly just enforce conformity with the state ideology. Thus, the “enhanced patdowns” of U.S. airport security are less about preventing terrorism than about preventing the acknowledgment of inconvenient truths at odds with the diversity cult. Contemporary Big Government is like a widget factory that no longer makes widgets but holds sensitivity training sessions all day long. And, if you’re a nonagenarian spinster at LaGuardia with a TSA agent’s paws roaming ’round your bloomers while the Yemeni madrassah alumnus sails through the express check-in, the involuntary sensitivity training isn’t all that sensitive.