Drowning in Hate
Ugly rhetoric perverts our politics.
Much has been made of the abuse showered on members of Congress at a recent tea-party demonstration on Capitol Hill. Georgia Congressman John Lewis was greeted with racial slurs. Emanuel Cleaver, a black congressman from Missouri, was spat on. Congressman Barney Frank, who is openly gay, was tarred with homophobic epithets. Later, Democrats in various cities had their offices vandalized. And Congressman Alan Grayson of Florida said one of his 5-year-old twins picked up the phone and heard a voice threatening to kill him if he voted for the bill. The startled child, Grayson told me, initially thought the threat was aimed at him.
Frightening a child in such a way is inexcusable. But presumably the caller thought she had reached the congressman himself. And, frankly, I'm not that worried about Grayson. Congressmen can pretty much fend for themselves. Lewis spent his formative years being beaten and tear-gassed by armed, foulmouthed racists on the Southern battlefield for civil rights. And let's face it: taking verbal abuse is part of a politician's job description.
The more serious danger from this corrosive conduct—and the failure to acknowledge it for what it is—is to our fraying national sense of purpose. It's a symptom of "what happens when [the citizens of] a country can't talk to one another constructively," said Cleaver's spokesperson.
When I asked Frank whether the rhetoric was worse than during the Clinton era, he said it was. To find its equivalent, said Frank, "I think you have to go back to the '60s, early '70s." The crazy talk then, he noted, was from the radical left, the likes of SDS. But at least in that era, respectable liberals denounced the radical fringe. Now the Republican establishment quietly acquiesces. And the right-wing media egg it on. "Instead of damning with faint praise, it is praising with faint damns," said Frank.
And precisely because it is so faintly damned by on-air pundits and other prominent figures, much of this poisonous talk is absorbed, undiluted, into the body politic. An analysis by Media Matters for America, a liberal media-watchdog group, blames the irresponsible and harshly partisan language for much of the misinformation accepted by a shockingly high percentage of the public. A majority of Republicans, reported a new Harris poll, believe President Obama to be a Muslim and a socialist—notions that, as Media Matters points out, are widely propagated in right-wing outlets (even though they don't particularly seem to go together). A majority of Republicans, reports Harris, also believe that Obama "wants to turn over the sovereignty of the United States to a one-world government."
When patriots are being taught that the president is a religiously suspect traitor ready to hand the country over to some sinister international cabal, it's hardly surprising they feel entitled to hurl hateful words at him or his presumed allies. More worrisome is how those ideas play out when they connect with people who are violent and unbalanced, such as the members of a right-wing, Christian militia arrested in Michigan last week. They were reportedly planning to assassinate police officers in their effort to halt the rise of the feared new world order—as foreseen by conspiracy theorists and prophets of the right such as Pat Robertson.
Chip Berlet, a senior analyst with Political Research Associates who studies such militia groups, believes the possibility of violence is heightened in times like these, when fear of joblessness is high, the nation's racial demographics are changing, and America and its values are widely perceived to be under attack. All you need to push some people over the edge is an enemy seen as irredeemably evil. For many on the right, Obama has become that enemy. And there is clearly no point, Berlet says, in "having a conversation about policy if your opponent is evil." So rational discourse is shut down, and working in a truly bipartisan way becomes a bad joke.
Humphrey Taylor, chairman of the Harris poll, points out that hatred of presidents is nothing new. "What I think is different this time is the large numbers of people whose beliefs about this president are pretty weird or false," he wrote me. Those beliefs nonetheless have a consequence. Obama, who came into office swearing to put partisanship aside, is forced to rely on pure partisanship to claim his most significant domestic achievement to date.
The midterm season promises no relief from hate-filled language. And why not, when it is so effective at stirring people up? Why not when, according to Harris, a quarter of Republicans think Obama may be the Antichrist and nearly half believe that he "resents America's heritage"? However effective such divisive notions may be when hurled around in the political arena, it's hard to see how, once they get imbibed and digested, we ever get back on the same side.
Ellis Cose is the author of Bone to Pick: Of Forgiveness, Reconciliation, Reparation, and Revenge and The Envy of the World: On Being a Black Man in America.
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Ellis Cose, author, columnist and contributing editor (since 1993) for Newsweek magazine and former chairman of the editorial board and editorial page editor of the New York Daily News, began his journalism career as a weekly columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times—becoming, at the age of 19, the youngest editorial page columnist ever employed by a major Chicago daily. Cose, who is also an independent radio producer, is a popular campus lecturer and public speaker.
In addition to serving as a columnist, editor and national correspondent for the Chicago Sun-Times, Cose has been a contributor and press critic for Time magazine, president and chief executive officer of the Institute for Journalism Education, chief writer on management and workplace issues for USA Today (where he has also served as an occasional columnist and member of the board of contributors) and a member of the editorial board of the Detroit Free Press. He has also been a fellow at the Gannett Center for Media Studies at Columbia University, at the National Research Council/National Academy of Sciences, a senior fellow and director of energy policy studies at the Washington-based Joint Center for Political Studies, and a consultant to the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations.
Cose's Bone to Pick: On Forgiveness, Reconciliation, Reparation and Revenge, was published by Atria (a Simon and Schuster imprint) in April 2004. The book is a wide-ranging look at a number of societies—the United States, Ghana, South Africa, East Timor, and Peru among them—and their ways of coping with cruelty and pain. The Washington Post had this to say: "The complex questions surrounding 'forgiveness, reconciliation, reparation, and revenge' probably require a scholarship of jurisprudence, philosophy, psychology, history and literature. This is the kind of ambitious enterprise that the world's great religions deal with. But Cose meets the challenge, and Bone to Pick ranges over centuries of contested histories, across five continents, spinning individual tragedies in and out of collective traumas, seeking the nature of 'forgiveness, albeit as a proxy for a larger set of values.' … The truth may be a prized (and politicized) commodity in the quest for social justice, but as Cose observes, quoting Czech novelist Milan Kundera, 'The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.' Bone to Pick is a timely reminder of that axiom and a useful addition to the canon of that struggle."
Cose's The Envy of the World, an in-depth essay on the state of black men in America, was published by Washington Square Press (an imprint of Simon and Schuster) in 2002 and has appeared on several best-seller lists, including the Essence magazine list, where it was number one. Newsweek featured the book on its cover and National Public Radio produced a special a program based on it. Kirkus Reviews called The Envy of the World, "A slender volume with a substantial and significant message." The Washington Post described it as "lucid, eloquent and deeply personal book." The Chicago Tribune called its author "a gifted, rhapsodic essayist." "Cose charts both an urgently argued history of black masculinity and a moving and nuanced snapshot of where it is now," declared Publishers' Weekly. The paperback edition was published in January 2003.
In May 2004 the Rockefeller Foundation issued Beyond Brown v. Board: The Final Battle for Excellence in American Education—a major report authored by Cose on the legacy of the historic Brown v. Board of Education school desegregation decision and the current challenges facing American educators. The report was the basis of a Newsweek cover feature and for a David Broder column and other stories in the national press. In November 2006, the Institute for Justice and Journalism at USC's Annenberg School published Cose's Killing Affirmative Action: Would ending it really result in a better, more perfect Union? That report, featured in several newspaper and in Newsweek magazine, examined California's 10-year experience living with Proposition 209, the measure that ended affirmative action in the public sector in California.
Cose's best-selling The Rage of a Privileged Class, a book-length essay on race in America, was published by HarperCollins in January 1994. It was featured as a Newsweek cover story and described by The New York Times Book Review as a "disciplined, graceful exposition of a neglected aspect of the subject of race in America." His A Man's World (published by HarperCollins in June 1995), was featured in a front page review in The New York Times Book Review. The Washington Post called it "a valuable, cogent and well-written contribution to an enormously complex subject."
Color-Blind: Seeing Beyond Race in a Race-Obsessed World (published in January 1997 and also excerpted in Newsweek) explored America's continuing obsession with race. The New York Times Book Review called it "a book this country desperately needs, one with genuine healing potential," and included Color-Blind among its best book of the year recommendations for 1997. Cose edited an essay collection entitled The Darden Dilemma published by HarperCollins in March 1997. His debut novel, The Best Defense, was published by HarperCollins in September 1998 ("a formidable first novel...crisp, fast-paced and engaging. In a genre glutted with lightweight fare, The Best Defense reaches higher"— The Seattle Times).
Cose is also the author of A Nation of Strangers, a history of American immigration, published by William Morrow and Co. in 1992 and of The Press, published by Morrow in 1989. He is the author of Energy and the Urban Crisis (1979) and the editor of Energy and Equity: Some Social Concerns (1978), both published by the Joint Center for Political Studies. He also wrote The Rebirth of Community Power, published by Westview Press: 1983.
At the Institute for Journalism Education (at the University of California, Berkeley), Cose designed and directed a widely quoted study on journalism careers published by IJE: The Quiet Crisis: Minority Journalists and Newsroom Opportunity (1985). He also instituted and served as inaugural director of IJE's Management Training Center at Northwestern University.
In his capacity as president of Ellis Cose, Inc. Cose has produced, written and hosted the pilot for a multimedia documentary series: "Against the Odds." The radio project (which has received funding from the Ford Foundation and will be distributed by Public Radio International) profiles individuals who have overcome tremendous adversity. It aspires to provide continuing and better coverage—in public radio but also on the web and in other media, including print—of people and communities often relegated to the margins of society. It also aims to stimulate thinking on how they, and their respective societies, can overcome that marginalization. The pilot focuses on a young man from a refugee camp in northern Kenya who, studying by the light of a rechargeable lamp, managed to get himself into Princeton University.
Cose has appeared on The Today Show, Nightline, Dateline, ABC Evening News, Good Morning America, the PBS "Time to Choose" election special, Charlie Rose, CNN's Talk Back Live, and a variety of other nationally televised and local programs. He has been interviewed for British, Brazilian and Canadian television. He is also a judge for the New York Public Library Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism. Cose has received fellowships or individual grants from the Ford Foundation, The Andrew Mellon Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies, and numerous journalism awards—including the University of Missouri medal for career excellence and distinguished service in journalism, two Clarion awards, and four National Association of Black Journalists first place awards. He was also named the 2002 winner of the New York Association of Black Journalists' lifetime achievement award, winner of the 2003 award for best magazine feature from the National Association of Black Journalists as well as the winner of two New York Association of Black Journalists' first place 2003 awards for commentary and magazine features. In 2004 Cose was named the first recipient of the newly inaugurated annual Vision Award from the Maynard Institute for Journalism Education. In 2006 he won a Unity award for commentary and also shared in a first place award from the Society of Professional Journalists.
A Chicago native, Cose holds a master's degree in Science, Technology and Public Policy from George Washington University. He is married to Lee Llambelis, former legal director for the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund and current director of intergovernmental relations for the Attorney General of New York. He has a daughter, Elisa Maria.
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