Oh, no ... it's fear itself

Chan Lowe perfectly drew what went through my mind Friday morning on the way to the dog park, as I was listening to the radio news of the previous night's shoot-out.

In fact, the day before,I'd been thinking of how black people speak of hearing about a crime and then watching the news saying, "please, no, please, no ..." and thinking that Muslims around the country, and around the world, were surely going through the same thing.

There are two reasons for not just Muslims but for all of us to regret this development:

1. It helps stir up more anti-Muslim bigotry, not that we've needed much help stirring that up. 

2. That bigotry, in turn, distracts us from actually getting to the roots of such events. If the Boston bombing can be lumped in with 9/11 as part of some Grand Muslim Conspiracy, we don't have to wonder about how it came about. Hey, they were Muslims! Whatchagonnadoaboutit?

Well, we could round up all Muslims and put them in camps, like we did with the Japanese-Americans 75 years ago. And like ... okay, okay, Mr. Godwin, I'll skip the analogy. The Nisei parallel will suffice.

The genuine problem is that, when Dylan Klebold and Erik Harris decided the world was against them, they didn't have a Grand Conspiracy to explain it all and to make common cause with, so they just went down to Columbine High and did what they did on a kind of freelance basis.

I heard on NPR yesterday that the older brother in the Boston bombings had lived a fairly normal life for an immigrant, but then became unhappy and frustrated with things, and suddenly took a turn towards fundamentalism. He stopped drinking and ordered -- not "asked" -- his girlfriend to dress modestly and, apparently, became a pain in the ass within his social circle. 

This happens in Christian circles, too. And, while most of those overnight converts simply annoy people with lectures about Jesus or by handing out pamphlets on the street, some of them end up in armed compounds in Idaho.

But, however this new mania exhibits itself in those cases, there isn't as clear a path from "everybody picks on me" and "nobody lives up to my standards" to "I'll show them all!" as there is for psychotic Muslims who seek some kind of justification for their social disconnection through what they perceive to be their religion.

I interviewed Bobby Seale once, and he said that the major problem that undermined the Black Panther Party's original goal of legal community organization and local empowerment was that they let in people who didn't get it, chief among them, of course, being Eldridge Cleaver, but also just about any black guy who could get his hands on a pair of shades, a black leather car coat and a beret.

And not only did these wannabes get into the group, but there were faux-Panthers all over the country who had no connection with the party. The core group, Seale said, should have strongly disavowed all these hangers-on.

I'm not sure how much good that would have done, given J. Edgar Hoover's attitude towards minorities in general and the Panther Party in particular.

Not sure how much good it will do now, for that matter.

Does anyone care that the Command of Mujahideen of Caucasus Emirate's Dagestan Province said this? 

"After the events in Boston, the US, information has been distributed in the press saying that one of the Tsarnaev brothers spent 6 months in Dagestan in 2012. On this basis, there are speculative assumptions that he may have been associated with the Mujahideen of the Caucasus Emirate, in particular with the Mujahideen of Dagestan.

The Command of the Province of Dagestan indicates in this regard that the Caucasian Mujahideen are not fighting against the United States of America. We are at war with Russia, which is not only responsible for the occupation of the Caucasus, but also for heinous crimes against Muslims." 

I doubt this will make a bit of difference. People are going to believe what they want to believe.

I watched a two-hour Discovery Channel program last night that united Woodward, Bernstein, Bradlee, Redford and Hoffman, and added interviews with Egil Krogh and John Dean and Ben Stein and some other people, to go over both Watergate and "All the President's Men."

When they got to the "what did it all mean?" part, there was the predictable "well, they all do it," mostly from Joe Scarborough, who was in a good position to analyze it, having turned nine years old the month before the break-in, and also some speculation about "what if it happened today?"

And the consensus seemed to be that Watergate would have blown up in Nixon's face much more quickly because the social media and the 24-hour news cycle would have dissected the whole thing in a matter of days or weeks rather than the months through which Woodward and Bernstein (and the NYTimes and a lot of other people, but shhh!) labored.

Which, first of all, is not consistent with "they all do it," since the most this new generation of relentless sleuths has come up with so far was a blowjob from an intern. And I'm willing to concede that they all do that, but what else ya got, there, Columbo?

More important, however, it also ignores the fact that we didn't have spin down to such a well-established, well-funded process in those days.

Today, Watergate would have spawned a competing deluge of insane, partisan web pages that would make the question of Obama's birth certificate look like a discussion among rational, intelligent people motivated by a mutual desire to learn the truth.

And it's not just the advent of the Internet that has changed things. Well before that, we sold out the airwaves to deregulation, which is to say, we took the public out of public discourse.

Nixon had plenty of defenders. But they had to play within the rules, and the rules required fairness.

At the time of the break-in, Rush Limbaugh was playing Top 40 music on a radio station in McKeesport, Pennsylvania, and if he had paused between "I'll Take You There" and "The Candy Man," to announce that nothing had happened, that Kennedy was worse and that it was all a conspiracy, they would have been required to grant someone with two oars in the water an opportunity to voice an opposing opinion.

And speaking of people Rush Limbaugh hates, FDR's First Inaugural Address is so peppered with applicable sound bites that I defy any of Facebook's meme-creators to select only one.

But, just as Don Quixote is remembered for his early tilt against the windmills and War and Peace for Natasha's adolescent crush on Boris, so, too, FDR's address is remembered for a phrase from its opening paragraph, and that with little context attached to it.

This is preeminently the time to speak the truth, the whole truth, frankly and boldly. Nor need we shrink from honestly facing conditions in our country today. This great Nation will endure as it has endured, will revive and will prosper. So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.

Less than a decade later, mind you, he locked up George Takei and his family.

Unreasoning, unjustified terror doesn't necessarily come from outside the walls, but it is, indeed, the thing we need fear the most.

Assalamu alaikum.

 

Comments

[Jean]

Thanks for writing this, Mike.

[Mat]

"People are going to believe what they want to believe."

This is crux of the problem. Too many people willing to believe something regardless of evidence, facts or anything to the contrary.

[Mary in Ohio]

And may I add that while the Senator from Texas is climbing all over the FBI for letting them "slip through the cracks" he might want to check up on some safety regulations in his home state, as that fertilizer plant explosion had a way higher toll of dead and injured than Boston, and each one of those lives was important somehow. (And I do not mean to belittle the horror of Boston when I write this!)