Violence in the campaign

Last week, a young Republican supporter claimed that while getting money at an ATM she was attacked by a tall black man, "an Obama supporter" who had carved the letter B for Barack with a knife on her cheek.

As it turned out, it was a hoax. She had mutilated herself with a B on her cheek and invented the whole story. The hoax did not last long. The B was backwards. She had done it looking in a mirror.

Yesterday, we learned that two youngsters defining themselves as neo-Nazis, had planned to assassinate Barack Obama. Before that, they were planning to kill 88 black people, 14 by beheading. 14 and 88 are symbolic numbers for neo-Nazis. 14 is the number of words in a sentence uttered by a supremacist leader about preserving the white race and the white children. 8 corresponds to the letter H in the alphabet. Two 8 means two H, the initials for "Heil Hitler."

This is the kind of violence which goes with the current election. In previous posts, I wrote about the fact that the supremacists wanted Obama to be elected, I wrote about the outbursts of racist hatred coming out of McCain and Palin's audiences.
Quite incredibly, this violence, underlying or in the open, is becoming commonplace. People are hardly shocked by such news. They do not really question the deep-running causes of such hatred and violence.

It does not really matter how often the candidates on both sides will say that the US is the greatest country on earth, the US still has a long and continuing history of violence, racism, presidential assassination. What does it mean to be the greatest country on earth when such violence is commonplace?
And for my American readers, I have to insist that although I am saying this, I am not "a primitive anti-Americanist" as I was called once on national French radio. I love the US. I teach the US, I read the US, I married the US, I have US children.

I just think that if only all those people who claim they love their country so much simply questioned their country now and then, they could make it better.

I come from a country where the electoral campaigns are so boring that when the candidates call each other liars, it is a big deal. Just imagine!

Of course, the candidates are not responsible for all this violence. Well, kinda!

As I wrote in a previous post, Palin has not reacted in the least bit to the hateful outbursts coming from her audience. A reminder: "Off with his head!" "Kill him!' could be heard when Palin said Obama was "palling around with terrorists."
McCain has been very slow, and mild and awkward, in correcting the outbursts in his audience, taking the mike from a woman calling Obama "an Arab." A reminder of McCain's awkward response: "No, Ma'am, he is a decent family man." Awkward, but still the most soothing reaction he has had so far.

Since then, Obama has been linked to terrorists again and again. Until he was called a Socialist, also with underlying violence, since the socialism they are refering to here is not the Mitterandian socialism that we the French know, but something McCain, Palin and their surrogates confuse with Stalinist Communism.
Why is Obama called a socialist? Because he wants to "spread the wealth." That is he wants the rich to pay more taxes than the poor, and use that money to help the poor.
Finally, yesterday, commentator David Gergen had tried to remind everybody that this is not Socialism in the Communist sense of the word, it is Progressive Taxation, something that Teddy Roosevelt, McCain's model advocated and a policy that Reagan, another model of McCain and Palin's, implemented.

But that does not matter. "Socialist" and "terrorist" are uttered so often in the Republican stump speeches that they almost become synonyms, negative epithets that depict Barack Hussein Obama as a dangerous man. An editorialist has even gone so far as accusing Obama a "Muslim Socialist."
When Barack is finally elected next Tuesday, this is so stupid and absurd that it will be funny. Right now, though, it is stupid and scary.

One more thing: Colin Powell, a Republican who served in the Bush administration, endorsed Obama last week. He explained very clearly why he did so. He said that Obama was a transformational figure. He said that McCain's VP pick said much of his poor judgment. He gave a lot of reasons that he had thought through.
The following day, Rush Limbaugh, a racist, far-right radio host, yelled in his mike that Powell's endorsement of Obama was "totally about race."
It does not matter that Powell is an intelligent man with a lot of political and military experience. For Limbaugh, he is above all a black man, and that's why he endorsed Obama.
I guess all the white men's endorsements of McCain are also about race then.
I guess all white people will vote for the white candidate, and all black people will vote for Obama. I guess Limbaugh wishes that were true. McCain would win. But Obama will.

I am rambling.
What I mean to say, I guess, is that, yes, the candidates are partly responsible for all this violence. They blow on the glowing ashes.
McCain still have not said anything about the hoax I referred to at the beginning of this post. He needs to talk about it, and about all the rest. He needs to talk against this violence and this ambient racism.
He could lose with dignity, at least.

Lionel Hussein Larre