Riots on Election Nite? It's looking as tho the racist scum of the South and white suburbs and some white rural areas may defeat Barack Obama, aided by wilful lies by the despicably dishonest John McCain and Sarah Palin about Obama's tax plan. What happens if racism defeats hope? Will the millions of blacks energized by the Obama candidacy just accept gracefully their defeat by racism? Or can we expect riots? If riots, where? How violent? Violence directed against whom? Will blacks in states that did vote for Obama still riot in Blue States because they can't reach Red States? Have the Obama campaign, civil rights organizations, and law-enforcement agencies developed plans to deal with riots?
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And what of riots in Red States if Obama wins? Certainly there has been a lot of hateful rhetoric from Radical Rightwingers with loaded words that could be seen as code for violent insurrection if a 'nigger' gets elected, aided, again, by the monsters McCain and Palin. There are a lot of guns in Red States, and a lot of violent rednecks who have just barely been held in check in the past 40 years. Is this the last straw for the "white trash" who see the whole damned country being "stolen" from them? They feel entitled to control things even if they don't do anything to advance themselves. They don't go to college, they don't improve their job skills, they don't save, they don't plan for the future. But when other groups move up, they feel they are moving down. And it's those other people's fault. "The damned Gummint has been greasing the skids under poor white folk and giving everything we used to have to them damned niggas. Are we going to stand still for this? What are we going to do about it?"
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Rick Sanchez of CNN read aloud some emails during his show today from people who are appalled at the blatant racism they hear all around them, or decipher from the coded language used by Rightwingers in media. Phrases like "I thought we were better than that" came thru their worried emails. They are right to worry.
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Have the governors of agitated areas put their National Guard commanders on alert for trouble on Election Nite? If not, why not? "We don't want to give people ideas"? Saying you are prepared to put down any cockamamie insurrection, a latter-day Johnny Reb uprising, should not incite violence but put people on notice that you're not playing along and you're not playing, period, but will use all necessary force to maintain public order and defend the electoral process, the Constitution of the United States, in effect everywhere in the Nation, and the unity of the United States against demented talk of a new secessionism. Make no mistake: the Red State white trash who paint Confederate Battle Flags on their pickups or mount a rebel flag under the gun rack in the back of the cab may very well be so delusional and so certain that "white people" — meaning of course uneducated, lazy white trash who feel their racial entitlement trumps education or job skills — are being "sold down the river" by "Warshington", a mispronunciation probably brought to North America by the Scotch-Irish, who are the hardest of the hardcore Radical Right. Those Protestant Scots who helped conquer and hold northern Ireland for Britain for centuries, have a history of militarism and interpersonal violence that they are proud of! They may be so deluded — and drunk, or meth-addled — that they take to the streets or take up their weapons to fite for "white people's rights". Congressman John Lewis was absolutely right to warn that he was hearing echoes of George Wallace's campaign for President:

As public figures with the power to influence and persuade, Sen. McCain and Gov. Palin are playing with fire, and if they are not careful, that fire will consume us all[.]

Naturally, the pussy Barack Obama substantially disowned Lewis's remarks. It might almost be funny if they came around to bite him in the ass — or put a bullet thru his head.
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Assassination is almost as American as elections. John McCain needs to worry about that almost as much as does Obama. On November 4th, we shall see if we are as sophisticated, democratic, and even-tempered as we like to think ourselves.

Email to Britain. I wrote to a colleague in northern England today who seems sanguine about the election. I'm not.

Alas, I'm unhappy with both major-party choices once again — which is why I and my late friend Stanley [Hauser] started our own little party — and will be voting for Ralph Nader. Given the nature of our electoral system, the popular vote doesn't matter, so if your state is certain to go for a given candidate, if you want to register a protest vote, you can do so safely.
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I'm concerned that racism and tribalism will trump good sense, and McCain will be elected. He has shown himself to have absolutely no principles, but the Democrats won't call him a baldface liar, adulterer, gigolo, and male golddigger, nor ask aloud why it is that John McCain couldn't make Admiral (unlike his father and grandfather; the real reason he wants to be President) but we're supposed to make him Commander-in-Chief. I often feel that the Democrats are an imitation party of the Opposition that puts up a show rather than a fite. McCain-Palin are making traction with their LIES that Obama wants to take money from "working families" to redistribute it to unknown persons (presumably to layabout 'niggers'), and Obama-Biden don't say "That is a flat-out, baldface lie. We want to take money from the rich and super-rich and use it to cut taxes on everybody else, including essentially all the people McCain is trying to rile with his lies about Joe The Plumber (that means you, you white-trash losers!)." Perhaps that last bit of text would be impolitic, but perhaps we should just say plainly, "Listen, McCain wants you to think that you don't want to raise taxes on the rich because you might someday be rich. But let's face facts. The great preponderance of you will NEVER be rich. The rich will see to that. So why are you so eager to lower taxes on the rich and super-rich — the people like John McCain, with his 7 houses and 13 cars — who don't care about YOU at all, not even whether you are thrown out of your ONE house or die because you can't afford an operation that would save your life? You are WHITE TRASH to them, and they HATE you. They are LAFFING AT YOU behind your back, laffing at how easily you can be manipulated into voting to lower THEIR taxes and make them even richer, even as YOU fall deeper into debt every year — debt that they own, and on which they charge you outrageous interest! Wake up, you f* morons! We're on YOUR side. McCain is one of the rich. Count his houses. Count his cars. How on Earth can you think he's one of you?"

Idiotic Subtitles. The 24-hour newschannels apparently have no idea what people need and want to know. Over and over I see interviews in which the person speaking is not identified in the space where such ID could easily rest, in a group of text lines as much as four high. Rather, the ID is flashed on and then taken OFF, in order to leave a description of the general news item the discussion concerns. We can tell from what the person is saying what the topic is. We cannot, however, tell from what he is saying who he is. If anything is to be put up only momentarily and then removed, it is the topic, not the ID.
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These text subtitles and crawls are way out of control. Much too much information is offered, each bit of which may cancel out others by distracting us. People CANNOT multitask without loss of attention and loss of comprehension. The pretense is that we can, and so some morons read and write text messages while DRIVING, with the result that they have accidents that KILL people. There are minor distractions we can handle and others we cannot. Listening to music while driving is something most people can handle. Talking on a cellfone while driving, not so much. Text messaging while driving, damned near impossible. Even changing the channel on the radio or changing a disk in the CD player while driving can cause fatal accidents.
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Altho being distracted by one stream of information, be it spoken or written, from what is being presented on other streams during a news program may not produce fatal accidents, it assuredly reduces the understanding we take away. The mind may even cross-relate unrelated things because they happen to be perceived at the same time. So not only do you lose full comprehension of the main topic being discussed, but you may actually be confused as to why an extraneous thought intrudes upon you when you're trying to recapitulate an interview, in thinking back on what you've heard. Too much information can end up meaning that we come away with too little real knowledge.
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Moreover, I have now seen on at least two different newschannels "THE HEADLINE ...THE HEADLINE ...THE HEADLINE..." on the news crawl, as the people who are supposed to be feeding actual information where "THE HEADLINE" appears can't keep up. When that happens, the crawl should simply go blank until actual headlines are inserted, not show the incompetence of the technicians and news staff by displaying text that might as well read "WE'RE MORONS ...WE'RE MORONS ...WE'RE MORONS...".
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 1,486 — for Israel.)

- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 5:52 PM