Creating Solutions to Problems That Don't Really Exist: A Toxic Political Strategy
By the time you get around to reading this blog, Virginians will likely have gone to the polls to elect a new governor. Looking into my frequently unreliable crystal ball, I see 3 possible outcomes:
1) Former Governor, Democrat Terry McAuliffe, who served as the Commonwealth’s 64th governor from 2014-2018 would be returned to office by a nose;
2) Republican businessman and Republican donor Glenn Allen Youngkin, a Trumpian clone, would defeat McAuliffe in a squeaker, or that
3) Younkin would lose in a particularly close race and then claim that McAuliffe stole the election from him.
Sound familiar?
McAuliffe, a seasoned poll and self-made millionaire, chaired the Democratic National Committee from 2001-2005 and then the National Governors Association in 2016-2017. He has long been close to the Clintons, and campaigned largely on his economic record from his single term as governor (Virginia only permits non-consecutive terms), supporting infrastructure improvements, voting rights, and President Biden's current “American Rescue Plan." McAuliffe has also managed to get in a few words about Donald Trump, letting it be known that his opponent is very much in Trump’s thrall and, like the former POTUS (who endorsed Youngkin no less than ten times during the campaign, is a multi-centimillionaire making his first run for office.
During the campaign, whatever support Youngkin showed for Trump was more tacit than obvious; the name T-R-U-M-P barely passed his lips even once. And one can be reasonably certain that he prayed that the de facto head of the G.O.P would not come into the Commonwealth to campaign on his behalf. So what were Youngkin’s main issues? At first, he avoided any discussions of divisive social issues in favor of praising of free markets and job creators, lower taxes, and balanced budgets (an historically typical Republican smorgasbord) and conservative activists actually knew very little about him other than the fact that he has a degree from Harvard Business School, a long and lucrative career in private equity, devout religious convictions and even a family love of horses . . . making him more similar to Utah Senator Mitt Romney than former POTUS Donald Trump.
Then, in the election’s final two weeks, he made a sharp right-hand turn and began promoting causes which animate and energize the conservative Republican base (read: Trump); now he began hammering away at the “danger and peril” of teaching of “Critical Race Theory” in schools as well as transgender children. In other words, Youngkin no longer ran against Terry McAuliffe; now his targets were school bathrooms and sports teams to the Pulitzer and Nobel Prize winning writer, poet and essayist, Toni Morrison. What all these - and many other - “dog whistle” issues have in common (besides being “dog whistles”) is that they are arguing for “solutions” to “problems” which really do not exist. Nakedly, they combine to make a political campaign strategy which is both toxic and represents a clear and present danger to the future of “small-d” democracy.
Candidate Youngkin has quickly made the banning of Critical Race Theory (“I’ll do this on the first day I’m in office”) the number one issue for his campaign. According to Fox News it has pushed him to a 54%-46% lead in various polls. (I for one take polls run on Fox, News Max or OAN with a dollop of salt). He wants to protect Virginia’s children from having to be “indoctrinated” with “. . . left, liberal, socialist notions that America is a racist nation . . . and will make our children into a bunch of Californians.” The fact of the matter is that Critical Race Theory is not part of the state-wide curriculum in Virginia . . . or Texas, Oklahoma, Florida, Arizona or any of the other states which have either banned it as a matter of law or are in the process of doing so. It is a toxic solution to a problem that does not really exist.
Here in Florida the State Board of Education unanimously approved an amendment to its rules this past June. The amendment instructs public school staff to teach topics around race "efficiently and faithfully," using materials that meet "the highest standards of professionalism and historical accuracy." It bans the teaching of Critical Race Theory, which the legislation describes as "the theory that racism is not merely the product of prejudice, but that racism is embedded in American society and its legal systems in order to uphold the supremacy of white persons." It has the full-throated approval of Governor Rick DeSantis.
Why has Fox News mentioned “Critical Race Theory” more than 1,300 times in less than 4 months? What is causing state legislatures, governors, and candidates for school board across the country to be so adamantly opposed to something which exists far more in theory than in reality? What is it about the late Toni Morrison and her best-known, most widely read novel — Beloved - to so rile up the right? And by the way: how many have actually read it? (Watching the 1998 movie starring Oprah Winfrey and Danny Glover doesn’t count).
For those who have neither read nor watched Morrison’s Beloved, it is a graphic, violent and harrowing novel, sort of a Sophie’s Choice transferred back to America’s post-slavery era. It won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1986. In brief, the novel is based on the true story of a Black slave woman, Margaret Garner, who in 1856 escaped from a Kentucky plantation with her husband, Robert, and their children. They sought refuge in Ohio, but their owner and law officers soon caught up with the family. Before their recapture, Margaret killed her young daughter to prevent her return to slavery. In the novel, Sethe is also a passionately devoted mother, who flees with her children from an abusive owner known as “schoolteacher.” They are caught, and, in an act of supreme love and sacrifice, she too tries to kill her children to keep them from slavery. Only her two-year-old daughter dies, and the schoolteacher, believing that Sethe is crazy, decides not to take her back. Sethe later has “Beloved” inscribed on her daughter’s tombstone. Although she had intended for it to read “Dearly Beloved,” she did not have the energy to “pay” for two words (each word cost her 10 minutes of sex with the engraver).
These events are revealed in flashbacks, as the novel opens in 1873, with Sethe and her teenage daughter, Denver, living in Ohio, where their house at 124 Bluestone Road is haunted by the angry ghost of the child Sethe killed. The hauntings are alleviated by the arrival of Paul D, a man so ravaged by his slave past that he keeps his feelings in the “tobacco bin” of his heart. He worked on the same plantation as Sethe, and the two begin a relationship. A brief period of relative calm ends with the appearance of a young woman who says that her name is Beloved. She knows things that suggest she is the reincarnation of Sethe’s lost daughter. Sethe is obsessed with assuaging her guilt and tries to placate the increasingly demanding and manipulative Beloved. At one point, Beloved seduces Paul D. After learning that Sethe killed her daughter, he leaves.
The situation at 124 Bluestone worsens, as Sethe loses her job and becomes completely fixated on Beloved, who is soon revealed to be pregnant. While the lonely and largely housebound Denver initially befriends Beloved, she begins to grow concerned. She finally dares to venture outside in order to ask the community for help, and she is given food and a job. As the local women attempt to stage an exorcism, Denver’s employer arrives to take her to work, and Sethe mistakes him for “schoolteacher” and tries to attack him with an ice pick. The other women restrain her, and during the commotion Beloved disappears. Paul D later returns to the grieving Sethe, promising to care for her, and Denver continues to thrive in the outside world.
Admittedly, Beloved is not everyone’s cup of tea; Morrison’s writing style is both unique and difficult to plumb for the casual reader of fiction. Nonetheless, for those who have read it in its entirety, it is a novel that remains forever. From listening to and reading the remarks of those anti Critical Race Theory automatons who go on and on about how dangerous this book is and how it should be outlawed in public schools and universities, I get the impression that they have never read it. True, it is not an easy read. True, it shines a brightly uncomfortable light on a part of American history that many would care to avoid . . . or even believe never happened. But it is not meant to teach students to hate being white or turn them into anti-patriots. This is all stuff and nonsense dreamed up by those who believe banning books is a sure-fire way to solve problems which simply do not exist.
This is, of course, nothing new. American politicians began blaming immigrants for the nation’s economic woes as far back as the “Panic” (recession) of 1837. American “masters of morality” have urged the banning of books they considered harmful for well over a century (who remembers the folderol over Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead” ]which contained ‘that word’] and J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye [which dealt with such “immoral” issues as teen angst, alienation and the superficiality of modern society?]). The, of course, there was the Hollywood “Black List.” which accused innumerable actors, directors, screenwriters and even hair stylists of being “Fellow Travelers, “premature anti-Fascists” and “rotten Commies.” All these - and oh so many more - presented so-called “solutions” to problems that truly did not exist.
Some things never change.
So what is to be done about the stench of pro-gun-racist-white-power-anti-immigrant-Critical-Racial-Theory? Trying to talk sense to these social misfits and miscreants is a fool’s errand, tantamount to taming a rabid rhino. People who listen intently to the malicious, hateful cadences of the Marjorie Taylor Greenes, Madison Cawthorns, Tucker Carlsons and Joe Pags of the world aren’t going to be disabused of what they hear or see through rational discourse. That is why so many still fully believe that the Clintons are pedophiles, Barack Obama is an African-born Muslim, that the Democrats are going to take guns away from all “real Americans,” ban the Bible and turn control of the country over to George Soros. Yes, it is sheer twaddle, but there’s plenty of it out there.
Political revolutions are just as frequently created from the bottom up than from the top down. Our attention must be even more laser-focused on school boards, town councils and county commissions as on state legislatures, governor’s mansions, Congress and the White House. I urge readers to attend school board meetings . . . not to outshout, but to listen and to learn and to grasp. I urge you to volunteer to register voters, to join campaigns and to never, ever except toxic political strategies where elbow grease is needed.
We close with a thought from Toni Morrison which says it all: "There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal."
Copyright©2021 Kurt F. Stone