[lit-ideas] Dr. Cockburn, Bill Bennett, Racist America

  • From: "M.A. Camp" <macampesq@xxxxxxxxx>
  • To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Mon, 10 Oct 2005 09:40:11 -0500

Rhetoric and Reality in the Business of Getting Rid of Black People
 
<http://news.webindia123.com/news/showdetails.asp?id=123039&cat=India>CounterPunch
^ <http://www.counterpunch.com/> | October 8-9. 2005 | ALEXANDER COCKBURN

Excerpt:
Every year or so some right-winger in America lets fly in public with a ripe
salvo of racism and the liberal watchdogs come tearing out of their kennels
and the neighborhood echoes with the barks and shouts. The right winger says
he didn't mean it, the President "distances himself" and the liberals claim
they're shocked, shocked beyond all measure. Then everyday life in racist
America resumes its even course.

This past fortnight it's been the turn of that public moralizer and noted
Las Vegas habitué, William Bennett. He should have known better than to
loose off a hypothetical on his radio show. Announce publicly that " if you
wanted to reduce crime, you could you could abort every black baby in this
country and your crime rate would go down," and many Americans reckon that's
no hypothesis, that's a plan waiting to happen.

Amid the dutiful uproar when his remarks finally drew notice Bennett kept
insisting that he was being purely hypothetical, but Americans don't take
hypotheses lightly, any more than they feel at ease with irony. Particularly
in the age of the internet, literalism is the order of the day.
Qualifications such as Bennett added (to the effect that this would be "an
impossible, ridiculous and morally reprehensible thing to do") are useless.

The deeper irony here is that liberals have pondered longer and deeper than
conservatives on how exactly to carry out Bennett's hypothetical plan,
either by sterilization or compulsory contraception.

Before Hitler and his fellow Nazis (who said they had learned much from US
sterilization laws and immigration restrictions) made the discipline
unfashionable, eugenics and the prevention of socially unworthy babies were
hot topics among America's social cleansers.
--
Cheers,
M.A. Camp, Esq.

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