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Holders Nation of cowards
Attorney General Eric Holder caused a small stir by telling us we are a nation of cowards, afraid to talk about race. You could almost hear the collective groan rise from Americans of all kinds. Who on earth wants to talk about race? Well, college-educated black intellectuals like Holder do. It sometimes seems, in fact, that college-educated black intellectuals want to talk about little else. The rest of us would rather just get on with life.If we are afraid to talk about race, its with good reason. For white people, at least, talking openly about race is a sure way to get yourself in trouble. The only white people who are willing to speak frankly on this topic are those who are old enough and/or financially secure enough not to give a damn Pat Buchanan, for instance. For an ordinary white middle-class Joe, with a family to feed and a job to hold on to, by far the wisest strategy is just to keep his mouth shut, parrot a few multi-culti catch-phrases if the topic comes up, rent a couple of good action movies to see him through the Martin Luther King holiday, and take a crossword puzzle along to keep himself awake through those Diversity Awareness seminars his company makes him attend once a year in hopes of insulating the firm against nuisance discrimination lawsuits. My private suspicion is that Holder was trying to pull off a Hundred Flowers strategy. In 1956 Mao Tse-tung launched a movement under the slogan Let a hundred flowers bloom, let a hundred schools of thought contend. The idea was to encourage intellectuals and ordinary people to offer criticisms of state policy and the Communist Party to have a conversation, you might say. People who took up the call, making open criticisms, ended up in slave-labor camps, or dead. It is widely believed (though the case is still argued) that the entire movement was intended from the start to flush out enemies of the people so that they could be hustled away to the camps. Stories leaked out from Maos inner circle that he afterwards boasted of having pulled of a yang-mou. Thats a play on words. Yin and yang are the contrasting principles in Chinese philosophy, yin standing for darkness and shadow (among other things), yang for brightness, openness, and so on. The usual word for a plot is yin-mou, shadowy scheme. Mao was boasting of having pulled off a wide-open scheme, like a robbery in broad daylight. Posted by: g(r)omgoru 2009-03-07 |
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