Hitler’s Mustache and Obama’s Grit

I was in Chicago on a family visit recently and ran into a character named “Fast Eddie” Jones on the near West Side. He had shown up in my educational activist days there ten years ago.

Fast Eddie was really excited and elated about all the right wing protestors against health care reform, especially the dodos sporting posters of Obama with a Hitler mustache.

He said, “Man, Charlie, Brutha Obama’s come a long way fast with all those honkies comparin’ him to the ‘Aryan Fuehrer,’ master of all the ‘whiter than white’ guys.”

I said, “Eddie, where’d you pick up ‘Aryan Fuehrer?’”

“On the History Channel, man, where it’s all WW II, and all Hitler, all the time.”

“Oh yeah, and I also keep in touch with the Deacons in Mississippi and Louisiana, who deal with the KKK and neo-Nazis down there by exercising their 2nd Amendment rights. They were the model for the Black Panthers up here, ya know.”

“I do. What other channels do you watch?”

“The Weather Channel, the Comedy Channel, Rachel Maddow, Keith Olberman and Ed Schultz. That’s where the action is ...and for figurin’ out what white people are thinkin’. Only white folks watch Oprah.”

I said, “Well, it’s been good seein’ ya Eddie. I’ll catch ya next time.”

“Sure man. Peace.”

Fast Eddie always was a hip guy. He sees the absurdity of putting a Hitler mustache on a black President even better than the MSNBC commentators he watches.

His West Side street smarts and African-American heritage also allow him to understand the fundamental antipathy of Teddy Roosevelt’s “malefactors of great wealth” to any real form of democracy even better than Michael Moore.

Hitler and the Nazis did not destroy democracy in Germany in 1933. It was already dead, destroyed by people who called themselves “conservatives.”

From the time of its inception in 1918, Weimar German democracy was under siege from ruinous war debts, vicious and murderous campaigns against working people and political moderates, and most importantly, big business men and their allies in the judicial system, which enforced a double standard of justice, slanted against democracy and in favor of elite rule, an oligarchy. The Depression of 1929, caused by the same greedy types who caused our present crisis, brought on Nazi electoral success in 1930, and simply finished off a dying democratic experiment.

The American democratic experiment was not done in by the Depression of 1929. The “conservatives” in our country were never quite successful enough in destroying the middle and working classes as they had been in Weimar. But they sure gave it a good try, and hated FDR, a man from their own self-anointed aristocracy of wealth and power, for his efforts in supporting the rest of us.

Such “conservatives” have had another long run since 1980, beginning with Ronald Reagan and his gospel of “greed is good.” For twenty-eight years these “conservatives” and neo-conservatives were successful in seducing a critical mass of Americans away from belief in democracy and into the swindle that they were somehow more righteous, more patriotic, than their neighbor who might worry more about people than profits.

War-mongering and bullying flag waving helped fuel a mindless war economy that still eats away at federal income for domestic infrastructure and health care. Their de-regulation of 1999 powered the way for the disaster of 2008, which still threatens to do in the American middle class altogether. These kind of guys, and their puppets in the media, have always hated democracy, and always will. But like all bullies, they are cowards at heart, and can be fought, by word and deed, as the case arises.

That’s where Obama’s grit comes in. It is such a pleasure to have a Law Professor with a sense of historical context take over as President from a pedigreed moron, whose legacy to Yale University seems to be a 30% reduction in its endowment.

More important is that Barack Obama is schooled in the same Chicago world as “Fast Eddie.” He’s not just smarter than the opposition. He’s also tougher.

Of course, black people have always had to be smarter than white people in order to survive their importation into this country. Like Br’er Rabbit they would get white folks to think one way so they could go another way ...at all appropriate speed.

The miracle of November 4, 2008 is that white folks finally got smart enough to put a black man in charge.

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