Trashing Obama

In the decades leading up to the Civil War, the Fire Eaters down South - to inflame their white trash acolytes - excoriated the abolitionists up North, accusing them of implementing a plot to "miscegenate the races." This strategy worked like a charm. Nothing inflamed white trash, north and south of the Mason-Dixon line, like the fear of mixing their pure white blood with primitive African blood. Abolitionists were persecuted, even murdered, at the instigation of such oratory.

Meanwhile, Down South, in the shadows, slave masters were performing the dark acts they accused the abolitionists of perpetrating. Some historical demographers estimate that 1/3 of all births in the United States between 1840 and 1860 were mulattoes. The slave masters were extremely eager miscegenators.

Today, the spiritual descendants of the Fire Eaters - the right wing loonies - are mobilizing against Barack Obama. I received an e-mail condemning Obama for attending an all black, racist church. The sender, no doubt, attends one of those all white suburban mega-churches. The most segregated hour in America is the Sunday morning sermon. If that fact exposes some hypocrisy in American spiritual life, the sender herself is a participant. Yet, she feels patriotically compelled to trash Obama for something which she excuses in herself. The reservoir of poison slaking the thirst of the right wing loonies is bottomless.