Godfrey Hodgson: American Tragedy, Political Response
[Godfrey Hodgson was director of the Reuters' Foundation Programme at Oxford University, and before that the Observer's correspondent in the United States and foreign editor of the Independent. Among his books are A Great and Godly Adventure: The Pilgrims and the Myth of the First Thanksgiving (PublicAffairs, 2007) and The Myth of American Exceptionalism (Yale University Press, 2009)]
...Almost fifty years ago, I was in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, to celebrate a minor victory in the civil-rights movement. The news reached us that Medgar Evers, the respected black leader in Mississippi, had been shot by a member of the White Citizen Councils. A white Mississippian clergyman, Will D Campbell, himself a brave and committed civil-rights worker, offered to give me a lift to Mississippi.
As we drove across the Alabama “black belt”, I guessed that this atrocity might make even conservative white Mississippians soften their attitudes. “Don’t you believe it”, said Campbell, “My mother kneels down by her bed every night and prays that God will save me from being a nigger-lover!”
Only hours after the shooting in Tucson, Clarence Dubkin, the sheriff of Pima county (in which Tucson lies) was one of those who interpreted the shooting as a politically motivated act: “I’d just like to say that when you look at unbalanced people, how they respond to the vitriol that comes out of certain people’s mouths about tearing down the government, the anger, the hatred, the bigotry that goes on in this country is getting to be outrageous.”
Many other Americans interpreted the attempt on Representative Giffords’s life in similar terms, as more or less directly the consequence of the almost hysterical, ideologically polarising rightwing rhetoric which is such a feature of American politics today, and especially of Fox News and blowhard “shock-jocks”. They highlighted the “crosshairs” with which Sarah Palin’s staff had marked Giffords and other Democratic congressmen who had voted for health reform, which many on the American right see as un-American and even “socialist” or “communist”
There is nothing new about this sort of response. When Lee Harvey Oswald shot President Kennedy in 1963, it took only hours for many breast-pounding worthies to see in his act evidence of the nation’s sins. The murders of Martin Luther King and Robert F Kennedy in 1968 brought forth similar outpourings (few, even today, seem to have noticed that Robert Kennedy’s assassin, Sirhan Sirhan, was a Palestinian, and that the wrongs of Palestine rather than the sins of America motivated his crime)....
Read entire article at openDemocracy
...Almost fifty years ago, I was in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, to celebrate a minor victory in the civil-rights movement. The news reached us that Medgar Evers, the respected black leader in Mississippi, had been shot by a member of the White Citizen Councils. A white Mississippian clergyman, Will D Campbell, himself a brave and committed civil-rights worker, offered to give me a lift to Mississippi.
As we drove across the Alabama “black belt”, I guessed that this atrocity might make even conservative white Mississippians soften their attitudes. “Don’t you believe it”, said Campbell, “My mother kneels down by her bed every night and prays that God will save me from being a nigger-lover!”
Only hours after the shooting in Tucson, Clarence Dubkin, the sheriff of Pima county (in which Tucson lies) was one of those who interpreted the shooting as a politically motivated act: “I’d just like to say that when you look at unbalanced people, how they respond to the vitriol that comes out of certain people’s mouths about tearing down the government, the anger, the hatred, the bigotry that goes on in this country is getting to be outrageous.”
Many other Americans interpreted the attempt on Representative Giffords’s life in similar terms, as more or less directly the consequence of the almost hysterical, ideologically polarising rightwing rhetoric which is such a feature of American politics today, and especially of Fox News and blowhard “shock-jocks”. They highlighted the “crosshairs” with which Sarah Palin’s staff had marked Giffords and other Democratic congressmen who had voted for health reform, which many on the American right see as un-American and even “socialist” or “communist”
There is nothing new about this sort of response. When Lee Harvey Oswald shot President Kennedy in 1963, it took only hours for many breast-pounding worthies to see in his act evidence of the nation’s sins. The murders of Martin Luther King and Robert F Kennedy in 1968 brought forth similar outpourings (few, even today, seem to have noticed that Robert Kennedy’s assassin, Sirhan Sirhan, was a Palestinian, and that the wrongs of Palestine rather than the sins of America motivated his crime)....