Sunday, October 2, 2005

O.J., W, ‘Us’ and ‘Them’—and Truth

By Robert S. McElvaine

Ten years ago Monday, America received one of its periodic wake-up calls on how deep the racial divide in our society remains. Almost exactly a decade later, we have just been exposed once more to this unhappy truth.

On Oct. 3, 1995, a Los Angeles jury, after less than four hours of deliberation following more than eight months of trial, found Orenthal James Simpson not guilty of murder. With few exceptions, white Americans were shocked. When they saw jubilant African-Americans celebrating the acquittal, many of the whites were equally shocked.

Now, as has been widely noted, the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina has dramatically pushed the continuing American dilemma of race back into the national consciousness. Nearly 70 percent of blacks in a recent Wall Street Journal/NBC poll agreed with the statement that the Bush administration would have moved with greater urgency if the stricken areas had been white suburban communities, rather than urban, largely African-American communities. Only 30 percent of whites held that view.

But there is a second, very important but scarcely perceived echo of the Simpson verdict reverberating in the form of another division of Americans in reaction to the government's response to the catastrophe along the Gulf Coast.

Although President Bush’s approval rating has dropped sharply since the hurricane, there remains a hard-core group of supporters of Bush who will no more convict him of any failing than a California jury will find a celebrity guilty.

These Bush-backers castigate as Bush-whackers anyone who says anything critical of the president. Like the stereotypical California jury, they simply refuse to pay any attention to the evidence against the accused, no matter how strong.

Four years before the Simpson trial, three members of the Los Angeles Police Department were caught on videotape kicking Rodney King and beating him severely with their nightsticks after he had been subdued. Disregarding the evidence before their eyes, a Simi Valley jury found the policemen not guilty in 1992.

We would like to think that no sizable segment of the American public would similarly excuse a president caught in the act on videotape. Yet many of the incidents and statements of President Bush that prove his culpability on the Iraq war and the Katrina fiasco have been captured on videotape, and the reaction of Bush supporters has been much like that of the California jurors.

Bush was videotaped in July 2003 making what may well be the most irresponsible and outrageous statement ever made by an American president, challenging militants who wanted to attack Americans in Iraq by saying, “bring ’em on! ... We got plenty tough force there right now to make sure the situation is secure." More than two years and 1,900 dead American military personnel later, the situation is patently insecure. During the horribly botched reaction to Katrina, Bush was captured on videotape saying, "I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees," not to mention his now infamous taped praise for incompetent FEMA Director Michael Brown.

In the Simpson trial, the defendant's blood was on the glove used in the crime. Bush's metaphorical DNA is as plainly evident in the cases of misleading the nation into a war of choice that even his father had seen would lead to disaster, the tax cuts for the hyper-rich combined with rapidly increasing spending that has transformed the federal budget surplus he inherited into a string of massive deficits, and the appointment of political hacks with virtually no experience in dealing with disasters to most of the top positions in the critical agency charged with dealing with disasters.

Yet the Bush backers blithely proclaim: "In the matter of the people of the United States vs. George Walker Bush, we find the defendant not guilty."

In the public opinion trials of the incumbent president, Karl Rove plays Johnnie Cochran to Bush's O.J. Rove decrees the talking points, and the Bush-backers dutifully repeat them. "Blame game" and "This is no time for finger-pointing" take the place of "If it doesn't fit, you must acquit."

The important thing to notice is that in both the King and Simpson cases, the key to acquittal was that the jurors identified with the defendants. There were no African-Americans on the Simi Valley jury. There were nine blacks on the Simpson jury. The main reason that the Bush-backers, in siding with the current president regardless of the evidence, display an attitude similar to those of the California juries is also that they think he is "one of us."

In fact, Bush is no more "one of us" to middle-class white Americans than Simpson was "one of us" to the masses of African-Americans who celebrated his acquittal. Both men have lived lives of wealth and privilege far removed from the concerns of those who identified with them.

But, at a deeper level, it is less a matter of the defendant's being "one of us" than it is of the prosecution being "them." To many African-Americans who applauded the Simpson verdict a decade ago, the individual guilt or innocence of the defendant was less important than that they saw those who were trying to convict him as the sort of people who had framed and abused many blacks over the years. To many Bush-backers who will see no evil, hear no evil and speak no evil of George W. Bush, what the president has actually done is less important than that they perceive his accusers as "liberals," a category against whom they have a visceral reaction.

That ideological and cultural divide in the nation remains as deep--and as significant--as the racial divide. It dates to the 1960s and was promoted by the Nixon administration. Vice President Spiro T. Agnew referred to the division as "positive polarization—to divide on authentic lines." In a memo to Nixon, Patrick Buchanan said the objective should be to "cut ... the nation in half; my view is that we would have far the large half." With the ongoing war in Iraq and in the aftermath of Katrina, the "we" of which Nixon was, and Buchanan and Bush remain constituent parts, is no longer "far the larger half," but the polarization that divides the nation on inauthentic lines remains. That polarization is not and never was positive. It constitutes a threat to the nation as serious as the racial polarization that has just returned to our range of vision.

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Robert S. McElvaine teaches history at Millsaps College. His most recent book is Eve’s Seed: Biology, the Sexes, and the Course of History.