Right-wing Callers Rant on Lynching and the Verdict of Edgar Ray Killen

Two events significant to America's racially violent past have occurred within the past month, and those ugly right-wing mutts were straining against their chains to set the Washington Journal viewers aright.  The senate resolution on June 13th apologizing for the failure to enact anti-lynching legislation so many years ago, when lynching was all the rave, was the first event, and the following week's conviction and sentencing of Edgar Ray Killen was the second. 

In the case of the senatorial resolution, a reasonable argument proposes that if the legislators had passed anti-lynching laws much sooner, social consciousness would have been raised.  But legislators ignored seven presidents requesting anti-lynching laws and instead passed over the divine appointment social progress had extended.  Therefore it has been suggested an apology is in order, delivered in the form of this senate resolution.   Because it was the topic of a lot of columns recently, the guest for the last half hour of the June 18th edition of Washington Journal was James Allen, co-author of Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America, a collection of essays and photographs of lynchings.  During the interview, the moderator opened the book for the cameras, sharing with the viewers some of the gruesome assemblages.  In the photos, the throngs were comprised mostly of men — only a smattering of women and children — the camera flash in their eyes rendering them like hungry  zombies around a dangling and mutilated corpse or three.  The images pulverized my sensibilities the way films of Nazi atrocities do, incapable as I am of getting my mind around the blithe acceptance of torture and murder.  I'm disquieted by the fact that in the relatively recent past, and living under the same constitution we currently proclaim as a high-water mark in history, American citizens abandoned with alacrity any commitment to a civilized purpose to embrace psychopathic savagery.  The guiding principles of our country, upon which I've placed so much confidence, were never the bulwark against barbarism as I had been taught.  An appeal to morality, despite the affected reverence for it the public square, might not be a forceful argument when facing savages, and I nervously ponder what penchant for brutality exists within my neighbor even today.  Looking at those pictures arouses a gnawing distrust  I'd already harbored but had kept compartmentalized to prevent the sheer magnitude of the horror from eclipsing the more prevalent good I see in day-to-day people. 

But what about those people I don't see?  How about these callers to C-SPAN?  The people possessing the determination to get through to Washington Journal are not day-to-day people.  These are people with a need to vent their hostilities, to spread it into the world.  I've listened to them a lot, and believing that many of them have the potential for real violence, I anticipated that right-wing fanatics would be outraged by this topic.  This was something I knew about them.  They would recognize something of themselves in the dirty mobs in the photos, the tendency to wallow in baseness and brutality.  Your average right winger accepts hate as a matter of course, and he's so inured to it, it no longer feels like a bad thing.  It feels like indignation.  He's transformed the coursing rage into self-righteousness, making it morally palatable to himself.  Hate is almost a duty, as he's been taught that liberals are the enemy of all that's decent and patriotic, a threat to the star-spangled rendition of American life.  Nationalism is his only religion, everything else subsumed to it, stultifying any chance he has of spiritual development, preferring instead to gaze adoringly at his marbleized heroes in the national pantheon.    

Then this comes along, this damned lynching thing, disturbing his vision.  Now suddenly the liberals he's delighted so much in disparaging have brought into the spotlight an issue that drives home the need for national introspection, and maybe justifies liberal activism.  What's worse, the damned liberals have got evidence.  They've taken a subject the right-wing fanatic begrudges even a passing mention in the history books — and merely as a concession to the term history, the word requiring at least the appearance of thoroughness  — and gave it a whole damned book.  The nerve of  them.   Possessing this understanding of the right-wing fanatic's mind, I knew the calls would be turgid with disdain.

The first attack came from New York.  The caller immediately launches an assault intended in his mind to expose some presumed hypocrisy.  He says to Mr. Allen, "I've got an idea of where you can find some Ku Klux Klansmen.  How about the senior senator from West Virginia, Robert Byrd?"   Well, the caller might have had a point on some other day, had the topic actually been the KKK, but it wasn't.  The topic was lynching and its unreported and unrecorded pervasiveness on the national landscape, an egregious omission this caller feels a need to defend.  At this point of the segment, things were going just as I had expected, and I permitted myself a conceit.  But I became downright smug as the caller went on to prove just exactly how prescient I was: He accused the author of bashing America, a charge I predicted.  In his bumbling screed he says, "This — the whole problem with people like you — I see absolutely no relevance — and what we're going to see . . . ." —  at which point the writer tired of the pointless tirade and cut the caller off.  Brushing aside the comment that he — the writer himself — had problems, he provided a list of the senators who didn't sign on to the resolution, along with the educational rankings for each state represented by them.   They were pretty sad rankings, and now that I think about it, four out of five of these calls come from red states.       

Another caller  deserving our attention comes from Columbus, South Carolina.   He diverts attention away from the issue of lynching by saying that the topic of race is discussed all the time, but improperly.  Then he drives onward with the statistics detailing the current grim condition of the black community, the cause of which is the black community itself, he says.  Again, what has this to do with lynching?  Nothing.  The topic was not as the caller suggested in his opening comment, the lack of discussion on race.  It was about lynching,.  But a diversion is critical to his sense of well-being, as the horrors of lynching infringes on his view of American life as the infallible actualization of an ideal.  During his statistical affront to blacks in which he accused them of eschewing education, I got the idea that he had pretty much eschewed it himself.