Don't Let Facts Get In the Way of Your Racist Delusions

I've always found Salon to be one of the most informative web sites on the entire Internet...though not for the reasons you might think. Like many other sites that feature and attract progressives, Salon serves as a chronicle of the "liberal condition," collecting the insecurities and psychological projection of its writers and its intended audience.

And so I find myself gazing with sick fascination into the mind of someone named "Keka," a desperately frightened soul that warns us that a new age of White Supremacy, night riders, and lynchings are on the way, because she saw a bumper sticker at a fast food drive thru.

I wish I were exaggerating:

I saw it. But I couldn’t believe it.

There I was, in a fast food drive through, behind a man whose back window decal, in small white letters, sent me a message that sent a chill down my spine—just as he’d hoped it would, no doubt. It said:

THIS COUNTRY WAS BUILT BY WHITE MEN WITH GUNS

Now, I was there because I needed something to eat badly. I’ve been tending a new puppy that behaves and has to be tended like a newborn, so you only get so much “break’ time if you’re keeping to your schedule. I had just enough to grab a bite, get some work done…and get ready for play time number…I’m not sure which.

But I lost my appetite entirely, when I saw that decal.

I’ve lost my appetite for America, period, to be honest—he’s just one of the many reasons. Forget that fact that if he really believes this, this guy must never have read a history book in his life—it’s the fact that he felt comfortable driving around with that ridiculous statement on his back window that galls me most. But I saw it comin'.

What a delicate, brittle flower of liberal womanhood is our poor friend Keka! A man with a historically debatable message on his vehicle has her all but ready to revoke her citizenship. My, oh my.

Her article, such as it is—White Men With Guns--Reconstruction Redux—is a sad mix of history, ignorance, and willful self-deception. The bumper sticker was just the thinnest excuse for her own ahistorical rant.

She uses civil rights-era violence from a half-century ago as the excuse to foist upon us one bigoted and extraneous stereotype after another. Keka's target is the Tea Party movement, which she is desperate to portray as the next coming of the Ku Klux Klan. For a child of the 60s she is quite limber, contorting reality this way and that in order to twist it into something of which she can be afraid.

She bases her arguments... actually, Keka doesn't both to concern herself with arguments.

Nor does she deem it important to cite facts, instances, actors, or events that justify her beliefs. Unfortunately, poisoned beliefs and bizarre assertions are all that Keka has.

She holds white Tea Partiers responsible for a gay Rutgers student Tyler Clementi committing suicide, because his Indian-American roommate and Asian-American girlfriend filmed him having sex and live-streamed it on the Internet. White people made them do it?.

A Hispanic gang in New York called the "Latin King Goonies" beat and sodomized a fellow Hispanic gang member they thought was gay. But Keka says white people made them do it.

Another white man that Keka most assuredly hates made a comment last week about some people being born to be slaves. He was of course talking about those suffering from the sort of mental bondage to which Keka has subjugated herself, a self-imposed prison from which no other person can set her free. She has made whites in general and Tea Party protesters in specific into boogeymen, responsible for all the evil she sees, facts be damned.

From her sequestered reality it was not doubt a simple matter to turn a blind eye to the eight years of near insanity shared by her fellow passengers (NSFW).

Utterly lacking self-awareness, she laments:

How can I connect these crimes to the Tea Party et al? Easily. Any country which has gotten to the point where it's president can be caricatured and spoken of as he has been in the graphics I've supplied, many of them brandished at Tea Party events...is in trouble. Free speech? You bet. But what that right is being used to say and do right now is a chilling statement about where we are as a nation right now.

It's not really just about Obama, you see. It's about me, my family and all of the black people of America—the world, really. Yes, there were pictures of Bush as all kinds of things—but they were "ideological." Much of the awful stuff being done to Obama's images is racial. Even if the image isn't, the "subtext" is.

She spoke exactly one fragment of truth, when she said "It's about me."

The images she culled from 4chan and photoshop contests are horrific, but signs of bigotry are inevitable on a world wide network, and the fact that she had to pull from the same sources to even prevent the handful of truly racist images she provides is a testament to just how much opposition to Obama has nothing to do with his race, and everything to do with his radical socialist ideology, as the most popular caricature of his image readily proves.

It is readily apparent that Keka's myopia is self-inflicted, her phobias generated from paranoia, her view of the entire outside world overshadowed by a pysche trapped in the worst part of 1955 Missippi.

Congratulations, Keka. You found 14 images on the Internet, and that was enough to validate your own prejudices and world view, and was a sentiment that Salon's editors thought was one your fellow progressives would recognize and share (and they were right).

As Salon so often does, they exposed a seething hatred, and let us see into the twisted minds ruining this nation.

Thanks for that.