Dear White America: Letter to a New Minority by Tim Wise

Author:Tim Wise
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Politics, Sociology, Race, History
ISBN: 9780872865211
Publisher: City Lights Books
Published: 2012-01-01T03:53:39+00:00

Nothing, of course, serves to inflate uncritical nationalistic hubris like nostalgia, nor does anything else so perfectly play to white fears concerning a changing nation, and it is this commodity, nostalgic reverence for the America of old, in which the right consistently traffics. From Glenn Beck’s nightly television paeans to the “good old days” of “innocence” long since ravaged by the forces of liberal darkness to Pat Buchanan’s lament that “traditional Americans” (wonder what they look like?) are losing “their” country,118 we are regularly subjected to the insistence that somehow the nation has lost its way, and that the changes afoot are to the detriment of all that “real Americans” should hold dear.

The nostalgia project has two components, equally important for rallying the angry and disaffected among us to a political cause: first, the Pollyanna-like glorification of the nation’s past, and second, the sanitizing of whatever parts of that past might strike a discordant note of contradiction in the retelling of the national narrative.

On the glorification front, consider the words of presidential candidate and conservative favorite Michele Bachmann, who recently bragged about growing up in “John Wayne’s America,” and whose comments suggested a longing for a return to those days.119 Or Glenn Beck, who serves as the would-be conductor on the train back to Pleasantville, and who in 2009 became weepy at two classic commercials played during his television show: commercials that make him especially wistful for those good old days about which he is so emotional.120

One in particular is worth noting: a Kodak spot from 1975 featuring the song “Times of Your Life,” by Paul Anka, piped over old Super-8 footage of families from the 1950s and 1960s. No question, it was an effective and touching ad. But in the hands of Beck, it became something else. Rather than seeing the spot as what it was (an emotion-laden manipulation intended to sell products and make Kodak a lot of money), Beck presented it as a literal nod to national unity and togetherness. While acknowledging that “America has always had her problems”—the typical, obscenely understated way in which white conservatives tend to gloss over things like apartheid and institutionalized racial supremacy—Beck insisted that once upon a time (like back in the days represented by that commercial) “we used to be united on some basic things.”

“Do you remember how that felt?” Beck queried his viewers. “Do you remember what life was like?” he continued. And then, in his crowning challenge, he speculated that if a politician promised he could take us back to those “simpler times,” when the flowers presumably smelled better, the skies were bluer and even one’s tears tasted like molasses (presuming for a minute that one would ever have occasion to cry in a place as blissful as this), we would all “do it in a heartbeat.” “Wouldn’t ya?” he added with the “aw shucks” earnestness that has become his hallmark.

All of which suggests that Beck doesn’t actually remember much, or perhaps never learned much, about those days.

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