Harold Meyerson Is My Hero

Shorter Harold Meyerson:  Let's strip citizenship from 'anchor babies' and from the descendents of Confederate traitors!  How does that sound to you, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina?  How about you, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky?

My only question is whether I, as a descendent of both a treasonous Confederate and a Union soldier, would be able to retain my citizenship.  My wife is descended from people who came after the Civil War, so as long as our children could be full citizens, I'm willing to settle for a green card or something like that.

Writing about this issue, digby had this to say:

It's never a good idea to underestimate people's willingness to deprive others of things they take for granted themselves.

To take it a step further, the entire strategy of the GOP - electoral and governing - is to exploit that willingness by always making sure that no matter how terrible the GOP makes life for its own members, there will always be someone else who has it just a little bit worse, someone to whom the badly educated, unhealthy, unemployed white can feel superior.  Unfortunately, we do not yet seem to have run out of people whose hatred of The Other surpasses the love they feel for their families and even themselves.  As long as there are people who are more interested in punishing black and Hispanic children for their skin color than they are in providing good things for their own children, the GOP will continue its assault on the US Constitution.

Comments

[Sir Charles]

Stephen,

Great post. I love Harold Meyerson. He is about he only thing -- along with Gene Robinson and sometimes E.J. Dionne -- who redeems the Post's Op-Ed pages.

And yes, there is a large group of Americans who would allow the Republicans and their corporate allies to cut off one of their arms as long as they promised to cut off both arms on the colored guy.

[Paul]

There is a Harry Turtledove short story where Lincoln was accidentally killed in 1864, and so Reconstruction was much more brutal, with the South, under a literal occupation, feeling and looking much like Northern Ireland for decades afterwards...

[litbrit]

Unfortunately, we do not yet seem to have run out of people whose hatred of The Other surpasses the love they feel for their families and even themselves.

*sigh* Ain't that the truth?

Doubly so, here where I live.

How omnipotent--how broad and deep and utterly dense--that hatred must be, that it can corrode even the baseline, survival-dependent neural pathways enervating the parent-child dynamic.

[Davis X. Machina]

The parent-child dynamic can be preserved by the relative, as well as the absolute, privileged position of the child.

So if I have a house now, and in the future my child lives in a cardboard box under a bridge, but the gayforeignliberalblack kid lives under a bridge, but doesn't have the box, that's still a win, sort of.

Happens all the time in public education.

The all-white schools the people of Southie and Eastie were fighting to preserve forty years ago were not exactly Phillips Exeter. But they were better than the Jerry Burke.

Smart tyrants bribe their people with the difference between what they get and what The Other gets, not with the absolute quality or value of what they get.

Saves money, and wins just as many hearts and minds.

[Sir Charles]

DXM,

How true. While on the Massachusetts State Police, my father ended up running security at South Boston High School during the first three years of busing. The stories he could tell.

[oddjob]

How different Eastie is now! It's heavily Latino.

[Lisa Simeone]

This is so damn good.

Harold Meyerson and Steven Slater, unite!

[kathy a.]

stephen, i also have a mixed past: a relative who fought for the union [whose letters a cousin recovered], and a grandmother on the other side who fondly recalled her family's "laundress" -- a descendent of slaves her family had owned.

and mixed in another sense, since my husband's grandparents were immigrants and his mother has citizenship by being born here. he and my son bear middle-eastern-ish features as a result.

my foreign brother-in-law, on the other hand, is not a citizen and will never be busted. his blond/blue/anglo background, also passed to his native-born son, is not the "wrong" kind of heritage.

[Davis X. Machina]

Sir Charles, my dad knows your dad, almost certainly. My dad was acting principal of the Gavin, where the Staties from the high school got fed every day -- easier to do it down the hill than at Ground Zero. For years afterward, we got a Christmas card from the high command of the Staties. Meant you could speed anywhere on the Turnpike.

[Sir Charles]

DXM,

I'll have to ask him if he knows Principal Machina! Yeah, the Gavin School was in his bailiwick as I recall. I don't think they had nearly the problems there as they did at the high school. He was very close to Dr. Reed at Southie.

My father described the riot at Carson Beach as the scariest moment in his career and that included a whole lot of action. (Being a Statie wasn't entirely without its rewards though -- he did get to shoot a tear gas cannister into a building at Harvard, thereby fulfilling the dream of every Boston Irishmen of a certain age.:-) )

Lot of Massachusetts dudes on this blog.

[oddjob]

(I am only sorta kinda. I was born in Concord, but we moved to Pennsylvania when I was 2, and I stayed there until I moved to Winthrop at (almost) 35.)

[Sir Charles]

oddjob,

But it's in the veins.

Have you ever been to the Madonna Queen Shrine? That defines the Wnthrop-Eastie experience in my mind.

http://www.yelp.com/biz/madonna-queen-national-shrine-east-boston

[JaB]

Stephen-
It's a well known fact here in the Bluegrass state that Kentucky waited until after the war between the states to secede from the Union. Like Twain said, when the world comes to an end, be sure to be in Kentucky- we're 20 years behind.