The Most Curious Creature of All

The world of politics, as they say, makes for strange bedfellows indeed. The Right sleeps around with the Left, the Left sleeps around with the Right, and the Center sleeps around with just about anybody they can find across the spectrum. Nothing unusual about that, though, right? Politics, after all, is arguably the world’s oldest profession.

But among all the individuals that we can find whenever we explore the wondrous world of politics, none is more exotic, alien, peculiar and vexing than the most curious political creature of them all. I’m talking, of course, about the White American Liberal (WAL).

What makes this creature so curious in the political animal kingdom? No. 1 is the double standard. Every person in politics has a double standard of some sort or another, naturally. But the White American Liberal has perfected the double standard and raised it to an art form.

For a recent example of such a curious creature, we need look no further than to Dennis Kucinich, the former member of the U.S. House of Representatives from the midwestern state of Ohio. Kucinich, an American of European descent, has long stood as a champion of liberal causes in everything from abortion to war — sometimes in contradiction to that towering castle of American neo-liberal capitalism to which he belongs, the Democratic Party. Kucinich even won a “Gandhi Peace Award” in 2003 from a U.S. non-profit organization run by other White American Liberals.

Kucinich ran for president of the United States twice (2004 and 2008) on liberal campaign platforms, but lost. After retiring from the U.S. Congress in 2013, Mr. Kucinich decided to become a “political analyst”. For which media company, you ask? Why, for none other than the bastion of right-wing extremism, Fox News. Yes, you read that right: Dennis Kucinich has been using his credentials as a WAL pundit these past few years on such popular Fox News programs as “The O’Reilly Factor” (goodbye and good riddance, Bill).

It was on one of these recent Fox News programs that Kucinich and Fox program host Sean Hannity, an unapologetic and mostly uninformed right-winger, wholeheartedly agreed about the existence of a “deep state”, an invisible government of sorts operating behind the public façade of the U.S. government today and working beyond anyone’s control. “You have politicization of the agencies that is resulting in leaks…and the intention is to take down a president,” Kucinich said, referring to current U.S. president Donald Trump and his many problems with U.S. intelligence agencies. “Now, this is very dangerous to America. It’s a threat to our republic. It constitutes a clear and present danger to our way of life.”

Mighty scary words there: “a clear and present danger” to the American Way of Life, or AWOL. We should all be concerned about something so dangerous to the public. But wait a minute — hasn’t Dennis Kucinich himself, as a vaunted member of the White American Liberal class, served the aims of the deep state in the past? The answer is yes, in fact, he has.

On September 14, 2001 — just three days after the 9-11 attacks — Kucinich joined 419 other members of both houses of the U.S. Congress, Republicans and Democrats alike, in passing House Joint Resolution 64, which would allow then-U.S. president George W. Bush sweeping powers in the newly declared “war on terrorism”. Only one member of the U.S. Congress bothered to vote against that resolution, and that was African American representative Barbara Lee of California. For Lee’s brave vote of conscience and her well-placed concern about giving the U.S. president such broad powers, she was condemned by conservatives and liberals alike.

President Bush signed the resolution into law as Public Law 107-40, “Authorization for Use of Military Force”, on 18 September 2001, a week after the 9-11 attacks. The law was used from then on by the Bush administration to justify, among many other bad things, the suspension of fundamental habeas corpus rights of hundreds of illegally held prisoners at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba and the wiretapping of innocent U.S. citizens on a mass scale at home.

Fifteen years and several overseas wars later, Barack Obama, on his way out the door as U.S. president, issued a report that essentially gave his legal blessing to that same law as “provid[ing] the domestic legal authority for the United States to use military force against the terrorist threats” of organizations like al Qaida and the Taliban, justifying Obama’s decision to bomb Syria. That was just about the best possible Christmas present that president-elect Donald Trump could have asked for, and in the short time he has been in office, Trump has continued those war policies of the Bush-Obama years to devastating effect.

And to think: All of this was made possible in part by White American Liberals in the U.S. Congress like Dennis Kucinich, who helped get the law passed in the first place. Now, in 2017, Kucinich crows wildly on Fox News about the dangers of a deep state that seems intent on taking Trump down (not that some of us wouldn’t enjoy watching Trump being disgraced and led out of office in an orange jumpsuit). Yet, the blame for the current state of political affairs, and the continued rise of the deep state, must also be laid at the feet of Kucinich and other WALs like him who played footsie with the U.S. deep state at key moments since 2001.

Kucinich has also advocated over the years the creation of a new “Department of Peace” that would replace the current U.S. Department of Defense (aptly named the Department of War up until 1947, two years after the end of World War II). This new “DoP” as proposed by Kucinich would be a cabinet-level department in the executive branch of government.

While the idea of such a Peace Department overseen by a U.S. president sounds nice in theory, all kinds of questions and liberal double standards arise: Wouldn’t this new Department of Peace then become part of, or at least serve the aims of, the deep state that Kucinich is so alarmed about? Could this new department even begin to make a dent in the worldwide military-industrial complex that has come to make war the ultimate profit-making venture in the 21st century? Would world peace then be something controlled and manipulated by the U.S. government, instead of fostered by the people themselves? So many questions abound.

Another factor that distinguishes the curious White American Liberal in the political animal kingdom is the deathly fear of being branded unpatriotic. Such liberals will say anything, do anything, to avoid being branded with a scarlet U (for Unpatriot) on their chests and being called a coward to their faces. It strikes fear into the very hearts of white liberals, activating a primitive flight-or-fight instinct deep within them like nothing else can.

I happened to be in the United States at the time of 9-11, and I saw firsthand how members of major U.S. news media organizations — many of them liberal and white individuals — literally trampled over each other in the rush to follow the self-appointed patriotism police at Fox News in shamefully cheerleading for war. One TV episode from around that time still stands out clearly in my mind: a live Fox News program in which the host was berating another White American Liberal icon, Medea Benjamin of the women’s activist group Code Pink, who was rightly criticizing Bush. “Why do you hate America?” the Fox News host demanded to know. Benjamin was aghast. “I don’t hate America!” she shot back, “I love America!” The conversation went downhill from there.

The White American Liberal, like a fish in water, will always bite on the bait of being called “unpatriotic” or “un-American” out of fear. To be fair, though, Japanese liberals here in Japan do the same thing with right-wing accusations of being a hi-kokumin — literally, a “non-citizen” or traitor. I guess it’s just something in the liberal DNA worldwide that you can’t change.

If you ask me, we should just stop dealing with such curious political creatures as White American Liberals altogether, step around them and the political obstacles they seem to be constantly erecting, and then muster the truly progressive, grassroots people out there who are ready to get down and fight for the changes that we all seek. No more liberal double standards or patriotic fears or wishy-washy apologies or weak-kneed compromises: We all come together across our societal differences and join hands to fight the good fight (of course, using the Gandhi/King principle of nonviolent action to guide us), and really make things happen.

Then, what to do with that most curious creature of all? One idea might be to just gather together all the best and brightest of the White American Liberals in one nice, air-conditioned museum someplace in the continental United States and make those WALs the subject of a major public exhibit. There, paying visitors could point and gawk and be awed at how those liberal marvels of nature sitting there behind the thick glass wall have driven themselves to near-extinction in the U.S. political scene today.

That solution could work well in two ways: It would give the curious White American Liberals on display at the museum a permanent, captive, non-questioning liberal audience — a new base. And, more importantly, it would free up the rest of us to move progressively ahead and get down to the serious work of real social change, now and for the future. Advance tickets for the museum show, anyone?

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