Why Harry Reid is Right (and Trent Lott was not)

The remarks by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev) that then-candidate Barack Obama could win the presidency because he was 'light skinned' and spoke publicly with 'no Negro dialect' may have been ill advised, but they do not compare with the endorsement by former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss) of a campaign for the presidency that blatantly proposed a policy of racial segregation.

The difference is that Reid's remarks describe a reality. The United States is not, contrary to rumor, a "postracial" nation. Race still matters, unfortunately.

There is a cultural divide between the European-origin population, of any nationality, who came here voluntarily as immigrants and the descendants of slaves who were kidnapped and stripped of their original identity to the point that most blacks cannot identify exactly from which part of Africa their ancestors came. (Whites may think all Africans look alike, but there are profound ethnic and cultural differences among them: such differences exploded into vicious violence in Rwanda just a few years ago.)

Reid, the Democratic Party and even President Obama can be criticized for being spineless and acquiescing all too easily to the Republican goal of taking us all back to 1910—the worst that can be said for Democrats is that they are far too timidly pragmatic to achieve their promises.

In contrast, in 2002 Trent Lott said, "When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We’re proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over the years, either." That's not realism. Thurmond, who ran for president in 1948 on the overtly segregationist "Dixiecrat" ticket, represented a racist point of view that by 2002 had been publicly repudiated by the overwhelming majority of Americans.

Lott clearly believed in efforts to roll back the social and racial clock.

Indeed, the dirty little secret about the Republicans is Richard Nixon's legacy: the "Southern strategy." This has an effort to peel off the South from the Democratic coalition after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In their speeches and positioning, Republicans have carefully broadcast a series of devious, coded nods and winks lending support to the region's enduring segregation.

Who can ever forget Republican presidential standard-bearer Ronald Reagan launching his national 1980 campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where he emphasized "states' rights" (code for separatism and Jim Crow) just a few miles from the place civil rights workers were murdered in 1964. Surely the Klansmen recognized that Reagan was their boy, as he was.

That's the Republican Party of Trent Lott—and Uncle Toms like Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele.

It was Steele who compared Lott's Freudian slip revealing the quintessentially regressive philosophy of his party with the frank assessment by Reid that this country is still too racially divided to accept as a leader a black man with the color and speech that unmistakably remind all of the nation's original sin of slavery.

Vacation Lag

People used to laugh at me when I told them I'd spent my vacation, a week in July, reading detective novels in my balcony. But I used to laugh at them when they came back weary from Thailand and points beyond.

The problem with active vacations (hadn't had one in four or five years) and international travel vacations (not taken for at least a decade) is that you end up needing a vacation to recover from the vacation.

Then everything back home feels a little weird.

If you go to the southern hemisphere, as I did, you get a short period of summer, then return to the frigid north. Last weekend I went from 90 degrees Fahrenheit going into the airport at my departure point to 26 degrees F coming out at the other end. That's a 64-degree difference!

This is all to suggest that the wisdom of staying home is ever more evident.

In a minimalist lifestyle, one would read in the balcony for a few days off in summer. Go for trips on tour buses through one's own city. Go to bed when one is tired on Dec. 31st and wake up at one's usual day-off wakeup time on Jan. 1 -- which I have actually done a number of times.

One would sell one's car and walk more. One would buy more produce and cook more. One might get rid of one's cell phone (I still don't know how to answer mine, anyway).

Ommmmmmmmmmmmm ....

My Beef with Al Qaeda

I don't call them terrorists because, frankly, I am not particularly terrified of dying. As to the twin towers of the World Trade Center, loss of life aside, the buildings were a blight on the New York City skyline. So, no, my complaint about Al Qaeda is quite different.

Having just come back from a numbing 12 hours of international flight, my beef with Al Qaeda is that they've made one part of life stupidly annoying: air travel.

The stupidity isn't really their fault, of course. For that we have the stalwart men and women of the "war on terror" who are forever closing the barn door after the horse has bolted.

• 19 Al Qaedans commandeered four planes in one day? Ground all planes.
• A Brit nut tries to set fire to his sneaker on a plane? Force everyone to take off their shoes.
• Other suspected malefactors carried some kind of explosive fuel instead of cologne or toothpaste? Ban all liquids, including especially legitimate aftershave and duty-free foreign wine.
  

And so on ... per saecula saeculorum, amen. When will they start catching, trying and meting out deserved justice to the miscreants, instead of the sheepish rest of us?