Roots

At a White House conference of mayors, Ronald Reagan greeted one man affably (he was always affable in public): "How are things in your city, Mr. Mayor?"  "Mr. President," Samuel Pierce replied, "I'm your Secretary of Housing."  Well-disposed witnesses chalked it up to Alzheimer's.  Actually, Reagan just thought all black people look alike.  When as governor of California he "jokingly" proposed poisoning food before distributing it to the poor -- a demand of Patty Hearst's kidnappers, if I recollect rightly -- it wasn't poor whites he had in mind.  So nobody was really shocked, shocked, when recorded evidence of his racism surfaced this week, the old raconteur entertaining Richard Nixon by comparing African diplomats to monkeys.  (In one way, it was a reminder of how far we've traveled -- pre-Twitter, Nixon had to share this witty insight by telephoning his fellow white supremacists.)  After all, the Republican Party received its first endorsement from the Ku Klux Klan  in 1980 and became the modern Republiklan, the triumph of Lee Atwater's Southern Strategy.  Ultimately Reagan was talked into repudiating Klan support -- three decades later these hypocrites still like to style themselves the Party of Lincoln -- but they do noticeably better with candidates who don't even try to disguise their racism as Romney and McCain did.

Which leads to Trump, as our national Trail of Fears invariably does now.  Unable to refute the grounds for Congressional investigations into his crime spree, he always reverts to personal attack, declaring the most prominent opponent dishonest, unintelligent or ugly (the technical term is projection).  When the opponent is African American it's literally a no-brainer -- Baltimore is the worst place on earth for which its representative is solely and personally responsible, etc., etc.  People in Elijah Cummings's district often have to live in sub-standard conditions, therefore NO COLLUSION WITCH HOAX INVESTIGATE OBAMA.  It's like Dada poetry -- it isn't supposed to make sense as English prose.  It's a scream of rage that stops just this side of the N word.  For how long?

That Reagan/Nixon tape was made in 1971.  Some archivist has known about it for years.  Why was it suddenly made public?  To prepare the Ever Trumpers for the orgiastic moment when, down in the polls and cornered by the forces of decency, Trump discards the last atoms of self-control and calls on them to "Kill 'em all!" unleashing the kind of violence not seen since Tulsa 1921.  Racism is as American as Pilgrims and Founding Fathers, and here are two elder statesmen to remind us of that fact.  The moment that "Lock her up!" and "Send them back!" prepared us for.  The Tiki torches are already lit.