Just Landed...on Moral High Ground

The Moral High Ground, by Jim Kunstler
No, this blog is not about Iraq or the new Democratic congress. It's about Kramer, Cosmo Kramer, or the actor, Michael Richards, who played him on TV's Seinfeld series. By now the whole world has heard about Richards' outburst onstage at the Laugh Factory. Forgive me if this now seems like hopelessly old news. But I have been reflecting on the incident.

My girlfriend said this morning that she thought it might have been part of an act that just backfired horribly, a riff gone wrong. I disagreed. Based on the rough digital recording I saw -- the same one everybody else saw -- Richards definitely lost it. He was seriously angry. He unloaded. He fell into the swamp of the moral low ground and sank up to his lips in quicksand. Supposedly, he was being heckled by some black audience members. As far as I know, next to nothing has been reported about the content or manner of their heckling, except that Richards wasn't being funny enough for them.

Richards responded by shrieking "Niggers! Niggers!" at them and added (I paraphrase) that if it were fifty years ago they would have been lynched with forks stuck up their asses. It was a pretty harsh retort to heckling. Within the context of America's beleaguered recent history, advocating lynching and torture on account of race is about as incorrect as it gets. In any case, Richards then suffered media crucifixion for his transgression, followed by the now ritual public apologies and promises to go have his head examined.

Late last night, I was surfing around the cable channels when I chanced upon an HBO show called P Diddy's Bad Boys of Comedy, or something like that. I stuck around and checked it out. One comic (sorry, I forget his name) must have used the word "nigger" thirty times in the course of his act. He referred to the (mostly black) audience as "niggers" and his riffs were generally centered around the amusing things that (his word) "niggers" do, especially in sexual situations. The comic's exertions seemed warmly appreciated by the audience.

The foregoing has prompted me to arrive at some conclusions about what is happening in our country. There used to be a region of the collective spirit called the moral high ground. It was the place where the best intentions came to consort with the possibilities for sociopolitical progress, where honesty frolicked with bravery. It was the place where goodness and righteousness resided, a sunny, well-watered Arcadian glade within the larger low ground wilderness of human failing and sin. The high moral ground was fully racially integrated.

The social justice campaign of the 1960s was very much a drama enacted out of the moral high ground, with all the vicious monsters of the low ground wilderness prowling the margins. Up on the moral high ground was Martin Luther King, Lyndon B. Johnson, Rosa Parks, James Meredith, the Kennedy brothers, and literally a holy host of others. Malcolm X started out down in the low ground and journeyed up onto the high ground. The monsters out in the low ground were the various southern racists who opposed racial integration, the KKK crackers who killed Goodman, Cheney, and Schwerner in Mississippi, the obstructionist elected law-makers like James Eastland and Strom Thurmond, and so on.

Where race issues are concerned in America, white people have had to remain officially up on the moral high ground. White people are not off the hook for slavery and Jim Crow serfdom and never will be. There's no going back to these things and no excuse for them. White America cannot afford to abandon the moral high ground, or even the pretense that they occupy it.

But a curious thing has happened to black America. It has largely vacated the moral high ground, especially in the personae and behaviors represented in popular culture. What would Martin Luther King make of Snoop Dog and Fitty Cent? Indeed, what would he make of a whole pop culture dedicated to portraying young black people as violent criminals and prostitutes? It's significant, by the way, that these performers characterize their antics as "representing." Representing what?

As for political leadership, what would Martin Luther King make of Al Sharpton, engineer of the disgraceful and mendacious Tawana Brawley scandal, who has been unofficially pardoned by the media (and by extension, the public). What would Martin Luther King make of P Diddy's Bad Boys of Comedy?

White people are so frightened of appearing to step beyond the moral high ground that even academic discussions of "the N-word" employ this laughably craven euphemism. It's interesting to note that at the same time the talking heads on CNN are palavering over "the N-word," P Diddy's and Russell Simmons' employees are over on HBO calling each other "niggers" with abandon. Is it really okay for us to be two separate societies with two separate standards of behavior?

I'm not convinced, either, that it is enough for some black comedians to declare that they will stop brandishing the word "nigger" in their acts. A character in William Faulkner's novel, The Sound and the Fury says, “a nigger is not a person so much as a form of behavior; a sort of obverse reflection of the white people he lives among.” Isn't this what Snoop Dog and Fitty Cent are all about? And isn't it to some degree behavior engineered to make white people uncomfortable?

White America has for many years dedicated itself to sucking up its own discomfort. When someone like Michael Richards blunders beyond the moral high ground and reveals the anger and resentment underneath this stoical mask of tolerance for "diversity," white America freaks out and rushes to anathemize it. White America does not want its discomfort to show, so it sucks up everything from the Tawana Brawley affair to the OJ Simpson verdict to the televised daily doings of Snoop and Fitty (which white children emulate as fun behavior).

White America does not want racial conflict -- and understandably so -- and will humble itself to any extent to avoid it. To some degree, Hip-Hop is black America's reminder to white America that there are a lot of heavily armed and vicious young men out there who might call off their incessant partying and kick off a national scale gang war. This is white America's worst nightmare, much worse than Iraq, or global warming, or peak oil. This is also, by the way, the reason that white America idolizes Barack Obama. He is the first figure on the scene in thirty years who offers the promise of leading all of America back to the moral high ground.

from www.kunstler.com