"It's been written about"

It increasingly amazes me how difficult it has became for people--myself very much included--to form basic political judgments. We distrust intuition, feel inadequate to reasoning, and presume that any argument printed in the New York Times has at least that much going for it. Even writers critical of certain especially egregious recent developments treat the most blatant doublespeak as merely the latest outrage. What more, they seem to ask, could have been expected of such liars, whores, and fools? Just keep beating that drum.

So the Supreme Court is almost certainly going to overturn Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, the very heart of the bill that was the crowning achievement of the civil rights movement, and for which many people died. We know this stuff. Fourth-graders know it. But when we read over a cup of coffee Justice Scalia's comments about the bill during court testimony last month--it's the result, he avers, of "a phenomenon that is called racial entitlement," adding, "It's been written about"--our outrage is well out-matched by an overwhelming lethargy. There goes ole scattin' Scalia, at it again. "Is it the government's submission that the citizens in the South are more racist than citizens in the North?" Justice Roberts asked. The answer, for anyone who has been to both, is obviously yes. That such an allegation is not only refuted, but deemed ipso facto inadmissable, is the clearest indication I can think of that those who care about the civil rights movement's ideals and achievements--not to mention scores of other equally important progressive values of the past century and more--is not only losing, but losing badly. And how! To think that Southern states, some of which have never elected a black person to statewide office, though at least five have a black population in excess of 25%, would respond to the elimination of Section 5 protections in any other way than reverting, quickly or slowly, to their pre-1965 behavior, is an illusion, yes, but it is also an illusion being carefully cultivated in minds that would otherwise, intuitively, oppose such blatant racist opportunism. The rest of us, per usual, are just asleep.

Selma.

Another outrageous example of this rhetorical chicanery that renders the word Orwellian a vast understatement: John McCain's comments in the Senate yesterday on the Senate floor. Assailing Rand Paul's filibuster of John Brennan's nomination to be CIA chief while waiting for the Obama administration to confirm that which it is terrifying to think actually has to be confirmed: that the United States government does not have the right to kill, without due process of law, American citizens on American soil. After receiving such assurance from the Attorney General, Paul ended his filibuster. John McCain promptly took to the floor to say Paul "should have known better." McCain's real concern, though, was with the American people. “We’ve done, I think, a disservice to a lot of Americans by making them think that somehow they’re in danger from their government,” he said.“They’re not." So there.


UPDATE: Section 5, by the way, applies only to those states whose white citizens until very recently used to lynch black people, refused to eat in the same restaurants as them or ride in the same train car and such like, and, until slightly less recently, bought and fucking sold them like so many sneakers or spoons, and it says that if those states want to change their laws in any ways that might exclude the formerly enslaved/lynched/generally oppressed people from participating in elections, they have to make sure the federal government is cool with those changes first. Once Section 5 is taken out of the Voting Rights Act, those states would be more or less free to do as they pleased.