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Jesse on My Mind

MAY 25, 1985

 

For thoughtful people it is a cliché that true equality is exhibited only when you permit yourself to get as mad at a minority member as you would at a fellow fraternity member. On reflection, the clearest sign of the enduring discrimination of white people in America against black people in America is our toleration of Jesse Jackson. If he were a blue-blooded WASP, he would be treated with the contempt appropriately shown for the Reverend William Sloane Coffin, a contempt made possible not because of any lack of recognition of his many talents as an orator and organizer, but the special contempt by which democracies effectively stigmatize those who dwell in cuckooland. They simply disappear from public sight, going off to live more or less permanently in the fever swamps, where they mix with one another as the junkies used to do in Goa. There David Dellinger dwells ... and Daniel Berrigan ... and Timothy Leary, Jane Fonda ...

Oh, but Jesse Jackson is a black leader. It is pointed out that he was the first member of his race to run for President of the United States, which proves what? So did Lyndon LaRouche run for president, and if that man is not nuts, I am Napoleon. Ah, they will say, but Jesse Jackson got 465 votes from the delegates in San Francisco. To which the appropriate response is that all he proved was that a black man will win a lot of black votes, and that he is one hell of an orator, which was true of Gerald L. K. Smith, who was probably an even finer orator, and was a racist mess. Jesse Jackson so intimidated the San Francisco Democrats that they couldn’t even muster the resolution to vote a denunciation of anti-Semitism, for fear of offending Jackson, the anti-Zionist assembly and, one supposes, Jesse’s noisy fan Louis Farrakhan.

During the last couple of weeks, Jesse Jackson has appeared before the European Parliament and other audiences there. He denounced Star Wars, which is OK, though he probably knows as much about Star Wars as the European Parliament knows about hominy grits. But he also denounced the Cruise and Pershing missiles in Europe, and these are the spinal column of our NATO alliance. He spoke in those hyperboles for which he is renowned. Thus, “the germ of genocide was not buried at Bitburg; it was transferred to Johannesburg.” Catch that, now. The entire Jewish-American world was convulsed when President Reagan said that the young SS buried in Bitburg were “as much the victims” of Hitler as the victims of the Holocaust. That trivialized the Holocaust, they wailed; and they had a point. Along comes someone who says that Buchenwald was no different from life in South Africa—where are the protests? You are getting the point. They don’t protest because he’s merely a black preacher saying dumb things.

He returns to this country and addresses a rally in New York commemorating the Vietnam War. “Our only joy is that the military occupation of that land is over,” he says about a country (Vietnam) more heavily militarized than any other country on earth, from which 650,000 boat people have fled, a figure exceeded only by the number of blacks that have immigrated to South Africa. He goes on to Chicago, where he tells an interviewer that “the same forces that are anti-Semitic in the morning, by three o’clock of that same day manifest their anti-blackness”—one of those runny slurs freighted with meaninglessness.

But why go on? Jesse Jackson is the man who toasted Fidel Castro and the memory of Che Guevara, two totalitarians, one of them a sadist to boot. Jesse Jackson has become what we used to call a fellow traveler. Whatever foreign line Moscow takes, Jesse Jackson is now taking. His toleration of rank anti-Semitism in his entourage is a matter of record. His endorsement of totalitarian trends here and abroad is documented. Why is he always at center stage?

Because he is black. And because, being black, he has a large following, which following backs him as slavishly as white racists once backed Senator Bilbo and “Cotton Ed” Smith. But as long as he moves about with the immunity that now protects him from the kind of ostracism he has so diligently earned, then one can say with meaning: There is true condescension in America for the black, and that condescension is strongest among the elite. Jesse Jackson couldn’t be elected squad leader by American hardhats. But the media elite, they patronize him. They figure he’s just being a little uppity, and what do you expect?