Part one in a series.

Listen to the victim, abused by the system

The basis is racist, you know that we must face this

In 1991 Pop Will Eat Itself produced one of the most damning comments on racism in society in the history of popular music. “Ich Bin Ein Auslander” was specifically aimed at anti-immigrant racism in Europe, but over the past 17 years it’s been impossible for me to hear the song without mapping its penetrating, undeniable truth onto our American context. Our black auslanders aren’t recent arrivals (although many of our brown ones are), but they nonetheless remain social, political, economic and cultural outsiders, and whatever progress they may have made in the several hundred years since they first arrived in shackles, only a fool can believe that the basis is no longer racist.

I said some time back, as the presidential election lurched into overdrive, that the heavy racist stuff was coming. Not that it necessarily took Nostradamus to predict that, of course – as staggering prognostications go this one ranked right up there with “the sun will rise in the East.” Still, the predictability and magnitude of racism in America, the absolute certainty of it, matters.

Welcome to a state where the politics of hate Shout loud in the crowd

“Watch them beat us all down.”

There’s a rising tide on the rivers of blood

But if the answer isn’t violence, neither is your silence

So I collected the bits and pieces of evidence as they began flying across the transom. As Obama’s lead solidified. As McCain became more desperate. As the ignorant and hateful on the Right were whipped into a lynch-ready lather by Rush, Hannity, O’Reilly, by the Coulters and Savages and their legions of local market disciples. As they were egged on by the silence of a gutless old man who’d sold what little soul he had to start with; and by the photogenic perkiness of the former beauty queen he chose as his running mate: finally realized, Dan Quayle and Marilyn all rolled into one, witch doctor-approved, and so far to the right politically and theologically that even Pat Robertson has to be thinking “that bitch is crazy.” And of course, by their cynical proxies, who have read enough history to know a thing or two about the value of a good “other” when the scapegoating hour arrives.

Slowly, but all too surely, Cracker America began to realize that its most horrific of spectres is taking corporeal form: the White House is about to become the Black House. One of the greatest truisms of human nature is this: crisis reveals character. Or, in this case, lack of character. If you want to know what people are all about, at their core, back them into a corner. The truth will soon reveal itself, for good or ill.

The Code of Real America

“Take a look around at the cities and the towns.”

See them hunting, creeping, sneaking

Breeding fear and loathing with the lies they’re speaking

I said I had been collecting evidence. Let’s have a look, shall we?

As the song says:

Freedom of expression doesn’t make it alright

Trampled underfoot by the rise of the right.

Next: None of Us Are Free