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Let me make one thing clear right off the bat. I agree with
about 1% of what Mario,
my brother, has to say. He’s a liberal wacko and he is wrong
on every issue you can imagine. He’s even wrong on some you
can’t imagine yet because we haven’t figured out what they
are. But be assured, when we do, he will be on the wrong side of
those issues, too.
My brother lives in a fantasyland where government has to
protect us from evil business owners who would unfairly rape us
in the marketplace. He believes it has been because of
government’s benevolence that we have taken great strides in
eliminating poverty and hunger in America. Only through
government will the American people have adequate healthcare
coverage and efficient schools.
He’s just wrong on damn near everything. But on one issue a
speck of doubt has crept into my thinking as of late.
In case you missed it, Mario was on Hannity & Colmes
Friday night defending the estimable Jesse Jackson. A difficult
task to be sure, but he did it in the time honored liberal way:
Short on facts, heavy on rhetoric.
Then the e-mails
came. Scads of ‘em. Now I've gotten my share of hate
e-mail. It was particularly bad after an appearance on
Politically Incorrect during last years election debacle in
which I had the nerve to admit Al Gore was trying to steal the
election. So I'm far from over-sensitive to negative
comments from others.
Most of the e-mails Mario received were dismissive of his thinking, some
were vulgar, others were downright offensive. There were even
several writers that were way too fixated on enemas and
excrement in general. But that’s a different story.
But, disturbingly, there were about 10% that, inexplicably,
attacked his ethnicity.
If it were just one or two, you might be able to shrug them
off as irrelevant crackpots. But this wasn’t one or two. As
much as I wanted to deny it, there was a definite pattern.
For example, a fellow named Jerry claims to be a former
Marine Corps Captain. He says Mario has a "typical WOP
attitude." Now, being of Italian descent myself, I may just
have to disagree with the Captain as to there being a
"typical WOP attitude" about anything, never mind the
likes of Jesse Jackson. My father, a liberal if there ever was
one, despised the good reverend. I have an Aunt, a true-blue
Reagan Republican, who thinks Jackson has done some good things
for African-Americans.
Besides, in the military I served in, the know-nothing
Captain would have found himself in the brig for such a
"typical WASP attitude." Apparently he wouldn’t have
wanted one of those WOP’s in a foxhole next to him because
they probably would have been too busy cooking pasta to protect
his sorry, worthless ass.
As a little intellectual exercise in imagination, why don’t
we contemplate just what Captain Jerry thinks about Blacks. Is
there really any question?
Then there were others who took the opposite approach saying
Mario couldn’t be a real Italian-American because
"real" Italian-Americans just don’t think the way he
does.
This argument is as justifiable as Mario’s argument that an
African-American who doesn’t toe the liberal line is being
disloyal to his people.
Another "gentleman" decided physical
characteristics were open for ridicule. It seems, according to
this one particular reader, that Mario’s intelligence is
inversely related to the size of his nose. Big nose, small
brain.
This isn’t the first stereotype about the size of certain
body parts with which Italian-Americans have had to contend. And
if we follow the same logic the reader made I must be very dumb
indeed. Of course, maybe that’s just a myth.
Then there was the incredible e-mail I received chastising me
for posting the above mentioned e-mails. It would make
conservatives look bad, the writer said. Well, I am very sorry,
but it is not my job to assist such people in looking good.
I’m not, for a moment, accepting the criticism of liberals
and their allies in the press. Liberals have used the civil
rights movement for their own personal gain for years. It’s
the liberals that are content to keep minorities in crumbling
schools and rotting inner cities as long as they get their
votes.
I guess I just always figured conservatives were different.
It was, after all, the Democratic Party that defended slavery at
the price of civil war. It was Democrats that kept Blacks from
voting wherever they could. It was Democrats that put
Japanese-Americans in internment camps. It was Republicans that
pushed through the first civil rights legislation in this
country with the Civil Rights Act of 1957. And it was a higher
percentage of Republicans than Democrats that supported the
civil rights legislation of the 1960s.
Conservatives have gotten use to the race baiting of liberals
and the media. Sometimes though, it just may be possible that
they are a little closer to right than we would like to admit.
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