The Republic of T.

It’s an old cliché, but nonetheless true: even a broken watch is right twice a day. The same can be said for even the most bigoted organizations of the religious right. (Maybe it’s just that if you keep moving to the right, you eventually meet up with the left?) The American Family Association is that broken watch right about now.

I don’t remember the last time I thought the AFA was right about anything, and I don’t ever remember saying the AFA was right about anything. Ninety-nine and nine tenths of the time, they’re not. But their response to the Day of Silence this year, actually had me nodding my head and thinking they might have gotten a couple of things right this time.

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I haven’t commented on the biggest meat recall ever, but this caught my eye. The USDA wants to put cameras in slaughterhouses.

Cameras could be placed in about 800 U.S. slaughterhouses to watch for improper procedures and inhumane handling of cattle, a federal official said Thursday.

A Senate committee recommended installing the cameras three years ago, but the proposal is getting new consideration in the wake of a massive recall of beef last month, Agriculture Undersecretary Richard Raymond told a House committee Thursday.

“It is really the inhumane handling issue,” Raymond told CNN. “I can’t see putting these in a plant that makes jerky, in a processing plant.”

Raymond said that logistical issues still exist, including figuring out who would watch the cameras and how they would be controlled.

“Those are the considerations we would have to take under advisement before we make a decision up or down on the camera issue,” he said.

Oh boy. Wasn’t it video that made this whole story explode?

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Kip has posed an interesting question, and since he noted me as one of two vegetarians among his readership, I thought ought to join the discussion.

So I was sitting in my undisclosed location a few days ago, cleaning out my aggregator and listening to the radio, when I heard a commercial — for what I cannot recall — that contained, give or take a word or two, the following pronouncement:

I’m a vegetarian. A man once offered me $50 to eat a buffalo wing. I decided that my morality was worth more than that.

It seems to me that this woman, by refusing to take the money, is actually declaring that her morality is worth less than $50, and indeed worth zero.

Interesting question. Of course, Kip has more.

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Something’s happening out there. It’s happening quietly in some places and not-so-quietly in others. It’s happening around kitchen tables and in living rooms across the country, as Americans come to grips with new — or, to them, newly-revealed — economic realities. For some, it’s just impossible to deny or ignore what most have known for weeks about the economy. Even the Bush administration — famous for simply ignoring reality (see part two of this series), as the president himself recently demonstrated by denying we’re in a recession — is showing vague signs of concern.

Maybe someone in the White House has been reading the news over the last several days, and maybe even reading it to the president. (Though until a reporter asked him about it, Bush hadn’t heard that gas might soon cost $4 per gallon.) But even the president might not have needed his news predigested this time, because even a perusal of the headlines in the last few days indicates that something — like that middle class anger in the last post — is building, and it’s reaching a point where more and more people have almost nothing left. And, it follows, nothing left to lose.

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Sweet Jesus, but I am sick and tired of hearing about Jesus.

Let me be clear. When a presidential candidate is asked the following question — or any similar question — about his/her opponent, it shouldn’t be answered. If said candidate isn’t smart or decent enough to leave it at that, there is only one correct answer. (Nancy Pelosi, please take note.)

STEVE KROFT: You don’t believe that Senator Obama’s a Muslim?

HILLARY CLINTON: Of course not. I mean that’s, you know, that, there is no basis for that. You know, I take him on the basis of what he says, and, you know, there isn’t any reason to doubt that.

KROFT: You said you take Sen. Obama at his word that he’s not a Muslim…
CLINTON: Right, right..

KROFT: …you don’t believe that he’s a Muslim.

CLINTON: No! No! Why would I? There’s nothing to base that on. As far as I know.

The correct answer is, “Who gives a fuck?!” The recommended follow-up is, “Do you have any questions about something that does matter?”

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Let’s return, once more, to our metaphorical intersection from parts two and three of the series. Except, where we once imagined a doomed pedestrian just preparing to cross the intersection, let’s imagine a group of pedestrians stuck in the middle of the intersection. When they started across the intersection, they had the green light. As far as they knew, it was safe to cross. But — as luck would have it — they were just halfway across when the signal changed. Now, traffic whizzes by them, on both sides, heedless to their plight as they find it impossible to finish the journey to the other side of the street, and difficult to go back whence they came.

It’s not a stretch to imagine those pedestrians as representing the middle-class, buffeted by the credit crisis on one side and the subprime crisis on the other, and finding themselves caught in the middle, with no real options except to hope the signal changes again, so they can either scramble to the other side of the street, or make a hasty retreat.

Upward mobility in the American economy has always been something like the popular 1980s computer game, “Frogger,” in which players had to maneuver their frogs across a busy street. Doing so successfully often meant taking two hops backward of sideways for every one hop forward. Failure to move fast enough meant getting squashed flat by oncoming traffic. Today, after hopping sideways for as long as possible, America’s middle class is getting flattened, or — for the lucky — taking several hops backwards.

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It ain’t quite Willie Horton. We’ll have to wait for the general before we see anything close to that. But this ad is definitely in that ballpark.

Now, I’m still not supporting either Clinton or Obama in the primaries (though I’ll settle for whichever of them the Democrats nominate). But this doesn’t make me feel any better about Clinton.

This makes me feel slightly better about Obama.
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There’s a look that Black men of a certain age have. It is somewhat akin to the “thousand mile stare” of war veterans. It may be tinged with anything from sorrow to determination. It is usually accompanied by a silence that is usually best left uninterrupted, except by those who know what it holds back, know when the dam is about to burst, and know how to stop it from bursting in that particular man. Right then.

Anyone who knows that look, knows that stare, and knows that silence, knows that it holds back—and sometimes just barely—a tidal wave of anger and frustration. It is a look that says not only “I’m sick of this shit,” but “I’m sick of fighting this shit.” And it it most often worn by one who is—and has long been— waist deep in “this shit,” and fighting to get to the other side.

Joseph Beam captured the essence of it, and put his own spin on it, when he wrote:

I, too, know anger. My body contains as much anger as water. It is the material from which I have built my house; blood red bricks that cry in the rain. It is what pulls my tie and gold chains taut around my neck; fills my penny loafers and my Nikes; molds my Cavlins and gray flannels to my torso. It is the face and posture I show the world. It is the way, sometimes the only way, I am granted an audience.

My father had that look sometimes. I’ve seen it on the faces of other men in my family, as well as teacher, preachers, deacons, and just about anybody old enough to “remember when.” James Booker remembers when, and james Booker has that look.
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