The Tongue

September 18th, 2009  |   

A Season For Tongue-Lashings

South Carolina GOP Rep. Joe Wilson yells “You lie” as President Obama delivers a health care message to a joint session of Congress.

Tennis star Serena Williams yells at the line judge at the U.S. Open Tennis Tournament: “I swear to God I’m f_ _ _ _ _ going to take this f_ _ _ _ _ _  ball and shove it down your f_ _ _ _ _ _ throat, you hear that? I swear to God.”

Rap artist Kayne West jumps on stage from his front-row seat, grabs the microphone away from Taylor Swift, who has just won the MTV Best Female Video award for her song You Belong with Me, and says: You, Taylor, I’m really happy for you…but Beyonce (a Swift rival for the award) had one of the best videos of all time.”

A Phoenix, Arizona, pastor, Steven Anderson, on talk radio, says he would not condemn any person who killed President Obama or call that person a murderer. And to the gay talk-show host Michelangelo Signorile he says that he would not call someone who shot a group of gays and lesbians with a machine gun a murderer. In closing, he wishes a brain tumor on Signorile and Obama as well.

Joe, Serena, Kayne, and Steven have wagged their tongues in public and left a bitter taste in many people’s mouths as we’ve watched them engage in the old and nasty sport of tongue-lashing.

As you can see, I have tongues on my mind. This started while I was preparing for last week’s sermon. One of the texts for the day was from a letter by James, the brother of Jesus. Written to Christians scattered across the Graeco-Roman world, he warns them that they must not burden the poor with prayers, blessings and spiritual talk without backing up the religious talk with good works. Simply stated, walk the talk.

James warns readers that a tiny tongue—the mouth’s treasure—can be a blessing, but it can also be a curse. When the tongue starts wagging, it can very easily be like a spark that causes a mighty fire, much like a match thrown in the woods that sets the forest ablaze.

The picture of Congressman Wilson, snapped at the very moment he yelled at the president, gave us a glimpse of his tongue. It set the House chamber on fire, and ignited a wildfire that set the media and the nation into a twitter. And so I put my tongue to paper.

Congressman Joe Wilson’s Tongue

I saw the look on Nancy Pelosi’s face, as she sat behind President Obama, when Joe Wilson yelled “You lie.” She was shocked. And so was I, perhaps for a different reason than that of the Speaker of the House. She couldn’t believe that anyone would disrupt the decorum of the House with such behavior. For me, the shock came when I discovered who did the tongue-lashing. Of all people, Joe Wilson from South Carolina.

Those of us who found Wilson’s rebel yell offensive, could easily make South Carolina the scapegoat. Go get the shotgun and hunt down the whitetail deer, South Carolina’s state animal. Get the hound dogs out and bag a wild turkey, the state’s game bird. And let’s not just target Wilson as a turkey, let’s call all South Carolinians a bunch of turkeys. Heck, while we’re out hunting, let’s have an open hunting season for all the turkeys in those southern red states, like Georgia and Mississippi—two of the turkey havens.

But here in West Virginia we know that targeting South Carolina, or any southern state, as an ignorant, redneck, racist state is comparable to the labeling and broad brush stigmatizing that folks in Appalachia so often endure. The brush that likes to define states by painting them either blue or red without acknowledging the diversity that exists in both colorings winds up feeding some of our deepest prejudices. 

So why was I surprised that South Carolinian Joe Wilson did what he did?

Joe Wilson is known among his friends and colleagues as an “officer and gentleman.” And here’s where I gulp down what I’d rather not swallow. Full disclosure demands that I tell you that Wilson is a graduate of Washington & Lee University, my alma mater.

It was bad enough that over the years I’ve had to own up to the fact that Pat Robertson graduated from my old school, and now along comes Old Yeller congressman Wilson.

That confession over and done with, let me get on with the Joe Wilson surprise.

Since Wilson’s notable rebel yell, his wife, Roxanne, has gone public with her own confession. Right after the president’s speech she spoke with her husband by phone. She asked him, “Joe, who’s the nut who hollered out ‘You lie’?” And when he confessed that he was the nut who fell from the tree and landed in the House, she could only say,  “No really, who did it?”

Roxanne Wilson’s explanation that Joe just got carried away after hearing from his constituency at town hall meetings is believable. Nutty talk begets nutty talk.  

Joe Wilson is a tried and true conservative whose political persuasion will, I am sure, draw a good deal of support from Beaufort County, the southern tip of his congressional district. Some of the folks on Hilton Head Island, where 70% of the island is gated and where some 30 golf courses dot the land, will surely share his conservative views, even as they share his wife’s surprise, and mine, at the way he let anger out of the cage.

What was most surprising about Joe’s rebel yell was that he violated some very basic  good old conservative values espoused at his alma mater in Lexington, Virginia. I spent four years there and know very well that southern gentlemen, no matter what their personal or political passions may be, are never to let their mouths get ahead of their emotions. The grits might be hot and the barbecue spicy, but raw emotions are meant to be camouflaged beneath a ready smile, a keen sense of humor, and a demeanor known best as “southern hospitality.” Courtly manners are meant to represent Southern culture, and, at the same time, cover a multitude of sins.

Sam Tanenhaus’ new book has a dubious title, “The Death of Conservatism.” I say dubious because, to play off Mark Twain’s words, rumors of the death of conservatism may have been greatly exaggerated. In fairness to Tanenhaus, and without having read his book, my suspicion is that the old-style, well modulated William Buckley approach to life and politics has suffered a blow from the right hand flank of the Republican Party. You might say the GOP isn’t on a slab in the morgue. Let’s just say it’s in intensive care.

Calling A Spade A Spade And A Fig A Fig

Jimmy Carter undoubtedly will be as unclean to some Democratic Party leaders as the leper who Jesus touched. I hear the cries already that he has hurt President Obama, even strengthened his opposition. And why? Because he told the truth when he said that racism is an underlying component of some of the attacks on Obama. He didn’t say, by the way, all of the attacks. He said some.

Kudos to the old peanut farmer from Georgia!

Maybe it’s because Jimmy Carter is so deeply rooted in his biblical faith that I can’t help turn my readers’ attention to a Gospel story.

Jesus, on one of his journeys, cured a deaf man who we are told “could hardly speak.” (The King James Version of the Bible says “had an impediment in his speech.”) I like the interpretation of that passage which say the man stuttered because he was unable to hear and, therefore, was unable to fully get his tongue around the words he wanted to speak.

There was no impediment in Jimmy Carter’s words, no stuttering or stammering, no slippery tongue talk, which so often defines politicians. He spoke the truth about race as he knows it.

You know the old saying: If it looks like a duck, and swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it must be a duck. Well Carter knows racism when he sees racism quacking around in the nation’s cultural barnyard. And so do I.

So what can a white guy like me know about racism? The question is almost worthy of a laugh. People of color certainly can speak about racism with up-close-and-personal, experiential knowledge. But so can I. Growing up as a white boy in Baltimore, below the Mason Dixon line, educated in segregated schools like Washington and Lee, inducted into a very Southern institution—the Marine Corp, I know the assumptions that exist, and the conversations that take place behind closed door. I’ve been in the locker rooms.

I have breathed racist air, swallowed racist lies and shed racist shrapnel I didn’t know lay deep within me. Like acne or a canker sore that keeps popping out, racism has a way of surfacing in unreflective conversation and, even more insidiously, in the foundations of all the structures I am connected to daily. Don’t get self-righteous on me; we’ve all drunk from poisonous, racist streams.

Ironically, President Jimmy Carter has something in common with Congressman Wilson. Both have broken with the old Southern gentlemanly façade which prohibits the display of honest emotions, even prejudices. In Wilson’s case it has to do with his demeanor. For Carter, his sin lies in the fact that he has squealed on the boys. He’s a turncoat, a snitch who went public about what’s said behind closed doors where intimate conversations takes place among people who still think they are back at the fraternity house, the keg party picnic, and the country club. And dare I say it—the racially coded conversation, teaching  and preaching of any number of churches. By the way, Carter has just left the Southern Baptist Church because he could no longer tolerate their warped orthodoxy.

I’d like to be able to say that Jimmy Carter has called a spade a spade. But the political correctness police would indict, convict and cut out my tongue for mentioning spades.

Actually, it’s a marvelous phrase that originated 2000 years ago. When Greeks said “Call a spade (a bowl or trough) a spade and a fig a fig,” it meant that a person was to speak plainly and bluntly; to speak without euphemisms. Unfortunately, the word spade has become an epithetical slur directed at black people.  

When I think of spades now, I think of a deck of cards in which the spade might very well be the trump card. I think of the whining done by folks, mostly white, who can’t bear to hear race mentioned as a factor in our national political conversation. When they hear race mentioned, all they seem able to do is yell out “the race card is being played,” as if that would end the discussion.

What I really have on the tip of my tongue today are these words: “You guys are right. The race card is being played. It’s one of the cards in the deck and must be played when a trump card is needed to bring the game at hand to an end. Not a poker game or a bridge game, but the game being played around race and all the lies that exist underneath the fig leaves of people fearful of having their nakedness exposed. 

Tainted Tongues And A Polluted Atmosphere

What more can I say about Steven Anderson, the Phoenix pastor who has expunged the word “murder” from his vocabulary when it comes to the assassination of a president and gunning down gay people? Is he just another crazed, misguided Christian who substitutes hate and fear for the Gospel message of love and hope? I think not. Whether you like it or not, he represents a host of unhinged religious leaders who pollute the atmosphere with hatred and, therefore, contribute to the incitement of violence in the name of God.

Back during our battle over textbooks here in Kanawha County in 1974-76, I was called the Antichrist by some Christians who heard their preachers berate me for defending the multicultural, multi-ethnic textbooks they wanted thrown out of the schools because they saw them as ungodly. They saw me as a threat to their children.

The heated language made the temperature rise in this valley—rise to the point where schools were bombed, people were threatened, buses were shot at, and parents were so fearful that they kept their children home from school.

By the way, the battle over whether multicultural, multi-ethnic textbooks could be placed in school classrooms took place at the very same time as battles were raging in places like Boston where white people were vociferously protesting the busing of black kids into white schools.

I followed, as I am sure you did, the hysterical response to President Obama’s appearance in classrooms across the nation as the school year began. Some parents were apoplectic over the thought that Obama would be allowed in their child’s school. I saw women weeping and wailing, and angry men vowing that their child would stay home if that man entered their school.

In 1968, Julius Lester, civil rights activist and author, wrote the book “Look Out Whitey: Black Power’s Gonna Get Your Mama.” Watching frantic people yelling and shedding tears over the thought of Obama talking to their children, I thought a new title would be appropriate: “Look Out Whitey, Obama’s Gonna Get Your Kids.” I thought to myself, look how this president motivates young people, reawakens idealism stunted and stifled by adults fearful of change. Look at  how his campaign brought record numbers of kids out to pre-election rallies. And then look at the way  the weepers and the wailers couldn’t bear the thought of Mr. Obama godfathering their kids into some new ways of thinking about people and the world in which we live.

I searched the Internet for Pastor Anderson and watched him preach a sermon where he dug into the Bible (I Kings) to find a passage which talks about God describing men as people who “pisseth against the wall.” By God, he says, that’s what it means to be a man—to piss standing up as opposed to women who sit to piss.

He goes on to say, “We got pastors who pee sitting down. We got the President of the United States who probably pisses sitting down.That’s what’s wrong with America.You don’t like an old fashioned Bible that tells you what being a man is all about. It’s called the King James Bible.”

And here I thought the pastor in an Assemblies of God church in Louisville, Kentucky, a former Marine, was wacko when he had his congregation bring their guns to church to be blessed on July Fourth. “We’re not ashamed,” he said, to witness to “a strong belief in God and firearms—without that this country wouldn’t be here.”

You see, real men can be identified simply by the way they urinate. And posture surely will separate the men from the women.

And real Americans can be identified by the fact that they carry Bibles and guns.

And, if you’re a women in this equation, where does that leave you? Most likely cleaning up the mess after these misogynist Christians leave little behind but piss and blood. 

Tainted tongues mess with reality, making illogical equations, spreading fear, and increasing the possibility of violence. In today’s scene, socialism gets translated as satanic. Anyone labled as anti-American becomes the Antichrist. Communism is linked to community organizing (Obama was a community organizer). And the “Anointed One,” as Sean Hannity calls Obama, is nothing more than a reincarnated Karl Marx or Hitler.

Here in the Kanawha Valley we have seen our share of chemical plants fouling the air with pollutants. We know how rapidly polluted air can travel. In like manner, we’d better wake up to the polluted tongue-wagging messengers who are polluting our airwaves and websites with hatred, and the churches which undergird those messages with theological justification. They are not to be ignored. Bullies, and folks whose tongues which play fast-and-loose with the truth require attention and response.

It’s been said that a closed mouth gathers no feet. It’s clear to me that the illicit marriage between right-wing religion and right-wing politics has gathered feet—people with open mouths and wagging tongues. Those of us who care about the soul of this nation must find a way to use every appropriate occasion to open our mouths and speak back to these destructive voices. It’s no time for our tongues to be tied.
 

Entry Filed under: Fig Tree Notes Archives

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