House of Eratosthenes

This is a story that has been zipping around under a very low profile outside New York City, but it would appear that is slowly changing and I suspect it’s going to continue to change. Manhattan Borough President C. Virginia Fields, running in the Democratic Primary for Mayor of New York, has circulated a flyer with a photograph of her supporters that has apparently been altered. Cynical Nation has one of the best scans of the photo, before & after, which I have hot-linked below and of course will remove upon request. Fields, according to the latest news I can dig up, is denying any knowledge or involvement in the alteration.

Now let us ponder what this proves, what it almost proves, and what it simply suggests, and then cogitate upon where this must lead.

Someone who has an interest in the Fields campaign, has taken the time & trouble to change the racial makeup of the people with whom the candidate is photographed. We could argue back & forth about whether that person or party wants to see the candidate win or lose, but it seems a given that they have access to printed materials being developed to advance the candidacy, so they probably want her to win.

A week ago I pointed out that in our present culture, when we talk about “diversity” being a good thing, we’re being reverse-racist as you can possibly be because the d-word describes a positive quality toward which our political leaders don’t think white guys can contribute in any way. I was writing about a newspaper article in London regarding the terrorist bombings there, so I take this as a global phenomenon. Things that are solid white, are bad, things that aren’t, are good. And a white-nonwhite hybrid of any kind, the darker it is, the better it is. When we use the d-word, we’re saying we want things to be heterogenous, but what we’re really indulging in is an Animal Farm type of four-legs-good, two-legs-bad lazy thinking.

So the voters, who appear to desire more Asian faces, or are thought by someone to desire this, elect leaders who are going to represent their interests. But wait a minute. If a leader is competitive enough and clever enough to see that a photoshop job is needed before a flyer can go out, that leader has to be out to win, right? And if you’re out to win, you have to appoint people to key positions who know how to win. Not people with a certain color skin…people who will win. Those are two different goals. That a situation may arise from time to time, where these two goals happen to intersect, is irrelevant. They’re still different, and to be effective over the long term, a leader has to embrace one and favor it over the other.

So appearances would indicate the voters are voting for someone who will appoint people with Asian faces (or whom people with Asian faces can support), who then, appoints people likely to get jobs done, regardless of the color of their skin, while pretending to appoint people of a favored ethnicity. The leader’s job, then, has been re-defined to a gig where you pretend outwardly to be doing one thing, while in reality you’re doing something else. So look what has happened here — the issue of racial makeup has been thrust into the public discourse, and as a result, we have to elect leaders who pledge to separate their public personas from the guiding principles of their inner sanctums.

It is a promotion of dishonesty. Anyone who votes for this kind of thing, is voting for leaders who will willingly lie to them.

There is a great example of this kind of thing from last year. In spring of 2004, Claremont McKenna College psychology Professor Kerri Dunn reported to police that her car had been vandalized in an apparent hate crime. Racial epithets were spray-painted onto the body of her car, her tires were slashed, her windows broken. The next day, she gave an impassioned, fiery speech, not for a family audience, about how strongly she disapproved of the mindset of these racist hooligans. Within a week after that speech, police were saying she vandalized her own car. Professor Dunn was put on trial for fraud, convicted, and ordered to undergo psychiatric review.

Professor Dunn doesn’t need any such review. Her psychiatric facilities work just fine. She had a goal, put a plan in place to achieve it, and executed it.

No, the little people are to blame here. The masses are asses. You can hear them in this recording of her speech. These are people so passionate about the issue of hate crimes, they have been sent out on a silly witch hunt for no real perpetrators at all.

The Fields Scandal begins with prejudice, and it ends with fraud. The Dunn crime begins with prejudice, and ends with fraud. The more obsessed we are with skin color, the more easily played we are, like musical instruments.

Politicians are supposed to figure out which way a parade is going, and then run to the front of it. We are in perpetual danger — at any time, and on any issue — of being governed by leaders who can out-think us, and send us scrambling off in a certain direction so they can rush to the front of it with the benefit of advance preparation. Now once a politician successfully pulls that off, how much real respect can that politician hold for the commoners? Not much. It is not intellectually possible to tell the public what it’s supposed to think on one issue, and then stand by ready to receive your grassroots instructions in a democratic model on other issues. You would have to be Machiavellian across-the-board. So that leader would have to end up like Marie Antoinette, saying “Let Them Eat Cake.”

I think C. Virginia Fields is guilty as all hell, although there is no way to prove this yet. I think politicians do this all the time. I think the only difference between Kerri Dunn, and most of our diversity-minded politicians, is a beat-up car, a pipe wrench, and a false police report. They’re agitating public unrest were there previously was none, and reaping the political benefits of it. It is a cheap, easy, sleazy substitute for quality leadership, and I hope when people are guilty of falling for it, they rightfully blame themselves and look at the charlatan elites as symptomatic of something infected deep below the surface, which those people can see in the mirror.

I hope that. But I’m not holding my breath.

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What Color Cake To Let Them Eat?Monday, July 18th, 2005

What Color Cake To Let Them Eat?
Monday, July 18th, 2005