You know what I miss? Good old-fashioned, Southern-style 1950s-era bigots. Axe-handle wielding sheriffs and George Wallace; they were loathsome, they would inflict horrible harm, but give them points for candor. They snarled the hatred in their hearts. They didn’t try to dress it up, to be clever and speak in codes.
At least not to the degree they do today.
Now take Donald Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, whom the president seems to be grooming for some undefined role on the international stage, maybe Queen of the World. Suddenly Chicago was in her gunsights on Tuesday.
Maybe out of sympathy for her father, whose dog whistles and semaphore flags to bigots and white supremacists was partially stifled, certainly temporarily, by the pair of mass shootings, in El Paso and Dayton, apparently committed by hardened haters. The poor man was forced to condemn white nationalism, which musta hurt.
So his loving daughter, Ivanka, stepped up, speaking for her father. She tweeted:
Do you really need me to translate? Okay, just in case it isn’t clear.
The top tweet, “As we grieve over the evil mass shootings....” means, in hatespeak, “Hey, it ain’t just the white power nuts who love my father who are pulling the trigger. Those black folks in Chicago are killing each other too. So cut us a break.”
And the bottom tweet, beginning “With 7 dead...” is factually wrong in two different ways. First, the carnage was city-wide over the entire weekend, not “near a playground in the Windy City.” (Her confusion might have come from a shooting where seven people were wounded by Douglas Park.) And second, there is a) plenty of outrage, expressed by winking, nodding haters like Ivanka’s dad, who use “Chicago” as a code for minorities they feel momentarily inhibited from slurring in public. Rats in Baltimore one day, shootings in Chicago the next. They can’t come out and say it, as they did in that era in America they consider “Great” and are so frantic to drag us back to.
And b) there might be “little” coverage on Fox News — I don’t know, I wouldn’t watch it if you put a gun to my head — but the story was “hidden” on the front page on the Sun-Times Monday; as big as life on Page 11 of the front section of the New York Times Tuesday, and countless other publications that Ivanka Trump has never read in her life.
These shooting are real. The victims are real. To the grief their families feel, add the insult of empty bullies and frauds like the Trump clan — or should that be “klan” — dipping their fingers in innocent blood, writing their not-so-secret messages of contempt, cowardice and hate.
