December 19, 2002

DOES SENATOR LOTT NEED A HEART TRANSPLANT?

Yale Kramer

When I first heard of Senator Lott’s dumb remark I knew I was supposed to feel outrage, but I didn’t really. After all, I wasn’t part of the target population. It wasn’t my people he was offending. In fact, after scrutinizing the quotation and parsing and reparsing, it wasn’t clear to me at all what Senator Lott meant, and consequently what the Black Caucus was so aggrieved about. The worst inference that one could fairly draw from his ambiguous remarks was that he would have voted for Strom Thurmond in 1948 (when Lott was two or three years old) and would have then been in favor of continuing racial segregation. The big question was did he imply that he was still in favor of racial segregation today?

Let’s assume the worst, and that in the happiness of the moment, in that old Southern Boy context, he was feeling smug, fat and sassy, and that his politician’s hypocritical guard had gone off-duty at that moment and that his unconscious segregationist feelings began to tumble out of his mouth before he could squelch them. Oops, there they go….

Now, let’s take a poll. Who among you has never let your hypocritical guard down and uttered some tactless remark, with or without realizing it, that hurt someone’s feelings? And who among you has not had mixed feelings toward someone close whom you would not want to know all of what was in your heart of hearts? Raise your hands, higher please, don’t be shy—you see you are not alone. The truth is that, unless you are on the short list for sainthood, most people have had such an experience.

Hypocrisy—the discrepancy between what one feels in one’s heart and what one pretends to feel publicly—is the lubricant of civilization, because no one’s heart is pure, because ambivalent feelings are universal and one of the main characteristics of human nature. And the only way that human beings can live in a social context is by practicing hypocrisy—sometimes more, sometimes less.

Children and adolescents are always chiding their parents and elders for being hypocrites because they have not yet transcended the inner puritanical guards which they have had to install in order to control their early passions. It is only as they learn to control their infantile feelings that they can let themselves off the puritan hook and stop persecuting their elders. And by the time they themselves become parents and are in positions in which they are responsible for others they are full-fledged hypocrites. That is the nature of social life.

It is understandable that the Congressional Black Caucus would put on a dog-and-pony show of racial grievance and outrage—that, unfortunately, is what they are paid to do by their constituents. They and Black activists in general have been professional grievance collectors since the thirties. But then, the NAACP had some serious grievances to deal with—lynchings, the Ku Klux Klan, quotidian indecency and acts of humiliation. And Martin Luther King’s dream represented a serious moral vision because it had to do with changing the white majority’s actions toward black America.

But times have changed, powerful laws protect blacks from the cruel, unfair, and discriminatory acts of the past, and this has led to the current situation in which any black person who has the ability to rise to the top of any profession cannot be stopped by law or custom. There are now three blacks holding cabinet level positions in the federal government, many black congressmen, many black millionaires, even black billionaires, black models for black children to emulate galore, in sports, the arts, media, show business, science, academics. And although there is still a black dysfunctional underclass who don’t work because they suffer from chronic forms of mental illness and maladaptive behavior—there is an ever growing black working class, middle class, and voting class.

But this situation notwithstanding, the Black Caucus goes on to look for more grievances—and political outrage plays well in Washington. The GOP expresses it when and if they get a chance, and now it’s the Democratic Party’s turn to milk it for all it’s worth. The trouble is that what the GOP prosecutes is bad behavior—Condit’s sexual misbehavior, Clinton’s sexual misbehavior, lying under oath, Mrs. Clinton’s greediness—whereas the Democrats want to punish Lott not for having done anything that breaks the law or committed some act against a person, but for something he said. For this indiscretion he has apologized and sought forgiveness from the American black community.

But that is not enough. In real life it would be, unless you are a conservative Republican. You are forgiven your racism if you are Senator Byrd, or Senator Hollings. The question of their sincerity, of what is truly in their heart is a non-starter in Democratic circles. But the question that is central in what is becoming one of the most sanctimonious farces in recent political history is how sincere is Senator Lott in his feelings about segregation? How pure is his heart?

I can tell you that his heart is no different from anyone else’s heart—his heart is impure. He doesn’t need a heart transplant, his critics need to grow up morally and accept the fact that ambivalence is universal and a major component of human nature. It is what makes us both comic and tragic creatures.

You cannot expect moral purity from any human being, especially a politician. The only way you can judge people is by their acts, by their deeds, and in the case of politicians by their voting records and public policy statements. Forget what’s in their hearts, you wouldn’t like what you found, Democrat or Republican.