A Sea of Neocon Hate, Literally July 16, 2007

“I lie on the beach with Hillary-Ann, a chatty, scatty 35-year-old Californian designer. As she explains the perils of Republican dating, my mind drifts, watching the gentle tide. When I hear her say, ” Of course, we need to execute some of these people,” I wake up. Who do we need to execute? She runs her fingers through the sand lazily. “A few of these prominent liberals who are trying to demoralise the country,” she says. “Just take a couple of these anti-war people off to the gas chamber for treason to show, if you try to bring down America at a time of war, that’s what you’ll get.” — from “Ship of Fools” by Johann Hari

Johann Hari, writing for The Independent (UK) gives us a startling insight into many of the neocon minds which are lamentably in vogue in the Capitol Hill circuit these days. Mr. Hari went aboard the National Review cruise, and the conversations he was unfortunate/fortunate enough to overhear were brimming with racism, xenophobia, and Islamophobia so virulent that it should make any progressive person shudder.

I am travelling on a bright white cruise ship with two restaurants, five bars, a casino – and 500 readers of the National Review. Here, the Iraq war has been “an amazing success”. Global warming is not happening. The solitary black person claims, “If the Ku Klux Klan supports equal rights, then God bless them.” And I have nowhere to run.From time to time, National Review – the bible of American conservatism – organises a cruise for its readers. I paid $1,200 to join them. The rules I imposed on myself were simple: If any of the conservative cruisers asked who I was, I answered honestly, telling them I was a journalist. Mostly, I just tried to blend in – and find out what American conservatives say when they think the rest of us aren’t listening….

I’d really like to repost the article in its entirety — it’s that worth reading. Larisa Alexandrovna, at her blog At-Largely also finds some wonderful quotes.I would be remiss if I didn’t quote the following:

Ward Connerly is the only black person in the National Review posse, a 67-year-old Louisiana-born businessman, best known for leading conservative campaigns against affirmative action for black people. Earlier, I heard him saying the Republican Party has been “too preoccupied with… not ticking off the blacks”, and a cooing white couple wandered away smiling, “If he can say it, we can say it.” What must it be like to be a black man shilling for a magazine that declared at the height of the civil rights movement that black people “tend to revert to savagery”, and should be given the vote only “when they stop eating each other”?I drag him into the bar, where he declines alcohol. He tells me plainly about his childhood – his mother died when he was four, and he was raised by his grandparents – but he never really becomes animated until I ask him if it is true he once said, “If the KKK supports equal rights, then God bless them.” He leans forward, his palms open. There are, he says, ” those who condemn the Klan based on their past without seeing the human side of it, because they don’t want to be in the wrong, politically correct camp, you know… Members of the Ku Klux Klan are human beings, American citizens – they go to a place to eat, nobody asks them ‘Are you a Klansmember?’, before we serve you here. They go to buy groceries, nobody asks, ‘Are you a Klansmember?’ They go to vote for Governor, nobody asks ‘Do you know that that person is a Klansmember?’ Only in the context of race do they ask that. And I’m supposed to instantly say, ‘Oh my God, they are Klansmen? Geez, I don’t want their support.’”

This empathy for Klansmen first bubbled into the public domain this year when Connerly was leading an anti-affirmative action campaign in Michigan. The KKK came out in support of him – and he didn’t decline it. I ask if he really thinks it is possible the KKK made this move because they have become converted to the cause of racial equality. “I think that the reasoning that a Klan member goes through is – blacks are getting benefits that I’m not getting. It’s reverse discrimination. To me it’s all discrimination. But the Klansmen is going through the reasoning that this is benefiting blacks, they are getting things that I don’t get… A white man doesn’t have a chance in this country.”

He becomes incredibly impassioned imagining how they feel, ventriloquising them with a shaking fist – “The Mexicans are getting these benefits, the coloureds or niggers, whatever they are saying, are getting these benefits, and I as a white man am losing my country.”

But when I ask him to empathise with the black victims of Hurricane Katrina, he offers none of this vim. No, all Katrina showed was “the dysfunctionality that is evident in many black neighbourhoods,” he says flatly, and that has to be “tackled by black people, not the government. ” Ward, do you ever worry you are siding with people who would have denied you a vote – or would hang you by a rope from a tree?

Disgusting.