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Race-Baiting or Race to the Bottom?

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Frank Ranelli
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While the tempest in a teapot over race boils over, America seems poised to swirl down the maelstrom of tribal divisions.

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America is ablaze with a feverish fervor over race, chiefly, at its core, the acceptance, and legitimacy of its first non-Caucasian president. The race-baiting is coming from all angles; however, it is predominantly a function of a small, right-winged sectarian group of seething bigots who simply cannot reconcile, in their insular cerebral cortex, America has a bi-racial "not even black, president. Still, the guardians of tolerance, usually aligned left, have done little to curb the fiery clash over race, in fact, may be impetuously emboldening it.

The salient point to recognize is regardless of where the vitriolic ignorance of prejudice is emanating, it is occurring. This race-baiting is a race to the bottom fomented by the right and sensationalized by the left. In brevity, the civil unrest in America is intensely palpable with racial "almost tribal "overtones buoyed by the death throws of a diminishing duality populous who cannot accept a pluralistic society and culture.

Certainly, the downtrodden Lou Dobbs, waxing nightly of lament of an erstwhile "white America, is a bit player stoking the embers of Nixon's silent majority. Glenn Beck, the small-minded, diminutive demagogue darling of the right "achieving apotheosis by a tinfoil hat, conspiratorial coterie of obtuse and paranoid Americans "is fanning the growing flames of a new Jim Crow era. Sarah Palin "sans any bearings of correct historicity, yet with unchecked histrionics, tweets daily neoconservative vitriol, preying on the pathos of the willfully ignorant, screeching of American hegemony and jingoism through unconvincing yet fanatical sophistry.

Propaganda of this sort, which should only find an audience among the dimmest Americans, is now flowing through our collective veins like a rampaging virus of virulence.

Unfortunately, liberals too have lost their message of unity, social cohesion, and a progressive agenda of "one America for all by wading into the ugly abyss of racial partisan partitioning. In essence, firebrand preachers, such as Al Sharpton, have merely grabbed the other end of the burning cross of prejudice. Jimmy Carter, a lifelong luminary champion of human rights, unwisely chose to descend into the pool of bigotry, with a crass cry of "racism, drowning out his otherwise venerable voice of solidarity and peace.

Sorry, but liberal Americans need to shed their beaming pride of electing a president, who breaks the mold of White Anglo-Saxon Protestant, and embrace post-racial politics, not bi-racial antics and polemics.

In a dizzying array of impossibly inane ideologies, from paranoid "birthers and "deathers, to excited excrements of "socialist to "fascist by Teabaggers, we have winnowed away any evidence we are a mature democracy capable of dialectic debate. In its stead, we are mere children hurling churlish epithets across a growing gulf of anathema about ethnicity.

America has reached a new nadir in its pitiful ability to welcome a secular, ethnically diverse civilization, eclipsing, in my view, the turbulent civil rights era of the 1960's. America's body politic is a wobbly and gaseous red giant, at the brink of its limits of expansion, about to violently contract, and certainly on an entropic orbit of decay. In all, as the iconoclastic contrarian, I see America as just another flailing, failing imperialistic empire about to collapse under the weight of its own divisive hubris and hate.

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Frank J. Ranelli is an independent scholar, skeptic and critic, author and essayist. His erudite and iconoclastic style of provocative writing has been extensively published in a variety of news outlets and across (more...)
 
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