Mouton De Panurge
MOUTON DE PANURGE
By Deborah Long
February 5, 2018
I have wanted to write a post on the Ralph Northam auto-da-fé because, as a life-long skeptic, I smell a rat. A big rat, a gargantuan rat. I’ve waited, expecting to read articles depicting a decades-long list of racist actions and policies known to be Northam’s calling card – or at least some credible journalism that provides a keyhole view into his despicable racist soul. So far, nothing. Nothing except a shameful photo of him in blackface 35 years ago that may or may not be of him. Apparently, this bombshell of investigative journalism was compliments of a right-wing news site called Big League Politics, and compliments of its editor-in-chief, former Breitbart reporter, Patrick Howley, himself of dubious character.
Rabelais’s, “The Life of Gargantua and of Pantagruel” was big in my family growing up – mostly because of the satire and scatological humor. In one of the books, the character, Panurge, buys a sheep, but is overcharged by the merchant. Outraged, Panurge tosses the sheep overboard and into the sea to drown. But the rest of the herd sees and hears the bleating sheep and follows it into the sea to drown along with him – not out of loyalty to the pricey sheep, but because of sheep’s unquestioning tendency to follow their leaders.
Absent any legitimate proof that the befuddled Ralph Northam is, in his heart of hearts, a crypto white racist whose life is characterized by acts of bigotry toward African Americans, I suspect that what’s happening to him might be fueled by the same kind of moral frenzy best seen in the equation: baby:bathwater. I wonder if the moral outrage generated by President Tumpenstein has put us a bit on edge. It seems that Northam has been thrown overboard by a party that just can’t seem to remember how, only three years ago, it was fooled into sacrificing its queen for no potential tactical gain whatsoever – and in a political chess game, no less, that was conducted by the best chess players in the world: the Russians. Benghazi, Pizzagate, and lest we forget: “But her emails!”. Remember when the comically dimwitted, George W. Bush, couldn’t repeat the old saying, “Fool me once; shame on you. Fool me twice; shame on me”? I’m guessing that we’re getting fooled twice, and like GW Bush, we can’t remember how the saying goes.
Virginia is a pretty important state for the Democrats, and Northam won it handily, beating the contemptible Republican, Ed Gillespie, by 9 points. But while we righteously and rightfully demand that the Mueller Investigation be permitted to present unassailable proof of Trump’s criminality, why is it that nobody demands the same for the apparently decent, if uninspiring, Ralph Northam? This scandal obscures all other news coverage as the nightly moral outrage over a 35-year-old demonstration of racism eclipses the contemporary daily attempts to brutalize and imprison brown-skinned children at our border. Of course, this is politics, but I don’t like the fact that it’s probably internal Democratic party politics.
Of course, anyone dressing in blackface or posing in the sartorial splendor of a member of the KKK in 1984 is deeply insulting. (And who among us wouldn’t like to get a peek at Jeff Sessions’s costume collection.) And in the aftermath of Charlottesville, this disclosure is particularly unforgivable for a Democratic politician in Virginia. But just once, before we throw up the white flag and send this guy to the gulag, shouldn’t we demand proof that he has lived his life as a racist, a bigot, or a white supremacist? I wonder if it’s Northam who has fooled us once, or is whether it’s us who are being fooled twice.
Deborah Long is a Principal at Development Management Group, Inc. and founder of several non-profit charitable organizations. If you find her perspectives interesting, controversial, or provocative, follow her at: https://www.facebook.com/debby.long.98499?ref=br_rs
