These next two lie in the gap between Clown and Outrage. I wasn't completely sure where to put them, so here are, somewhere between. Consider them a segue from the Clowns to the Outrages.The first is one that in an even slightly saner time would be laughed at for being so bone-headed stupid. But now, we can't afford to laugh. Terry Jones is a GOPper member of the North Dakota legislature. Under a bill he has introduced, any state form that asks for racial information would be required to list "American" as the first choice.
Why? Because, he says, he's "disgusted" with how race is used by bad actors to divide the country. "Bad actors," I expect, refers to people such as the Black Lives Matter movement who point out the racism in US society because, jeez, if we would only just all call ourselves "Americans," all that rac - I mean all that "division caused by bad actors" - would just disappear. Obviously.
Asked how "American" can be a race, he answered by defining the word as "a group of people that has lived under common laws for mutual benefits." How that differs from "nationality" went unexplained.
He did even worse in asserting his bill would unite the country, claiming not only that people of all backgrounds are proud to be Americans, but Black Americans are "glad their ancestors were brought here as slaves." He knows that because he remembers reading an article in the Reader's Digest 30 or 40 years ago where in that one article one black doctor said something more or less to that effect. And with evidence like that, who could argue with him?
Rep. Gretchen Dobervich another member of the North Dakota House, said "I don't think (the bill) is meant to be racist, but the optics are not good."
Okay, screw the optics business, but I agree. I don't think it is meant to be racist; I doubt Jones was thinking "This will stick it to those" fill in the racial epithet of your choice.
But that's the point! That's the problem! The kind of routine, unaware, ingrained, unconscious racism endemic to our society that can move someone to dismiss both the past and the present pain and damage and suffering wrought by that racism and convince themselves that the problem is not racism but divisions created by "bad actors" and so imagine all we need is to engage om some greeting card sentimentality. That is the problem.
As I said, the desire is to laugh at how astonishingly stupid this is. But we can no longer afford to. It's an outrage.
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This also lies in the space between between Clown and Outrage, because there is a clownish aspect to it, but this one clearly sits on the Outrage side of that gap.
Okay. On January 15, Tweetie-pie received Morocco's highest award for his work in advancing a normalization deal between Israel and Morocco.
That's the Clown part: the idea of Tweetie-pie deserving any kind of peace award, especially on the Middle East, especially after his sycophantic support for Israel's oppression of Palestinians.
The Outrage part is everything else about this, centered on the fact that Tweetie-pie secured the deal by making the United States the first western nation to recognize Morocco’s illegal annexation of Western Sahara.
Western Sahara had been a colony of Spain for over a hundred years until Spain withdrew in 1975. I, fact, I own a world atlas from 1969 that shows what it called Spanish Sahara as a separate country.
Immediately after the Spanish left, Western Sahara was invaded - by Morocco from the north and Mauritania from the south, both seeking control over the natural resources to be found there. Morocco sent not only troops, but hundreds of thousands of civilians to settle in and occupy the area.Mauritania withdrew in a few years, but Morocco is still there, 45 years later. The invasion touched off a 16-year war with the Sahrawi liberation movement known as the Polisario Front, the Sahrawi being the native people of the area. With US military aid, Morocco drove the resistance to Western Sahara’s Eastern Desert, then created world’s longest minefield and a 1700 mile wall to trap them there, dividing Sahrawis into those under occupation and those who fled into exile.
In 1991, the UN brokered a ceasefire to end that 16-year war and promised the Sahrawis a referendum on self-determination. For the 29 years since, Morocco has blocked attempts to organize the vote and the Security Council has refused to act even as the Moroccan government continues torture, disappearances, killings, and repression against pro-independence Sahrawis.
Human Rights Watch, in its World report 2021, describes how the government continued in 2020 to "systematically prevent gatherings supporting Sahrawi self-determination, obstruct the work of local human rights organizations, and beat activists and journalists in their custody and on the streets."
That's what Tweetie-pie has just endorsed as US policy - and did it, obscenely, on December 10: Human Rights Day.
An obscene outrage.
Parenthetically, this is even without noting how the Morocco, labeled by Freedom House's ranking system as the 7th least free country in the world, systematically represses any criticism of the monarchy and subjects women and LGBTQ people to bigotry.
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