We Have Reached Bottom

When a racist meme becomes civic sacrilege.

The morning I woke up to the president’s vile and racist post of the Obamas’ faces on top of ape bodies was a kind of turning point. Vulgarity and outrage are his stock in trade; just when you think he can’t go any lower he does. It keeps the headlines coming, after all.

Still, this was different. It degraded the presidency itself, in a way that affects us all. A president of the United States has circulated a foul, juvenile, and disgusting slur against another president, indulging one of the oldest and crudest tropes about Black people. He has reduced the highest office in the American political system to the level of a bigoted 8^th grade bully.

Many people evidently felt as I do — even among the ranks of the president’s supporters, people who have appeared immune to so much. The New York Times reported that the White House had deleted the video clip in the face of “a chorus of criticism from Republicans.” The standard MAGA response to “liberal upset” at such outrages is “can’t you take a joke”? In this case the answer is “no, we can’t, for the sake of all we hold dear.”

President Barack Obama, first lady Michelle, and daughters Malia and Sasha wave to the crowd after his inaugural address Jan. 20, 2009, on the west steps of the U.S. Capitol. Photo by Master Sgt. Cecilio Ricardo, USAF via Wikimedia Commons.

We have shifted realms, from partisan politics to spiritual space. That hideous image of the Obamas — the “when they go low, we go high” Obamas — crossed the line from degradation to desecration. If America does in fact have a civic creed, then it upholds values of equality, liberty, justice, democracy, tolerance, decency, dignity, respect, and hospitality. We place our faith in those values, even as we continually fall short and grapple with our civic sins. To insult and actually laugh at those values is to trample the closest thing we have to civic holy ground.

President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama applaud Vietnam War veterans during a ceremony commemorating the 50th anniversary of the war at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., May 28, 2012. Photo by Linda Hosek via Wikimedia Commons.

Seeing that image, showing it in horror to my husband, but then going on with my day, I realized just how numb we have become. We, the American public, the vast majority of us who want this nightmare of polarization to end – we so often keep our heads down, figuring that more talk, more op-eds, more posts, won’t matter. Indeed, my first thought when sitting down to write this column is that the image and the action of circulating it was simply unspeakable.

That is exactly the problem. It may seem unspeakable, but we must find the words to speak, to describe the depths of rancor and indecency to which our political life has sunk. We may disagree on a long list of political outcomes: on taxes, regulation, health care, care for our loved ones, foreign policy, etc. But over 85 percent of Americans agree on the following statement: “I am proud to be an American, though I acknowledge my country’s flaws.” Surely, we can agree that we are not proud of late-night tweets and vulgar abuse of one president by another.

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I will respond by speaking and not speaking. From this day forward I will not mention the name of the current occupant of the White House, at least in print or in a public forum. To name him is to feed his monstrous, metastasized ego, the megalomania Danielle wrote about last week, to give him the attention he cannot live without. He seeks to emblazon his name everywhere, in the biggest and shiniest letters possible, to fill some bottomless hole in his soul.

I will fight the policies of this administration that break our laws, celebrate cruelty, and violate the moral code of every religion. I am reaching out to all Republicans who are willing to see and say what they know to be true when they look at what this country is becoming, no matter whom they blame. They may continue to support many of the President’s policies, but they reject his methods, his language, and his encouragement of hatred and division.

At the same time, I will encourage people on my side of the aisle to be willing to call out our own leaders as necessary. An AOC fundraising text I received described her background as a young Latina waitress who comes from a low-income background, all things I admire about her, but then said: “That makes a lot of classist, ageist, misogynist, and racist people mad.”

Is that as bad as circulating the Obama meme? Of course not. But does it fuel division in the service of fundraising and typecast fellow Americans for gain? Yes. No matter how disproportionate we may think the president’s actions are to anything happening on the left, we are not going to be able to get people on the right to call him out if we do not acknowledge that we have work to do on our side as well.

I will work to restore a common creed. I will do everything I can to engage my fellow Americans in building a vision and version of this country that is not red or blue, or even purple, but simply as true as possible to the words to which we pledge allegiance: “one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.” Words that echo from “we hold these truths to be self-evident” to “government of the people, by the people, for the people” to “one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed.”

These words capture and renew what the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. described as a “promissory note,” a “sacred obligation” to guarantee all Americans the unalienable rights of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

For me, the 21st century version of that promise is that we are a nation born of and dedicated to principles that transcend our individual interests. That we are human beings who abhor cruelty, corruption, and the cult of personality and embrace both our plurality and our commitment to the universal values that define us as a polity.

Having seen the despicable image of the Obamas, I cannot erase it from my mind. That is the goal of such memes, but this one will backfire. It will stay with me as a goad to say enough.

President of the United States Barack Obama with First Lady Michelle Obama at his second Inauguration, January 21, 2013. Photo by Anthony Quintano via Wikimedia Commons.