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Thursday, July 06, 2006
My quarterly attempt at being even-handed
First off I need to stipulate that Mona Charen is a right-wing harpy, a common peddler of the Republican dictated conventual wisdom talking points. Kind of a national Katherine Kersten with an actual editor and, sadly, someone other than immediate family that takes her seriously. Today's load of tripe in the Strib was about voting rights, something no modern Republican has the moral authority to discuss without first crawling on their knees through every minority district between Ohio and Florida. Needless to say she is supporting nothing that doesn't make it less likely minorities will get to vote.
But I'm not posting to talk about her, I'm actually posting to pile on one of her enemy Democrats cited in the article. (Unlike KK she does at least have the ability to use primary sources.) Once every few months I try being fair and attack a fellow liberal who I think has said something regrettable. (I find I don't much like being fair, so a few times a year is generally enough for me.) The offender today is Cynthia McKinney, a pretty easy target, granted, and the quote is from Charen's column:
Now many readers will miss it, Charen certainly does (being smarter than KK is a pretty low bar after all) but "strange fruit" is a lynching reference from an old Billie Holiday song:If we are to avoid the strange fruit of powerlessness, we have to pass the torch of leadership to a new generation of young, strong, uncompromising tree shakers. We can no longer be satisfied with leaders handpicked for us and not by us, because it's that strange fruit that wrecks our dreams and kills our community; the strange fruit that occurs when other people assume our powerlessness, and we act accordingly . . .
While lines about trees and strange fruit fly right over the heads of prissy white chicks like Mona I guarantee they are not lost on McKinny's audience any more than Reagan's speech in Philadelphia Mississippi was lost on his. Congressional Republicans are a lot of things, mostly things you make your kids wash their hands after touching, but they are not murders. To compare their recent slimy actions to lynchings, among the top 5 scars on America's soul, so cheapens the horror of those past events as to be unacceptable from a member of congress. Comparisons to lynching, like comparisons to Nazism, are almost never warrented and poison debate in all but the most extreme cases. McKinney was way out of line.Southern trees bear strange fruit,
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,
Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze,
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.
5 Comments:
There are right wing jerks, and left wing jerks. McKinney is of the left wing variety.
By 
, at
10:58 AM
I would like nothing more than to contradict Jambo, but I can't. I wasn't familiar with the reference, though "strange fruit" struck me as odd.
I think you take McKinney too literally. In the context provided, she is using "strange fruit" in a metaphorical sense. No, black men are not being literally lynched or castrated, but they are being warehoused in prisons for crimes committed as a direct result of there being no economic opportunities in our inner cities.
McKinney is widely misunderstood, and her flaws have been magnified by a vicious and racist Republican smear machine. It says a lot that they railroaded her out of Congress, but then the voters of Georgia made her one of only seven members of Congress who were later re-elected after being defeated as incumbents.
Not an easy person to love, but with a little research you might find your opinions are based on false and out-of-context quotes.
By , at
1:46 PM
Her opposition to Republican policies is well founded but I still object to the allusion. Comparisons to lynching are rarely justified and I'll practically guarantee that no southern black elected leader uses the phrase "strange fruit" without knowing exactly where it comes from.
I'm not saying she doesn't know the term, I'm saying she's using as a way of referencing the oppression that still blights the lives of many African-Americans.
It's easy to find bad things online about McKinney, but I kept finding that when I googled them, they were either out of context, or falsely attributed. In this case I'd recommend reading the original comments in which McKinney says "strange fruit" repeatedly, but in a number of contexts.
http://www.counterpunch.org/mckinney08092005.html
By , at
4:13 PM
