The Great Double Doublecross

It used to be that the three segments of the U.S. population that the Ku Klux Klan always singled out to demonize and torment were Catholics, Jews, and last but most viciously of all, what I call "Rainbows." This is an appellation that I chose to use instead of the odious term "black people" as far back as the 1960's, long before people were content to let the prism hues apply mostly to the gay community, when, unlike the case with the descendants of the slaves, there's nothing about gay people that suggests the colors of the rainbow. I suppose that, partly because of that gift to the gays, my term has no chance of catching on to denote the far more despised group of which I am a member. Mostly, however, we will never ever be forgiven for being constant reminders of a great ancient wrong, for which there has rarely been any regret shown, and instead chattel slavery has been relentlessly followed up by other belief systems and institutions with the same hateful purposes in mind.

Let's recall how the activities of the Klan reached a sort of apogee in the bigotry hotspots of the U.S. like Indiana as recently as the 1920's. But around the time of the election a few decades later of John F. Kennedy as President, his fellow Catholics were apparently let off the hatred hook, and now the same thing has happened with the Jewish segment.

Whether they like it or not, Jews have become the darlings of the demented right wing among Americans, and that keeps striking me as strange, considering how, till now, they were quite often the first to rally to the progressive banner, no matter what the cause, and sometimes at the cost of great personal injury to themselves, notwithstanding the lapses now and then, starting with one of their number, Judah P. Benjamin, who served throughout the Civil War as the Secretary of the Treasury for the Confederacy.

This sharp shift in the esteem of those who once professed to find the Jewish community so unacceptable delights their country cousins over in the Middle East, the Israelis, but that joy doesn't seem to be so general here in the U.S., and in "Haaretz" at least, you will regularly read that as much as 64 percent of American Jews are still likely to vote for B. Obama.

Nevertheless this means that rainbows have been left largely on their own when it comes to enduring the focus and the hatred of the bigots, and going by how the Republicans are going all out to attack B. Obama in any way they can, far past the ordinary hostilities of a political contest, obviously the rainbows have little to no chance to come out of Obama's one or two terms with increased standing in Majority America eyes, a la the Catholics after JFK or Jewish people during the GWBush era. Instead the future promises the exact opposite, and it doesn't take a blind man to see that far beyond getting rid of Obama, the deepest aim of the nasties is to make it so hot for him that afterward no sane man whose skin even approaches the color of his will likewise think of running for President. At least not in the near future. Not that very many ever did in the first place.

And it's not too far out to note either that the same thing is true of sane and at least partly decent Euro (i.e. "white") men or women. The current Republican candidate, M. Romney, is doing all he can to drive that particular nail of non-participation by the decent-minded deeper into the American coffin, with him seizing every pretense he can to attack Obama, a different charge nearly every day, no matter how ridiculous it is, to the point that it's a wonder that so far Romney hasn't blamed the President for the recent spate of 100+ degree days.

If that kind of thing -- and that kind of eternally mendacious and narrow-minded candidate -- is what it takes to run for the office these days, then that deeply diminishes the Presidency right there.

If this new Jewish status in the eyes of the country's regressives can be called "coming into favoritism," one of the main reasons must be the way the Israelis have chosen to treat the Palestinians. The Israeli leaders, especially the most recent of them, have acted in the best American traditions of stealing everything not nailed down from the Indians and also of "keeping the niggaz down" every day through all the centuries.

An equally strong explanation for the sudden right wing embrace of the Jews must be the Rapture, a concept that is so beloved by a key component of the American right wing -- the so-called "Christian" fundamentalists. As best as I can understand it, the Rapture has to do with the return of the Messiah, and for some reason that circumstance depends on the survival of the state of Israel. The great event will be climaxed by a gigantic struggle of the Jews fighting side by side with the fundamentalist Christians against the non-believers, and after all those infidels will at last have been wiped out, it will then be required of the Jews to convert en masse to Christianity or else meet the same fate as all those exterminated non-devouts.

The fact that American Jews in general and even a sizable number of Israelis are fully aware of that particular proviso for their participation in that decidedly un-Messiah-like wipeout leads to the idea that that "Great Day of the Ultimate Reckoning" more precisely figures to be called the "Day of the Great Double Doublecross." And as preposterous as all those projections of the Rapture are, one almost wishes he could somehow observe from afar, very far, from another universe if possible, all that nonsense going down anyway, just to see how it would all come out.

I wouldn't bet my money on either side. From here it all looks like a shoo-in for the ants, the roaches, and the bacteria instead.