NP: Mike Keneally and Beer for Dolphins, Sluggo!

I totally stole the title of this post from Porcupine Tree, but they were going for something different, and you probably haven't ever heard of them, so never mind.

Last week saw a considerable amount of opining about the racial dimension of the opposition to President Obama, focusing pretty tightly around Rep. Joe Wilson's fifteen minutes of fame. The irony here is that while Joe Wilson may have his fifteen minutes of fame, he and those who are rallying around him would probably never have even heard of the person who introduced that phrase into the lexicon, because Andy Warhol comes from a culture that freaks them the fuck out.

Which is what I'm getting to. Both David Brooks and Joe Klein took some pretty interesting looks at the issue, and what's interesting is that one says there is racism and one says there isn't, while both seem to be using the same underlying evidence.

Brook's historical argument about Jefferson and Hamilton as the leaders of populist and urban ideologies, resepctively, is particularly illuminating. It reminds me of one particular refrain from protesters and rabble-rousers, that Obama is "Chicago thug." There's some misguided guilt by association with Chicago politics there, but more than that, there's that sense of what goes on in cities as being weird and scary. You could probably bring in Sarah Palin's comments about the "real America" here as well. To this segment of the population, urban America is not real America, and Obama is quite clearly a product of urban America.

Klein tacks this on to his argument as the coup de grace of Obama as being the quintessential "other" in almost every way imaginable, but it seems to be a pretty integral part of that formulation to me. The question is whether there's underlying racism in that reflexive view of what American cities are like -- do people fear the big city because there is a certain color of people there that they deem inherently "dangerous" to them, or simply because it's so different from their everyday existence that they can't wrap their heads around it? Or is it just the same media artifact that comes with breathless reporting of urban crime and crime statistics?

Obviously, this isn't a brush with which to paint every critic of the President or his policies. But there's an interesting discussion that could be had about the nature of this one aspect that will be summarily ignored by the media as soon as the next person yells something somewhere.