The Un-Reconstructed Paul Broun (R-GA)

BROUN: If ObamaCare passes, that free insurance card that’s in people’s pockets is gonna be as worthless as a Confederate dollar after the War Between The States — the Great War of Yankee Aggression.

It's amazing how much wrong can be packed in so few words. To start--what free insurance card? This isn't about a public option or universal government single-payer. This bill is about regulation and expanding availability of corporate health insurance plans. There is nothing in the bill that will weaken the value of the actual health care obtained via that coverage. And just generically, comparing that passage of a health care reform bill to a particularly bloody Civil War (that's what we called it when I went to school) sounds down-right hyperbolic.

But I detected a little Confederate signifying in that reference, so I thought I'd break down what I hear there a little.

It's not uncommon to hear a son of the South refer to the Civil War as the War of Northern Aggression. It's getting rarer. It's a thing that puzzles me, as the rebels fired the first shot at Ft. Sumter. How is it "Northern Aggression" if the South started it? Was it aggression for the Union Army to be called upon to respond to an insurgency that threatened the structure of this nation? It may be because I am from Pennsylvania that I have not heard the war referred to as the Great War of Yankee Aggression.

(As a daughter of the winning side, I don't refer to it as the War of Southern Treason or The Cracker Rebellion. That would be ignorant, wouldn't it?)

There are many southerners who seem to pine for Old Dixie. I think his comment was a shout-out to them, the Confederate-flag crowd. The people who still resent the federal government because of Reconstruction, and continue to view federal law as impinging upon their states' rights. I also wonder if it isn't evocative of the last-ditch bid to the mostly-white Teabagger contingent--to align the idea of "Obamacare" as being a form of reparations (need I add--for African-Americans?)

The topic has been raised by humaniform meat-zeppelin Rush Limbaugh, who just came out and said it with respect to Obama's economic plans. It's absurd on it's face--any plan that would also benefit whites would not be "reparations" in the meaning implied. But his perception is tilted towards some concept of "white fairness"--if it might be marginally more beneficial to a larger percentage of African-Americans....

Carry that thought out, and it's clear that even he knows our society hasn't achieved full racial equality yet, because he at least at a gut-level suspects that more African-Americans might be in need of affordable health care or would benefit from a stimulus or more government jobs. As things stand, whites could be seen as having a privilege. But the response is decidedly against equality: How dare anyone try and turn something like health care into a right? (I think of it as the "cookie theory of equality". Privileged people feel like equality means "sharing their cookie" which means less cookie for them. But really, equality means everyone gets a whole cookie.)*

In a debate that has been fraught with mischaracterizations, hyperbole, lies, hoaxes and incivility, to introduce racism at this point is sad, but really--can it be said to be unexpected?


* I'm totally ripping myself off there by more or less copy & pasting part of a post I left on DU. When I saw that video-clip, I realized it totally fit with this blog-post, so I "recycled" it.